Robert P. Weller

Weller's work concentrates on China and Taiwan in comparative perspective. His research topics run from ghosts to politics, rebellions to landscape paintings. One unifying theme is an interest in finding the limits to authority in all its settings, and much of his work focuses on religion.

His earliest work began with the problem of religious meaning and authority. Who has the power to impose an interpretation? Could you impose one across a land as vast and a history as long as China's?

A second broad research area has been culture change in its global context, with all its flows and stoppages, appropriations and resistances. This includes his books on the environment and on civil society, which argues that something like a civil society can be built without looking quite like any place in the West.

That interest in the relationship between state and society also informs his newest book (with Julia Huang and Keping Wu), examining how religions help to deliver a wide range of secular services to people in Chinese societies.

His other major research endeavor is a more theoretical exploration of what allows humans to live in peace while still accepting the deep differences that divide us. This has led to two co-authored books so far, with a third now in press.

For some thoughts on evil: "On the Boundaries Between Good and Evil: Constructing Multiple Moralities in China" (joint author with Keping Wu). Journal of Asian Studies 76(1): 47-67, 2017.

And on silence: "Salvaging Silence: Exile, Death, and the Anthropology of the Unknown." Anthropology of this Century, 19 (May): http://aotcpress.com/articles/salvaging-silence/.