JEAN DEBERNARDI email: jdeberna369 [at] gmail.com

Jean DeBERNARDI is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of Alberta.  She received her training as a cultural anthropologist at Stanford University, Oxford University, and the University of Chicago and has been teaching in Canada since 1991. She has published two books focused on Chinese religion in Malaysia: Rites of Belonging: Memory, Modernity and Identity in a Malaysian Chinese Community (Stanford University Press, 2004) and The Way that Lives in the Heart: Chinese Popular Religion and Spirit Mediums in Penang, Malaysia (Stanford University Press, 2006), both of which have been reprinted by NUS Press (2009, 2011). In 2020, she published Christian Circulations: Global Christianity and the Local Church in Penang and Singapore, 1819-2000 with NUS Press. She is currently completing a monograph entitled Wudang Mountain and the Modernization of Daoism, drawing on ethnographic research that she completed in China and Singapore between 2002 and 2009. Intrigued by what she learned at Wudang Mountain about Daoist tea, in 2010 she launched a new project exploring contemporary tea culture in China with support from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation (2010-2012) and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2012-2015).

The photograph was taken at a cultural performance held in connection with the Second International Taoism Forum at Nanyue/Hengshan in Hunan Province, October 2011,