Dear All,
We’re pleased to announce the next session of the SPT maintenance and
philosophy of technology special interest group on Thursday October 9th
2025 (1800-1915 UTC+1). In this session, we’re excited to welcome Chuck
Woolridge (Lehman College CUNY) who’ll sharing his research on the
practices employed by volunteers to maintain the Change Mazu Temple in
Hscinchu, Taiwan. By examining the maintenance of a building with religious
functions and meanings, Chuck’s talk will explore an important cultural
context within which maintenance practices take place, and one which has
received little (if any) attention in existing scholarship. We’re really
looking forward to learning more about how religious practices can enrich
our understanding of maintenance - if you would like a link for what
promises to be a fascinating talk and discussion, email me at
mark@markthomasyoung.net
Best,
Mark
"Maintenance as Religious Practice in Taiwan: Tinkering in the Changhe
Temple"
Chuck Woolridge (Lehman College, CUNY)
Thursday October 9th 2025 (1800-1915 UTC+1)
Abstract: This paper is an examination of the work of volunteers at the
Changhe Mazu Temple 長和宮 in Hsinchu, Taiwan, where devotees variously
sweep,
mop, wipe tables, arrange flowers, clean up incense burners, and otherwise
move objects around. For them the work is a form of devotion, a means of
religious expression akin to prayer, ritual, and reciting scripture. The
labor is gendered and hierarchical. Women do a large proportion of daily
maintenance, and those of higher status tend to do tasks physically closer
to the statues representing gods. All the volunteers work with materials in
constant change, and they make meaning out of that flux, drawing out
implications both for their own personal religiosity and for the
relationship between the gods and the community of worshippers. How does
the maintenance of a building containing gods – a temple – different from
the maintenance of any other building? And how might the answer to that
question be useful to a special interest group for maintenance and
philosophy? I argue that what makes temples different is the density of
meaning that accrues in them. This case study thus offers a particularly
stark example of the ways maintainers tinker with meaning as well as with
objects
(In order to avoid confusion regarding the timing of the talk - the
following table clarifies when the talk begins in different locations)
Amsterdam 7:00pm
London 6:00pm
Toronto (New York) 1:00pm
San Francisco 10:00am
Mark Thomas Young
Postdoctoral Fellow
University of Oslo
https://uio.academia.edu/MarkThomasYoung
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