Workshop: “Esotericism in East Asia: Cultural Interpretation and Politics”

Eso­teri­cism in East Asia: Cul­tur­al Inter­pre­ta­tion and Pol­i­tics (Blooms­bury 2026) offers a new take on eso­teri­cism by cen­tring the often-over­looked con­tri­bu­tions of East Asian thinkers to the devel­op­ment of this field of knowl­edge. This com­bined book launch and work­shop takes the book as an ini­tial impulse for broad­er method­olog­i­cal and con­cep­tu­al inter­ven­tions in con­ver­sa­tion with CAS‑E. The prax­e­o­log­i­cal and per­for­ma­tiv­i­ty the­o­ret­i­cal focus devel­oped in the Ana­lyt­i­cal Dou­ble Helix Frame­work (ADHF) and, thus the crit­i­cal stance on “glob­al per­spec­tives” cen­tral to CAS‑E, bring addi­tion­al the­o­ret­i­cal per­spec­tives to the ques­tions addressed in the vol­ume, high­light­ing the mutu­al Ben­e­fits to be gained from a focused col­lab­o­ra­tion. The launch there­fore presents this new pub­li­ca­tion while fos­ter­ing the begin­ning of a dia­logue about how East Asian mate­ri­als can help to rethink the con­cep­tu­al and his­to­ri­o­graph­i­cal premis­es of eso­teri­cism research more gen­er­al­ly.

Poster-Eso­­ter­i­­cisim in East Asia and Glob­al Prac­tices