Dr Gareth Breen

Gareth's research focuses upon transnational Christian, Buddhist, and grassroots Confucian networks in China and Taiwan, and their global spread.

His forthcoming monograph, Sublime Sociality: An Ethnographic Theory of Chinese Christianity was a winner of LSE Press’ First Book Competition. It describes a transnational, Sino-Taiwanese community of followers of Witness Li (Li Changshou), son of a Shandong farmer, and the most prolific author in Christian history. Sublime Sociality is the first book length ethnographic depiction of this deeply influential group, the world’s largest ‘house church’, one of the first indigenous Chinese Christian movements of the twentieth century and only one to become globalized in the twenty-first.Subsequent research focuses upon emerging grassroots academies (shuyuan) who seek to recover the spiritual ‘essence’ (benti) of ‘China’ using Confucian, Daoist, Buddhist but also Christian and Islamic concepts and practices. Other research focuses upon the intersections of AI and projects of deification, Chinese medicine in the UK, and society and culture in the practice of Transaction Analysis.

He received his PhD in Anthropology from the London School of Economics (LSE) in 2020. He has taught the following courses:
• Anthropology of Mind, Language and Ethics (UG)
• Anthropology of Sovereignty (UG)
• Anthropology and Political Economy (UG)
• Anthropology of Religion (UG/PG)
• Childhood Across Cultures (UG)
• Being Human (UG)
• Medical Anthropology (UG/PG)
• Anthropology for Medical Students (UG)
• Multisensory Experience: Understanding Sickness and Health Through the Senses (UG/PG)
• Anthropology of the Body (PG)- convenor

He currently teaches:
• China in Comparative Perspective (PG)

Expertise

Christianity and other Religiosities in China and Taiwan; Chinese Medicine; Anthropological Theory; Essence; Culture and Therapy.