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From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW <[email protected]>
Date: Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 11:50 PM
Subject: H-Net Review [H-Buddhism]: Tam on Chau, 'Religion in China: Ties
That Bind'
To: <[email protected]>
Cc: H-Net Staff <[email protected]>
Adam Yuet Chau. Religion in China: Ties That Bind. China Today
Series. Cambridge Polity, 2019. Illustrations. xiii + 250 pp.
$22.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-7456-7916-7; $64.95 (cloth), ISBN
978-0-7456-7915-0.
Reviewed by Wai Lun Tam (Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Published on H-Buddhism (March, 2021)
Commissioned by Jessica Zu
The author of the book under review, Adam Yuet Chau, is a well-known
ethnographer and theoretician of anthropology whose previous book,
Miraculous Response: Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary China
(2006) received much attention by scholars not only in anthropology
but also in the general field of China studies: his book was reviewed
by no fewer than fifteen experts in the field. The present monograph
under review, Religion in China, published thirteen years later, is
in many ways a sequel to the author's previous book. There is a clear
continuity in the author's interpretative frames, including his
trademark schema of "five modalities of doing religion" (the subtitle
of chapter 1); the use of the notion of "event production" to
understand Chinese funerals and festivals; the idiom of "hosting"
(and guesting) to conceptualize Chinese peasants' welcoming,
entertaining, and feeding of visible and invisible guests; and the
neologism of "red-hot sociality" based on Émile Durkheim's notion of
"collective effervescence" to conceive the religiosity of Chinese
peasants. The methodology is now clearly defined as a "relational
approach," borrowed from French anthropologists Michael Houseman and
Carlos Severi's Naven or the Other Self: A Relational Approach to
Ritual Action (1998), which focuses on social relationships formed
and represented in the course of religious events. The objective of
Religion in China is to provide an "on-the-ground perspective" of
Chinese religion for a "proper understanding of Chinese people's
religiosity" that is "closer to Chinese people's religious lives"
(pp. 38, 193). At the same time, it is hoped to "throw off
intellectual baggage and epistemological habits" of conceiving
Chinese religion as "systems of thought" or as discrete traditions of
the Three Teachings (sanjiao) defined by a
"confessional-affiliational" model (pp. 8, 194).
A major difference between the present _Religion in China_ and the
previous _Miraculous Response_ is that the author no longer builds on
primarily one single case of the Black Dragon king Temple in Yulin in
rural northern Shānxi. The present _Religion in China _draws on a
great variety of fieldwork data from both the author himself and from
other researchers. This allows Chau to further develop his many
theses already presented in the previous book and to illustrate their
broader relevance to Chinese religion in general. It also allows him
to respond to some of the issues, critical comments, and
recommendations made by reviewers of his previous book, including: to
"make greater mention of numerous other recent studies," referring to
studies on non-Chinese societies; not to provide only "a very
male-oriented picture of popular religion" but to also include "a
house-based and women perspective"; not to describe "Chinese agrarian
society with no urbanization" and "completely neglect other religions
especially Christianity"; not to "swing too far away from the
historical, narrative, ritual and scriptural contexts," not to
emphasize text production ("only briefly discussed the relationship
between religious practice and literature"), and not to "disregard
entirely" rituals; and is not clear on "what might be different and
what might be the same" after the massive changes of the twentieth
century.[1]
Not all of the issues raised by the reviewers of the author's
previous book are resolved in the present _Religion in China_. The
present book is, for instance, still a study on the religion of a
primarily patriarchal China by a male researcher, but it has been
accurately noted by Chau that most women in China participate in
religious activities on behalf of all members of their household.
Although there is still no treatment of the content of ritual, there
is a whole chapter on ritual service providers and their clients in
_Religion in China_ in which the program of a three-day funeral
ritual in northern Shanxi recorded by Stephen Jones is quoted in
full.[2] The program of a three-day Daoist ritual of offering or
cosmic renewal (_jiao_) ritual in eastern Taiwan recorded by John
Lagerwey (_Taoist Ritual in Chinese Society and History_ [1987]) is
also found in the book.
As for mention of other recent studies in the present book, there are
plenty, although studies quoted are still mostly on Chinese society.
It is not possible to list all the fieldwork data of other
researchers quoted in _Religion in China _here but we should mention
a few interesting field descriptions that Chau quotes at some length:
a description of a Lunar New Year "tour of inspection" of a local
deity in Chaozhou in northeastern Guangdong to illustrate rivalry by
Irene Eng and Lin Yi-min (pp. 71-72), ethnographic accounts of
collective sessions of spirit possession (_huilingshan_) in Taiwan by
Alison Marshall and Ting Jen-chieh, a record of fetus-ghost
appeasement ritual in Taiwan by Marc L. Moskowitz, an investigation
of commodification of Tibetan Buddhism in China by Dan Smyer Yü, an
account of a house church and Christian migrant workers in big cities
by Huang Jianbo, and a discussion of Daoist transmission in
contemporary Shanghai by Yang Der-Ruey.[3] Other new fieldwork data
found in _Religion in China _belongs to the author himself, including
a popular little tradition of "beating the mean person" (_daxiaoren_)
in Hong Kong and a detailed field report on the experience of
becoming a confirmed Buddhist practitioner, in other words, the
ritual of taking refuge (_guiyi_), by a secondary-school teacher from
a large city near Shanghai (p. 122). The book is truly a plethora of
information on Chinese religion succinctly presented in a relatively
short, easy-to-read but thought-provoking single volume.
The complaint regarding the author's previous book of a neglect of
the Abrahamic faith in China and on the lack of treatment of new
developments in Chinese religion after urbanization must be dismissed
with regard to the present book. Chau has dealt not only with the
modern Chinese Catholic and Protestant congregational communities but
also with the way Chinese Muslims organized their Hajj pilgrimages to
Mecca under the close supervision of the state. There is ample
information in the book on the new developments of religion in
contemporary China. From the outset, the timeline of the book is
clearly defined as focusing on "religious practice in the
contemporary period (i.e. the reform era in China, which began in the
late 1970s)" (p. 7). The "atomization of society" and "increasingly
nuclearized homes" in urban China gives rise to the importance of
"confessional religious identities" (p. 134). Therefore, there is a
change from an "efficacy-based religiosity," focusing on miraculous
response, to a "Dharma-based religiosity," focusing on confessional
religious identities in urban China (p. 102). This is mostly detected
in the Buddhist sphere in which being a religious subject (as a
Foguang person or as a Ciji person or as both) by taking refuge is
eagerly sought after. The author names this phenomenon "religious
subjectification" (p. 136). "Cybersect," a term first coined by
Patricia M. Thornton, was found in the famous Longquan monastery
characterized by a religious life of microblogging (Weibo, a popular
Chinese microblogging website) and WeChat (Weixin, a Chinese
multipurpose messaging, social media, and mobile payment app).[4] In
the Christian sphere, rich entrepreneurs become "Boss Christians"
(_laoban jidutu_). Strong control on the development of Christianity
in China by the state leads to the development of underground house
churches. Strong state control expresses itself in the Christian
cross-removal campaign in some areas, especially in Wenzhou, where
the Boss Christians had built big churches. In the countryside, the
intangible cultural heritage scheme has given popular religion a new
status, diluting its label of superstition and even leading to the
development of a new religion sphere (an imagined community) called
"popular religion sphere" (_minjian xinyang jie_) with a new bureau
within local religious affairs (_disisi_ 第四司, also known as
_yewusisi_ 業務四司, a division within the Chinese Bureau of
Religion) (p. 180). The state initiated a nationwide funeral-burial
reform (_lüse binzang_), which gave rise to the tomb-flattening
incident in Zoukou in Henan in 2012, and a coffin-confiscating
incident happened first in Anqing in Anhui in 2014 and later in Ji'an
in Jiangxi in 2018.
A persistent characteristic of the author is that he is good at and
fond of coming up with "terms of his own invention" and Thomas
DuBois, a reviewer of his previous book, _Miraculous Response_,
commented that these neologisms "seem to represent rather ordinary
concepts presented in an unnecessarily jargonistic manner."[5]
Ordinary concepts they may seem, but new terms could also be seen as
a contribution to providing us with new conceptual tools to
understand religion in both rural and urban China. One such idea is
the idea of the "household" as the basic unit of religious engagement
in China. Charles Stafford, in a passing remark in his review of the
_Miraculous Response_, suggested a focus on "house-based" instead of
"temple-based" perspective to discuss Chinese religion.[6] This is
taken seriously by Chau in _Religion in China_. He now suggests that
"household" is a "political, economic and moral-religious building
block of Chinese society" (p. 52). There are three levels in Chinese
engagement in religious activities: the individual, the household,
and the community. For rural China, the order of the three, perhaps,
is reversed: community goes first (because of communal hegemony as
explained in chapter 4 of _Miraculous Response_) before household and
individual. In terms of modalities for doing religion, in the
agrarian sphere for peasants, it is a combination of relational and
the immediate-practical plus the liturgical modalities. For city
folks, the individual and family come first as a result of the
atomization of society and increasingly nuclearized homes. For them,
there is a coming together of three modalities of doing religion: the
discursive-scriptural modality, self-cultivational modality, and
relational modality. The introduction of the "household as [the]
basic unit of religious engagement" has allowed the author to cover
both rural and urban China.
Since 2002, India has become the country with the biggest village
population in the world. We must not forget, however, that China
remains the country with the second largest village population in the
world. In 2019, 41.8 percent of the Chinese population still lived in
villages, representing 0.57 billion people. The process of
urbanization is rapid and the number of villagers is dropping fast,
but a study of Chinese religion still cannot ignore rural China. The
new addition of "household" as the basic unit of religious engagement
in the present book, besides concepts of "event production," "text
acts," and "red-hot sociality," has allowed Chau to sharpen his
analytical tool in analyzing Chinese religion in both its rural and
urban contexts.
Another contribution of _Religion in China_ is that it suggests a
possible answer to the Freedman-Wolf debate over whether a single
Chinese religion exists, a question raised by Fang-long Shih and
DuBois in their reviews of _Miraculous Response_.[7] What we learn
from _Religion in China_ is that even if a single Chinese religion
does not exist, a Chinese religiosity that consists of red-hot
sociality (hot and noisy or red and fiery) does exist. Let us make no
mistake here, religion in China is not just about the "red hot
sociality" or the "carnival spirit" as Lagerwey has preferred to
translate the Chinese term _re'nao_.[8] Religion is not only about
people coming together to enjoy the excitement and social density of
attendance, feeling and enjoying the presence of each other, nor is
it all about the social production of relationships. These elements
are all there, but there is another side of the story. In the "Zaji"
(Miscellaneous Records) chapter of the _Liji_ (_Book of Rites_),
Confucius asked his disciple Zigong if he enjoyed the "carnival
spirit" of the agricultural sacrifice at the end of the year. Zigong
said he did not. He just found that the people of the whole state
appeared to be mad (he found red-hot sociality only) during the
festival, but Confucius said Zigong had missed the point. A bow could
not be drawn and never relaxed, Confucius said. Apparently, Confucius
talked about the carnival spirit that the people of the whole state
deserved and needed after their "hundred days of labor in the field."
Li Fengmou was right in interpreting this story as one with two
sides: solemnity and play. Like the rite of summoning the elders
(_ying wangji_) in Taiwan, ritual and festival is about both
solemnity and play, red-hot sociality and religious solemnity.[9] The
same applies to the agricultural sacrifice Confucius discussed with
Zigong. It was a ritual that created solemnity too. Confucius loves
ritual not just because of the carnival spirit it produced nor
because of the social harmony or relationship it gave rise to but
also because of the sincerity and reverence (_cheng_ and _jing_) it
helps to cultivate. That is why in the "Bayi" (Eight Rows) chapter of
the _Analects_, when the same Zigong proposed to do away with the
offering of a sheep connected with the inauguration of the first day
of each month, Confucius said, "Ci [another name for Zigong], you
love the sheep; I love the ceremony" (_Analects_ 3:17).
Another admirable feature of the author of the book under review is
that, unlike many other book authors, he does not choose to hide
behind the concepts and data presented in the book to give the
appearance of a disinterested and objective investigator. Chau
includes a detailed autobiography of himself. As a child of a
Shanghainese and Indonesian Chinese, he grew up in Sumatra, and his
family later moved to Beijing and then to Hong Kong. He was educated
in Hong Kong in the 1980s for primary and secondary school and went
to graduate school in the United States before he started to teach in
Britain. If we believe in Paul Ricoeur's three worlds of the text, we
would appreciate this little piece of information for it allows us to
understand not only "the world in the text" (Chinese society and its
religion) but also something about "the world behind" (in other
words, that of the author).[10]
The above brief review is perhaps enough to allow us to see the
abundance, richness, and span of knowledge of Chinese religion
covered in the book under review. The comment of another reviewer of
the present book may be right when she says, "I felt like I was
reading a textbook instead of a monograph."[11] Many issues and
topics in Chinese religion are only briefly alluded to in the present
book. Depth was sacrificed for breadth, but this is the right thing
to do for a book of two hundred pages in length. The choice of
breadth does not overshadow the insight and inspiration the book
provides. It remains a rich recourse for both teaching and research
on Chinese religion in years to come.
Notes
[1]. Katiana Le Mentec, review of _Miraculous Response_, by Adam Yuet
Chau, _China Perspectives_ 103, no. 2 (2008): 122; Charles Stafford,
review of _Miraculous Response_, by Adam Yuet Chau, _The Journal of
Asian Studies_ 69, no. 2 (2010): 543; Fenggang Yang, review of
_Miraculous Response_, by Adam Yuet Chau, _Contemporary Sociology_
35, no. 5 (2006): 500; Thomas DuBois, review of _Miraculous
Response_, by Adam Yuet Chau, _T'oung Pao_ 92, no. 1/3 (2006): 286;
and T. H. Barrett, review of _Miraculous Response_, by Adam Yuet
Chau, _The China Quarterly_ no. 186 (2006): 488.
[2]. Stephen Jones, _Daoist Priests of the Li Family: Ritual Life in
Village China_ (Magdalena, NM: Three Pines Press, 2017), 31.
[3]. Irene Eng and Lin Yi-min, "Religious Festivities, Communal
Rivalry, and Restructuring of Authority Relations in Rural Chaozhou,
Southeast China," _Journal of Asian Studies_ 61, no. 4 (2002):
1259-85; Alison Marshall, "Moving the Spirit on Taiwan: New Age
_Lingji_ Performance," _Journal of Chinese Religions _31 (2003):
81-99; Jen-Chieh Ting (Ding Renjie), "Huilingshan xianxiang de
shehuixue kaocha: qudiyuha qingjing zhong minjian xinyang de zhuanhua
yu zailianjie"
會靈山現象的社會學考察：去地域化情境中民間信仰的轉化與再連結
[A sociological analysis of the collective trance movement
"Converging with the Spirit-Mountain": The transformation and
re-embedding of folk religion under the situation of
de-territorialization], _Taiwan zongjiao yangjiu_ 台灣宗教研究
[Research on religion in Taiwan] 4, no. 2 (2005): 57-111; Marc L.
Moskowitz, _The Haunting Fetus: Abortion, Sexuality, and the Spirit
World in Taiwan_ (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001); Dan
Smyer Yū, _The Spread of Tibetan Buddhism in China: Charisma, Money,
Enlightenment_ (London: Routledge, 2012); Jianbo Huang, "Being
Christians in Urbanizing China: The Epistemological Tensions of the
Rural Churches in the City," _Current Anthropology_ 55 (supplement
10) (2014): 238-47; and Der-Ruey Yang, "From Ritual Skills to
Discursive Knowledge: Changing Styles of Daoist Transmission in
Shanghai," in _Religion in Contemporary China: Revitalization and
Innovation_, ed. Adam Yuet Chau (London: Routledge, 2011), 81-107.
[4]. Patricia M. Thornton, "The New Cybersects: Resistance and
Repression in the Reform Era," in _Chinese Society: Change, Conflict
and Resistance_, ed. Elizabeth Perry and Mark Selden, 2nd ed.
(London: Routledge, 2003), 149-50.
[5]. DuBois, review of _Miraculous Response_, 287.
[6]. Stafford, review of _Miraculous Response_, 543.
[7]. Fang-long Shih, review of _Miraculous Response_, by Adam Chau,
_Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies_,70, no. 1
(2007): 194; and DuBois, review of _Miraculous Response_, 283.
[8]. John Lagerwey, preface to _Ganna diqu di miaohui yu zongzu_
贛南地區的廟會與宗族 (Temple festivals and linages in
Gannan), ed. Luo Yong and John Lagerwey (Hong Kong: International
Hakka Studies Association, Overseas Chinese Archives, Ecole
Française D'Etrême-Orient, 1997), 21.
[9]. Fengmou Li, "Yansu yu youxi: cong zhaji dao jingwangji di
feichang guancha"
嚴肅與遊戲：從蜡祭到迎王祭的非常觀察 [Solemnity and
play: Ritual structure from the "Year's end sacrifice" to the rite of
"Summoning the elders"], _Zhong yang yan jiu yuan min zu xue yan jiu
suo jikan_ 中央研究院民族學研究所集刊 [Bulletin of the
Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica] 88 (1999): 135-72.
[10]. Paul Ricœur, _Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus
of Meaning_ (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976),
87-94.
[11]. Susanne Bregnbaek, review of _Religion in China_, by Adam Yuet
Chau, _American Ethnologist: Journal of the American Ethnological
Society _47, no. 3 (2020): 313-14.
Citation: Wai Lun Tam. Review of Chau, Adam Yuet, _Religion in China:
Ties That Bind_. H-Buddhism, H-Net Reviews. March, 2021.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55937
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.
--
Best regards,
Andrew Stewart
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