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 (USC Dornsife, School of Religion)
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.
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Citation:
Wai Lun Tam. Review of Chau, Adam Yuet, Religion in China: Ties That Bind.
H-Buddhism, H-Net Reviews.
March, 2021.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55937
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