Almost a generation has passed since the dawn of the reform era started to allow Chinese religions to revitalize, and gradually even to allow Chinese and overseas scholars to observe this revitalization, so that now academic writing in this area is frequently built on a considerable first-hand knowledge of the evolving situation – and quite a complex situation it certainly is, at that. Adam Yuet Chau's edited volume draws together contributions from nine researchers working across a very wide range of varieties of religion, yet even so does not touch for example on Islam, and scarcely on the editor's area of temple religion in the north, since the impressive essay on religion in North China by Stephen Jones, though fully aware of the complexities even of quite small sections of the total map of religion there, takes as its theme change – especially musical change – in ritual performance. Though the contributors are not uniformly ethnomusicologists, anthropologists or sociologists, since there is an excellent essay also by the historian Henrietta Harrison on Catholics in Shanxi that carries considerable chronological background depth, the overwhelming emphasis is on what is happening before our eyes.

In fact revitalization seems a somewhat limited way to categorize the phenomena described, since in many cases – and especially that of ritual performance – cultural change can be seen as sidelining or even destroying earlier traditions, whatever the economic good health of religious circles. Even innovation emerges as a somewhat problematic category, in that the presumed baseline of a religious standstill during the period leading up to and including the Cultural Revolution is less easy to prove than one might think: again, Stephen Jones questions our assumptions by pointing to a revival in the transmission of ritual knowledge in 1961, and it must be said that recent work by James Robson and others in Hunan suggests growth even during the Cultural Revolution as well. As always, too, the contemporary observer is hard put to it to speak of innovation when the past history of a religious scene so complex has shown plenty of shifting patterns of religious interaction – especially imitative interaction. For example, the study of current trends in Daoist education that look suspiciously close to Buddhist arrangements might be well advised to take into account not simply (as I have been told by Buddhist monks) a phase in the late 20th century when the need for training outstripped its provision to the point where Daoist novices were sometimes attending Buddhist seminary classes, but also the earlier emergence of Buddhist colleges in the Republican period providing an established model for modern religious education.

As hinted above, one essay that does show due regard for earlier interactions is that by Henrietta Harrison, who notes the way in which prayers for rain, long vital in the climate of North China, by late imperial times found expression in Chinese Catholic pilgrimage practice in the area (p. 215). A fuller picture of the main currents of local religion of the region that combines fieldwork with a truly long term appreciation of the historical background of this and other institutions may be found in Daniel Overmyer's monograph, especially in this case the opening chapter. Here, rainmaking ritual is traced back some three millennia, and though it may at first sight appear an irrelevance that anciently quite violent rituals of humiliation directed at scapegoats were involved, one wonders for example – had his classical education extended that far – how remote the possibilities of an atavistic recrudescence of violence would have seemed to the missionary Archibald Glover, surrounded by a procession of rain supplicants as he attempted to flee with his family from the Boxer Rebellion. Daniel Overmyer is one of the founding fathers of the study of Chinese religion as an integrated discipline covering both separate religious traditions and divisions between historical and contemporary phenomena. It is therefore a pity that his book appeared too late for its findings to be incorporated in Adam Yuet Chau's Introduction to his collection, since this provides an exemplary concise but thought-provoking survey, not simply of the scholarship contained in his edited volume but also of the general state of studies of the field of contemporary religion. That field is broad enough without encompassing also the historical dimension, true enough, so it would seem about time that institutions teaching Chinese religion started to produce scholars to work alongside social scientists in surveying the diversity of the contemporary scene against some notion of its totality – given, of course, that the totality embraces in this globalized age more than merely Chinese religion alone.

But a reading of these two books also prompts the thought that anyone working on religion in China now, should they not (unlike a good number of the contributors to the edited volume) possess a sound grounding in the history of religion, might do well to talk to historians. This is not a new point: a generation ago Michel Strickmann was warning against studying the anthropology of Chinese religion without taking the centrality of the textual heritage seriously. Nor, to be fair, can such an argument outweigh the point that a documenter of contemporary performance like Stephen Jones might make, namely that the textual heritage is reasonably secure, while ritual knowledge is disappearing before our eyes. Where all could agree, no doubt, is that against the assumption of a generation ago that religion could be ignored as no more than a spent force in China, there is a great deal of work to be done. One very much hopes that books such as the two volumes reviewed here will carry that message far and wide, and especially to funding agencies – lest they, entranced above all by the spectacle of China's economic rise, fail sufficiently to appreciate how important such research is.