The title of John Lagerwey's book accurately summarizes his central idea: “The religious dimension of Chinese society and the Chinese state being inseparable from each other, not taking that dimension into account makes it impossible to make sense of anything Chinese” (p. 1). The book has four chapters, which were originally presented as lectures at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the University of Hong Kong. The first two chapters are historical in focus, the third and fourth ethnographic. Chapter 1, “A Brief History of the Pantheon,” is mostly taken up with a highly condensed account of the emergence of some central religious ideas and the development of the Daoist church as well as Buddhism and local cults, and their relation to the state. Chapter 2, “Daoist Ritual in Social and Historical Perspective,” is packed with interesting details about the history of the Daoist church (his term) from its emergence through Ming times. The focus is exclusively on Daoism as an ecclesiastical organization and on its most sophisticated texts and practices, though a good deal of attention is paid to the arguments of Edward Davis about the development of a rapprochement between Daoism and local cults in the Song.
In chapter 3, “Festivals in Southeastern China,” by far the longest chapter in the book, Lagerwey abruptly changes into ethnographic mode. The chapter is composed of fascinating thumbnail descriptions of village, market town, county town, and mountain festivals. Nothing could make clearer the remarkable creativity of the popular religious imagination in China. Two basic ideas introduced at the end of chapter 1 are relevant here. The first is that “there were two religions in China, that of the state-church and that of local society” (p. 54). The second is that “we can get a more accurate picture of Chinese history and ‘mentalities’ from the study of local religion than from the study of national political history” (p. 55). Both these statements challenge much received wisdom on the subjects of Chinese religion, state-society relations, and culture, and deserve more thought than their deceptively simple form might suggest.
The second statement does not sit entirely comfortably with the first, however. If local religion is so important for our understanding of Chinese history and mentalities, there would seem to be little reason to study the “state-church.” Yet that was the realm of imperial ritual, Confucian ideology, and the organized religions, including Daoism, and Lagerwey is not going to abandon it. He writes that “‘China,’ as ‘imagined community,’ is essentially Daoist” (p. 93). More generally, he asserts that “the state was the church in China, and no other church ever succeeded in supplanting this state-church. . . . No religious movement in China becomes major without government recognition and support” (p. 54). Thus if one is interested in religious movements, or in organized religions, including Daoism, one must study the Chinese state-church. And yet Lagerwey says that it is local religion that offers the best insights into the nature of Chinese history and society. And local religion was seldom connected with movements making claims to universality, indeed had little to do with anything that can be called a church.
Thus two Lagerweys are contending quietly in this book, and both make important contributions. Lagerwey is the preeminent fieldworker in Chinese local religion of his generation, and I have stressed the importance of two of his ideas in that area. But he is also a leading authority on Daoist history, scripture, and ritual, and he makes a significant intervention in this area as well. Scholars have struggled for a long time to understand the connection of the Daoism of canonical scriptures and complex rituals with popular religion. The preferred solution has been to assert that Chinese popular religion is fundamentally Daoist. This may have superficial plausibility as regards southern China, where Daoist priests regularly officiated at village rituals. But it is not true of the small area in northern China I have studied, and I suspect it is not true in much of the rest of north China either. Lagerwey has shown a way out of this conceptual dead end by redefining Daoism as part of the Chinese state-church, against which he counterposes local religion, which includes Daoist elements, but also much else besides.
In the last chapter, “On the Rational Character of Local Religion,” Lagerwey creates an imaginary village, a composite of the many he has visited in southeastern China, to illustrate how villages interacted with the landscape around them, “inhabited with divine energies” (p. 17), and how the competition between resident lineages for land and water shaped village history. Readers will learn much from this unorthodox approach, far more than I can indicate here. But one point deserves special attention. Lagerwey wants to show that there was unity underlying the “seemingly endless variety” (p. 152) of local rituals described in the preceding chapter. He states that elite and commoners “alike subscribed to a common . . . system of symbolic acts” and asserts that “to refuse to understand and appreciate the Chinese symbolic system is to refuse to understand China” (pp. 153–54). However, just what that symbolic system consisted of remains largely undefined.
Lagerwey himself points to the tension between the historian and the ethnographer in his work, but the deeper tension is between the systematizing philosopher-theologian and the ethnographer. This tension has led to a complex engagement with important subjects whose very definitions are changed by this fascinating book. And this combination of interests is precisely what is needed by anyone who would define the symbolic system of traditional Chinese society.
