This work is a comprehensive cultural-historical survey of all 724 villages, divided into 153 ritual alliances, on the alluvial Putian plain in northern Fujian Province. Besides richly documenting the revival of religion since 1980, it extends backward before Song times to describe Putian's early settlement and its distinctive historical evolution. The main focus is the ritual alliances that controlled the irrigation systems by means of temple committees. These are seen as a “second government,” supported by per capita donations, manned by posts rotating among men, and managing autonomously not only an annual round of ritual events, the focus of this survey, but also a range of infrastructural and welfare activities as well as irrigation maintenance.

The longest chapters in volume 1 are the historical discussions by the two authors: Kenneth Dean's “Historical Overview” and Zheng Zhenman's appendix on “Lineage and Religion on the Putian Plains,” based on stone inscriptions. They reveal an institutional history in which local invention and elaboration often happened under the official rubric or in spite of official rules. Immigrant kin groups and their dependent families gradually reclaimed the coastal mudflats. In Song times, because lineages were not officially recognized beyond the fourth generation, many lineage organizations took cover in Buddhist monasteries. By Ming times, the situation had been reversed, the heavily taxed monks becoming guests of local lineages. Ingeniously stretching canonical and dynastic requirements, lineages grew and multiplied by extending ancestor worship to earlier generations, permitting elder sons of branch lineages to lead worship, and eventually selling lineage membership shares. The gods' temples had been prohibited with the early Ming establishment of lishe altars and altars for unworshipped ghosts. Gradually, they were revived and largely took over the official lishe order. Starting in about 1500, within the old official subcantons (li), ritual alliances of (in principle) seven villages ran cooperatively the weirs, sluices, canals, and channels with the help of tax-exempt sacrificial lands (p. 86).

The more than 200 maps not only cover the alliances and temples, but also present a palimpsest of local history. The story of cooperating lineages can be read in the evidence of memorial archways, lineage halls, genealogies, and examination lists. The enduring impact of official initiatives is evident in current references to archaic li and to the seventeenth-century pu—defense units against pirate raids. Another window on local history is seen in the distribution of gods—the spirits of irrigation founders, local and official gods, gods associated with the popular novels of the mid-Ming, gods brought from southern Fujian by migrants, the Wangye plague gods who appeared in the areas forcibly evacuated in the early Qing, locally invented gods linked to spirit mediums, and those of the mixed pantheon of the syncretic Three-in-One cult (pp. 194–203). The most widespread god, Tiangong yuanshuai—patron of the theater who possesses spirit mediums—has his own stage story. The third son of the Jade emperor, he is bored in Heaven, misbehaves, and is condemned to perform on Earth forever the story of his fall from grace—a perfect lesson in a society in which ritual colors relationships so thoroughly that everyone must conscientiously keep up the rituals (pp. 183–84). A most interesting finding is several contrasting regional subcultures. Ancestral halls, which reflect an elite literati Confucian cultural heritage, are almost absent in the northeast corner of the plain, the site of numerous altar associations or Tanban, which brought collective spirit medium cults back after the Cultural Revolution in an ongoing movement of ideas, institutions, and people (pp. 229–54).

The restoration in the 1980s of the vast majority of temples and their rituals has been relatively neglected, but volume 2 thoroughly demonstrates its massive scale. Almost every village celebrates the yuanxiao in the first lunar month and one (or more) god's birthday, inviting operatic or puppet troupes and ritual experts and conducting processions. Outside the cities, ritual and other activities have grown in number and importance with rapid economic expansion, stimulated by funds from Southeast Asian sojourners and migrant workers within China. Rapid urbanization has razed many villages, but their temples have been preserved or rebuilt in city suburbs, testifying to the fit of ritual activities with socialist modernity. Despite decrying superstition, the party state has adopted a “distant supervisory attitude” (p. 148) over cultural recuperation and the revival of local rituals. The temple committees continue to enjoy much autonomy, and their fund-raising fills a vital gap in the local state's expenditures.

Dean describes a ritual system open to change in changing times. He juxtaposes his interpretation with those of other scholars (such as David Faure, Liu Zhiwei, and others working on the Pearl River Delta) who stress cultural unification and propose a model of gradual integration according to which emergent elites identify with the state and seek its legitimation by adopting Confucian lineage forms and rituals (pp. 44, 79, 252–53, 281). Instead of such gentrification, Dean and Zheng's study finds that Confucianization has its limits: Buddhist and Daoist rituals persist in most Putian cults, even within officially canonized temples. Nor does Dean seek unity in a Daoist liturgical framework, as in his 1993 work. Local initiatives lead not toward cultural uniformity and state standardization but to hybridization: some ritual techniques and cultural symbols are borrowed from elites within Putian, others from Putian's Southeast Asian sojourners. Despite the cultural hegemony of the Confucian state, locals develop divergent modes of power, forging through ritual new kinds of communities and subjectivities that are consciously hybrid, translocal, and transnational.

There is much food for thought in this ambitious work, and, indeed, the authors present more evidence in volume 2 than they analyze. The arguments are always stimulating (e.g., on recent interpretations of Chinese religion, and the ritual-event), but some are not directly related to the survey material presented. As he has done elsewhere, Dean argues that temple rituals are not a departure from everyday life, which has its own rituals, but an intensification of it: more fun (re'nao), more gifts, more competitive display. This is a plausible way of explaining the force of ritual revival since the Cultural Revolution. Some matters await further study: the ritual procession (the subject of a promised work), the rotations of particular opera troupes and the content of their operas, negotiations with the contemporary local state, and the question of the ritual alliances' correspondence in scale and function with Skinner's standard markets. Dean, Zheng, and their team are still at work, and these volumes represent only the most thoroughly mapped of a series of Putian monographs that are increasingly essential for students of Chinese religion, local history, state and local relations, and emigration during late imperial China and up to the present.