Lin Wei-Ping's Materializing Magic Power surpasses previous scholarship by approaching Chinese popular religion from the perspective of material culture, thereby providing scholars with a new and promising analytical framework. Lin deserves credit for her interdisciplinary approach, which weaves together thick description and theoretical discussions to focus on the importance of materialization in Chinese religious life. Her work also breaks new ground for the field with its pioneering ethnography of migration and migrant religion in modern Taiwan.

Materializing Magic Power is divided into two main parts. Part one (“Popular religion in villages”) draws on Lin's long-term fieldwork in Tainan to provide thoroughgoing accounts of the processes for carving deity statues (especially related rituals), as well as the initiation rituals for spirit mediums, Part two (“Popular religion in cities”) explores the beliefs and practices of migrants from Tainan who have settled in northern Taiwan. There is also a bridge chapter between these two parts (“Dialogues with the past and the present”), which compares trends in Taiwanese popular religious life to those that took place during the Song dynasty (960–1279).

Part two is especially important for its detailed ethnographic account of how urbanization can reconfigure religious life, based on a case study of the challenges faced by Tainan migrant workers living in Bade (Taoyuan) while trying to adapt to new urban lifestyles. Lin focuses on migrants' new forms of spirituality, while also analysing how their beliefs and practices have changed due to modernization and urbanization. In particular, she considers how the power of village deities characterized by strong territorial and social ties has declined over time. While migrants initially relied on village deities by contacting relatives and asking them to consult local mediums on their behalf, they eventually started a new cult led by a spirit medium (also a migrant), while taking advantage of the Internet (including Facebook) to publicize their shrine's rituals and other events. Lin's research further indicates the gradual decline of kinship groups in migrants' lives, with ascriptive links becoming superseded by voluntary relationships.

Materializing Magic Power significantly enhances our understanding of Chinese religions by examining the importance of material culture, especially the cultural import of objects' agency. Lin draws on the work of Alfred Gell and Daniel Miller to study how religious objects (statues, spirit mediums) and the people who worship them reconstitute each other, thereby elucidating the material world's key role in mutual constitution of individuals and society. Her examination of the religious lives of people who migrate to cities is especially significant because an ever-increasing percentage of Taiwan's population now resides in urban areas, yet relatively little research work has been undertaken on migrants' religious lives.

As with any pioneering study, there are a few minor foibles. Despite the fact that Lin is well aware of previous scholarship, including on religious life in Taiwanese communities as well as relevant anthropological literature worldwide (for example, the work of Laurell Kendall), she overlooks Chao Shin-yi's 2002 article on urban spirit mediums and the divine altars (shentan) they preside over, thus missing a key chance for systematic comparison of relevant data. In addition, her work reveals the need to effectively distinguish between materialization and objectification, as well as explain the rationale for choosing one term over the other. Lin's analysis opens with the assertion that “the power of a deity is not only objectified by material artifacts but also by human beings, specifically mediums” (pp. 7–8; emphasis added), which suggests that objectification might be this work's operational concept. However, later in the book she compares a deity's being materialized into a statue with a deity's being objectified in a spirit medium (pp. 53–55), thereby implying that different processes are at work, while the conclusion is devoted to a discussion of materialization (p. 170). A related issue involves the validity of treating a spirit medium as a “material form,” especially since the processes of materialization for a medium (initiation) are rather different from those for a statue (carving) (pp. 64–69). The field would certainly benefit from additional research being done on these problems in the future.

Lin's research might also have benefited from a more nuanced grasp of modern Chinese religious history. In comparing her data to earlier historical periods, Lin merely discusses the work of Valerie Hansen and Robert Hymes on Song religious life, while following their lead in advancing rather problematic claims about that dynasty's supposedly novel religious features, including the worship of anthropomorphic deities, advent of local consciousness, and cults transcending local boundaries. In fact, many of these phenomena were present during earlier time periods as well, as has been documented in research by scholars like Glen Dudbridge and Lin Fu-shih. Perhaps even more importantly, Lin fails to consider how urbanization shaped religious life during the late imperial and Republican eras, including integrating migrants into major urban centres like Shanghai and Beijing, topics thoroughly explored in monographs published by Vincent Goossaert, Liu Xun and Susan Naquin. Another topic that merits further consideration is the links between the historical changes Lin describes and processes of materialization currently shaping Taiwanese religions. In addition, it is worth noting that rural temples in Taiwan pursue many strategies adopted by their urban counterparts, including mediums claiming direct links to high-ranking deities, the use of the Internet, posting séance results on temple bulletin boards, etc. Finally, there are a few problems with terminology, including the all too frequent appearance of “magic” in the Introduction and the abrupt use of “folk religion” (p. 106).

The above flaws in no way detract from Materializing Magic Power's importance to the field of Chinese religions, however. By redirecting our attention to the importance of material culture in Chinese religious life, as well as providing striking new data and analysis on the beliefs and practices of Taiwanese migrants, this work has achieved a number of major breakthroughs, and should be inspirational for future scholars who choose to pursue such topics.