The publication by Brill of these two volumes is a big event for those of us who are interested in Chinese religious history and its present florescence. Anyone with this interest knows one or more of Kenneth Dean's previous publications, starting with his Taoist Ritual and Popular Cults in Southeast China published in 1993 – which told the story of three important cults and their extensions in the central and southern regions of the province of Fujian. At about that time he and his writing partner in the present publication, Zheng Zhenman, focused their investigations by setting up a Putian research station. Since then in conferences, articles and chapters, Dean has displayed the results of their research – always unfinished and hinting at a lot more.

Putian is an irrigated plain of 464 square kilometres, most of it retrieved from the ocean and from salt water stretching out from what was an alluvial bay and its coastline in front of a ring of mountains. It includes Putian and other cities presently growing at a great pace and eating up surrounding villages. The weirs reversing river flows so that they were not tidal, and the canals that both drained and irrigated the reclaimed land, were begun in the Southern Song but the main construction was organized, by lineages, in the Ming dynasty.

Zheng Zhengman has been publishing, mainly in Chinese, on the social history of lineage formation and territorial temples since 1987. One long and pivotal article, published in Chinese in 2003, is translated by Kenneth Dean and included in volume one of the Handbook. It demonstrates, with extensive quotations from contemporary sources, how lineage sponsorship of Buddhist monasteries, then the building of Buddhist shrines by ancestors tombs, then the building of ancestral halls, gradually over several centuries from the Song to the Ming dynasties established commoner entitlements to honour founding ancestors well beyond the limit of four generations. This limit, set from the Han to the Song dynasties, was maintained even in Zhu Xi's Family Rituals (Jiali) while it was being flouted by the lineages of eminent Putian scholars with imperial court positions. Zheng also demonstrates in this long essay how local territorial temples of ancestors turned into gods became exemplars of the prescribed, but usually exceeded, rites of cantonal (li) she temples in the Song and then exceeded again as the Ming attempt to homogenize local temple rites collapsed and the she were appropriated as a great variety of local temple rituals and their festivals. In his overview chapter Dean covers the same story more briefly but as cogently.

The survey involved teams of school teachers visiting every one of the 724 villages in Putian, in 1993 and 1995, finding basic population and surname data, counting and naming the village temples and the dates of their festivals, noting in particular the procession festivals. The authors themselves visited every single temple between 1994 and 2006, collecting copies of all temple and festival expense and donation accounts, the subject of a promised publication, registering all the ritual experts Daoists, Buddhists, Three-in-one, spirit mediums and Christian priests, observing some of the temples' festivals and photographing them (a fine selection of pictures are included in these two volumes), and finding out how each temple is linked to others in a network of alliances. Most of volume two is a record of the findings for each village, in the three sub-regions of the irrigated plain.

In the course of their survey, Dean and Zheng copied all inscriptions recording the building of temples and the holding of rites. They are published in two other volumes in Chinese, 1995 and 2003. They also collected together a documentary base of genealogies, temple and local gazetteers, and scripts of plays and stories, many of them available only in the field sites they visited. Similar sources were the basis of Donald Clark's 2007 Portrait of a Community: Society, Culture and the Structures of Kinship in the Mulan River Valley (Fujian) from the Late Tang through the Song (Chinese University of Hong Kong Press), to which Dean often refers.

The main subject of these two volumes is the network of temple alliances in which village temples are linked to higher-order temples in the present day making up 153 ritual alliances, sharing many features, but varying both in their deities and their rituals. Their extension overseas, into Southeast Asia, is the topic of one chapter but is currently the subject of much more detailed research by Kenneth Dean.

The supreme merit of this survey is to establish the long history and transformation of ritual alliances, the way they spread and how they vary, with the strong suggestion that such variation and spread, differentiation and connection, is the groundwork of civilization in China into its border regions and beyond. But it also has its limits, compared to the more selective and intensive study of one place. To show that within walking distance a villager could attend a rite and a feast every three days is not as good as staying in the village and finding out whether any villager does. And to claim on this survey base that the frequency of rituals makes it part of everyday life is banal, since we know that rituals and temples are occasions and spaces set off from, even if they accompany and set a context for, the activities of everyday life. Dean's publications, including the theoretical conclusion to his part of volume one, combine detailed data on ritual alliances with highly abstract interpretative theories of networks. Here he adds Gabriel Tarde's social philosophy of monads linked by imitation/differentiation, opposition/hesitation, and adaptation/innovation, to establish once again his own theory of ritual as a syncretic field that folds its layers of expertise into each other and stretches between poles of hierarchical cosmology, performed by Daoists and Buddhists, and the immediacy of magical efficacity, exemplified by spectacular spirit possession. This concept of a syncretic field is very attractive, but it is surely tailored to the way Dean has conducted his research and to the way he has ordered these Handbook volumes, in an additive way, as yet another collection. It would need to be modified by reading more in-depth studies of ritual practices in one place.