Adam Yuet Chau's book provides an engaging and accessible account of Chinese popular religion in Longwanggou, a community in rural northern Shaanxi, focusing on its Black Dragon King Temple. Why have popular religious practices been revived in places such as Longwanggou in recent years? Is this a response to the spiritual emptiness of post-Mao life? A form of resistance to the state? According to Chau, if we examine the desires and actions of the social actors behind this revival, we find that worshippers may be seeking fun or trying to be good “hosts”; religious specialists may be on the lookout for ways to make money; agents of the state may be acting paternalistically, and so on. Chau is especially interested in the role of local elites in this complex picture. In Longwanggou, the temple boss Lao Wang (also a village head at the time of Chau's fieldwork) has been a key player—indeed, the key player—motivated in part, it seems, by a desire to “leave a name” for himself through religious entrepreneurialism. Under him, the temple has flourished to an unprecedented degree and expanded into other areas of local life, including primary schooling and reforestation projects.
In examining the case of Lao Wang and the “temple complex” he oversees, Chau has produced an empirical study of great importance. Readers learn much about religion in rural Shaanxi during the late 1990s (when the research was conducted), and along the way, Chau draws attention to many features of Chinese religious practice that deserve careful scholarly consideration. These include the symbolically charged production and use by local people of written charms, documents, stelae, and so on, in what Chau refers to as “text acts.” He also compares funerals and temple festivals to illuminate his notions of “event production” (what it means to actually organize social events as complex, and literally burdensome, as funerals or festivals) and “hosting” (as Chau observes, the business of welcoming, entertaining, and feeding guests—and spirits—is a hugely important dimension of Chinese religious practice). Chau's primary focus in the later chapters of the book is the relation between temple activities and initiatives and what he calls the “local state” and its agents. As he notes, the reform-era local state has come to tolerate, and in some respects actually promote, popular religious practice—an outcome unforeseen in the years of high Maoism.
Although there is much to admire in this book—indeed, I consider it a major achievement—I also have a couple of misgivings. Chau refers often to the work of other scholars of Chinese popular religion, including anthropologists, but he might, in my view, have engaged with some of their arguments a bit more deeply. Notably, Steven Sangren's writings on history and magical efficacy, and Stephen Feuchtwang's writings on the “imperial metaphor” and the politics of Chinese religion, both cited by Chau, are directly relevant to his arguments. Although neither of those authors suggests that “popular religion is a form of resistance” in any simplistic way (Chau is especially keen to debunk arguments of that kind), they both seek to illuminate the radical potential of Chinese cosmologies and religious practices. Moreover, they shed light on the potential in these same cosmologies and practices to reproduce inequality, giving power to those who are already elites at one level or another. However, rather than seeking to extend or critique in detail the accounts of these and other scholars, Chau tends to generate his own new interpretive frames, such as “event production” and “hosting.” In any case, neither Sangren nor Feuchtwang would be surprised by the finding that the (Communist) local state in modern China sometimes tolerates or even promotes religion, or the finding that different individuals may have radically different reasons for “doing religion.” Such paradoxes and complexities are taken as given by most anthropologists, and are the starting point for analysis.
On the empirical side, this book provides a very male-oriented picture of popular religion in Longwanggou. Of course, this is because Chau's project was explicitly (and intentionally) “temple based”: his main informants were Lao Wang and the other men who run the temple, count the donations of worshipers, and organize the festivals. No doubt a very different picture would have emerged from a “house-based” project, that is, one that started with families and prioritized the concerns and understandings of ordinary religious devotees, including women. Although I accept entirely the need for studies that focus in detail on temple management and entrepreneurialism, such work surely needs to accommodate (at least analytically) the “house-based”—and to some extent woman-oriented—perspective on Chinese popular religion before moving on to general conclusions about its nature and functions.
These concerns notwithstanding, this book is a major achievement: an important and accessible contribution to the literature on religion in China today that deserves to be widely read.
