Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Chau, Adam Yuet

Titel

Ritual Alliances of the Putian Plain. Volume One: Historical Introduction to the Return of the Gods by Kenneth Dean, Zheng Zhenman, and: Ritual Alliances of the Putian Plain. Volume Two: A Survey of Village Temples and Ritual Activities by Kenneth Dean, Zheng Zhenman (review)

Ist Teil von

• Journal of Chinese Religions, 2014-05, Vol.42 (1), p.106-112

Ort / Verlag

Atlanta: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2014

Link zum Volltext

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Shishuo xinyu 世說新語 depiction of ‘‘raw’’ ingestion of talismans must be a polemic, a Buddhist fabrication. Yet the Dengzhen yinjue passage mentioned above clearly describes direct ingestion of talismans without burning or immersion. The concluding chapters provide important evidence for the earlier appearance in Buddhist texts of certain notions concerning scriptures and their power. Much has been written recently about the value of making cultural claims based on dating texts within which specific terms appear. These approach the problem from the perspectives of philology, and of circulation and influence of those texts within communities on the ground. Here I would simply like to point out that the argument structure of these chapters is, in the end, a genealogical one, namely, that such-and-such ideas were ‘‘originally’’ Buddhist. This thus leaves room for further studies of the processes of such adaptations in China, from the perspectives of syncretism, cultural translation, and cultural and technical knowledge formation. Empowered Writing will prove an important resource for these studies, and the arguments therein will have a lasting impact on the fields of Han and Six Dynasties studies, as well as Buddho-Daoist studies. It makes an unprecedented contribution to the material history of Chinese writing—political, economic, and religious—and the easy style of its prose mixed with sophisticated argument make it excellent material for undergraduate courses in these fields. MICHAEL STANLEY-BAKER Berlin Center for the History of Knowledge, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science KENNETH DEAN and ZHENG ZHENMAN, Ritual Alliances of the Putian Plain. Volume One: Historical Introduction to the Return of the Gods. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010. xv, 404 pp. J103, US$152 (hb). ISBN 978-90-04-17602-7 KENNETH DEAN and ZHENG ZHENMAN, Ritual Alliances of the Putian Plain. Volume Two: A Survey of Village Temples and Ritual Activities. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010. xxx, 1060 pp. J185, US$263 (hb). ISBN 978-90-04-17601-0 The two-volume set by Kenneth Dean and Zheng Zhenman 鄭振滿 is published by Brill in its authoritative, beautifully presented, black-clad Handbook of Oriental Studies (HdO) series (Section 4 on China), whose remit is to publish scholarly works that are of lasting reference value.1 More than 1000 pages long, volume 2 of this set consists of systematically organized data providing a large-scale survey of deities, temples, lineages, festivals, and, most importantly, the ritual alliances on the Putian (莆田) Plain (in northern Fujian Province), which the two authors, with 1 Other volumes in the same series relating to religion in China include, for example, Handbook of Christianity in China, 635-1800 (2001, edited by Nicolas Standaert); Daoism Handbook (2000, edited by Livia Kohn); Death in Ancient China: The Tale of One Man’s Journey (2006, Constance A. Cook); Early Chinese Religion. Part One: Shang through Han (1250 BC-220 AD), two volumes (2008, edited by John Lagerwey and Marc Kalinowski); Early Chinese Religion, Part Two: The Period of Division (220-589), two volumes (2009, edited by John Lagerwey and Lü Pengzhi); and Local Religion in North China in the Twentieth Century: The Structure and Organization of Community Rituals and Beliefs (2009, by Daniel L. Overmyer). 106 BOOK REVIEWS the help of a team of local researchers and assistants, carried out over many years.2 Depending on the importance of the village, each village receives coverage ranging from one page to a few pages. There are altogether 724 villages comprising 153 regional ritual alliances nested within three large irrigated-plain hydro-politicalritual systems. Volume 1 of the set (still quite hefty and slimmer only relative to volume 2), entitled Ritual Alliances of the Putian Plain Volume One: Historical Introduction to the Return of the Gods, provides a series of inter-linked chapters to help the reader make sense of what seems a morass of socio-political and ritual inventions superimposed upon one another over more than a thousand years. Because of the immensity and complexity of the data used and analyzed in this study—historical, geographical, epigraphical, archival, ethnographic, visual, statistical, cartographic, and so on—the volumes must have posed numerous organizational challenges for presentation. The separation of the survey data from the interpretations makes perfect sense, but the...