Popular Religion In China: The Imperial Metaphor

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The institution of local festivals and temples is not as well known as that of ancestor worship, but it is just as much a universal fact of Chinese life. Its content is an imperial metaphor, which stands in relation to the rest of its participants' lives as the poetry of collective vision, theatrically performed, built and painted in temples, carved and clothed in statues. Stephan Feuchtwang has brought together unpublished as well as published results of his own and other anthropologists' fieldwork in the People's Republic of China and Taiwan and put them into an historical, political and theoretical context.Students of anthropology will be intrigued. This is not a religion of a Book. Nor is it one of the named religions of China. Popular religion includes some elements of both Buddhism and the former imperial cults, more of Daoism, but it is identifiable with none of them. It is popular in the sense of being local and true of the China of the Han, or Chinese-speaking people, where every place had or has its local cults and the festivals peculiar to them. Its rites, in particular offerings of incense and fire, suggest a concept of religion. It is quite different from theories of religion based on doctrine and belief.Students of politics will also find here vital and new perspectives. Politics is never far from religion, least of all in the People's Republic of China or colonial and post-colonial Taiwan. In the People's Republic of China, there is continuing conflict between the state and the growth of congregational and lo

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Popular Religion in China The Imperial Metaphor Popular Religion in China The Imperial Metaphor Stephan Feuchtwang CURZON First Published in 2001 by Curzon Press Richmond, Surrey http://www.curzonpress.co.uk This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2001 Stephan Feuchtwang All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-39285-X Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-39543-3 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-7007-1421-9 (hbk) ISBN 0-7007-1385-9 (pbk) Contents Preface v Acknowledgements x 1 History, identification and belief 1 2 The annual apocalypse 27 3 Official and local cults 63 4 Local festivals and their cults 95 5 The incense-burner: communication and deference 133 6 Daoism and its clients 159 7 Ang Gong, or the truth of puppets 191 8 The politics of religion and political ritual 211 Notes 247 References 255 Glossary 265 Index 275 Preface This is a book about Chinese popular religion. A sensible reader will ask: What is that? What is its name? We have come to expect of religions that they can be named like identities of nations or cultures or at least that they can be understood as doctrines. But in this case, these sensible questions must be given a disconcerting answer, because it has no name. This is not a religion of a Book.