This article proposes to place the anticlerical discourses in late imperial China (1368–1912), notably directed at professional Buddhists and Daoists, in a social context where the rights and duties of religious specialists were closely regulated by local social institutions (rather than by the state) and embedded in thick contractual processes. Drawing on the rich data available for the Jiangnan region, it argues that the fact that one could not freely choose which ritual specialist to employ (or not to employ) for various life-cycle events (weddings, funerals, ancestor worship) directly informed the type of asymmetrical relationships these people had with clerics and hence the discourse they held about them.
目次
I. Defining Chinese Clerics and Anticlericalism 88 II. Typologies of Anticlerical Discourse 91 III. Anticlericalism in Its Religious Context 95 IV. Conclusion 103