Special Issue: Beyond the Market: Exploring the Religious Field in Modern China
Author affiliations: Department of East Asian Studies, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies , University of Cambridge , Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge, CB3 9DA, United Kingdom
Author biographies Adam Yuet Chau is University Lecturer in the Anthropology of Modern China in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Stanford University in 2001. He has researched the politics of religious revival in contemporary rural China and is interested in the larger issues of better conceptualising religious practices both in today's China and historically. He is the author of Miraculous Response: Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary China (Stanford University Press, 2006) and editor of Religion in Contemporary China: Revitalization and Innovation (Routledge, 2011). He has also published articles in Minsu quyi, Asian Anthropology, Modern China, Ethnology, Ethnos, Visual Studies, Past and Present, Journal of Chinese Religions and various edited volumes. His current research is on forms of powerful writing as well as the idioms of hosting in Chinese politics and religion.
關鍵詞
religious market; religious economy; modalities of doing religion; ritual polytropy; ritual market; religious pluralism; China, funerals
摘要
This article examines the Chinese religious landscape through the lenses of ‘modalities of doing religion’ and ‘ritual polytropy’ and explores the implications such different conceptualisations might bring to the religious-market model. It argues that in Chinese religious culture one can identify five modalities of doing religion (the scriptural/discursive, the self-cultivational, the liturgical, the immediate-practical and the relational), each cutting across broader, conceptually aggregated religious traditions such as Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism. Instead of competition between membership-based churches, there is more typically competition within each modality, especially the liturgical modality. Religious pluralism in China is not manifested as the co-existence of, and competition between, confession- and membership-based denominations and churches, but rather as the co-existence of, and competition between, various ritual-service providers with different (though sometimes convergent) liturgical programmes.
