This book explores how religion is and has been created, transmitted, embodied and changed in specific locations in late imperial, modern and contemporary Taiwan and China. Locating research not only on temples, mosques, churches, schools, tea houses, festival sites, burial grounds and shrines, but also cities, neighbourhoods, counties and districts, it explores the rich, and often overlooked, details that fill the lived experience of people doing religion. Seeking to focus on interactions between place, text and agency, this book aims to reflect on the layered and specific histories that develop as a consequence of this interplay. By reducing the scale of the studies to a specific locale, phenomena such as religious change, conversion practice, individual transformation and the transmission of texts, authority, and charisma, can be reappraised. The contributors to this volume explore questions such as: How do the particular circumstances of time and place shape religious experience? What is specific to a location that influences the nature of religious practice there? What religious power is embodied in a place? How are narratives created around a location? What is characteristic of the religious world in a particular place? In particular, and in different ways, they ask how and why individual texts or sets of texts are transmitted in a particular place at a particular time, how such specific circumstances influence the transmission of authority within a group (or help to disperse that authority), and how authority and charisma are related to specific locations.
Acknowledgments Introduction 1 In Search of the Original Scriptures: The Formation of Modern Buddhist Studies and Sino-Japanese Exchange Chen Jidong 陳繼東 2 Locality and Temple Fundraising in Northern Qing China Luo Weiwei 羅娓娓 3 Yu Yue (1821-1906) Explores the Other World: Religious Culture of the Chinese Elites on the Eve of the Revolutions Vincent Goossaert 高萬桑 4 Inside and Outside the British Settlement at Shanghai Benjamin Penny 裴凝 5 The Construction of Fundamentalism in I-Kuan Tao Ting Jen-chieh 丁仁傑 6 The Problem of Locality and the Three-Self Patriotic Movement: the Little Flock in Fuzhou City Kao Chen-yang 高晨揚 7 Singing Your Own Song? Terry Hu and the Influence of Campus Folk Music Cafes on Taiwan’s New Age Religion Paul J. Farrelly 范寶文 8 Rituals as Local Knowledge: Millet and the Symbolic Subsistence of Taiwan’s Aboriginal Populations Benoît Vermander 魏明德 9 A Resurgent Temple and Community Development: Roles of the Temple Manager, Local Elite and Entrepreneurs Chang Hsun 張珣 10 The Decline and Revitalisation of Shamanic Traditions in a Paiwan Village in Taiwan Hu Tai-li 胡台麗 11 City of Saints: Linxia as the Centre of Qadiriyya Sufism in Northwest China Tif fany Cone 媞福 12 Rivers and Lakes: Life Stories of Diviners in a Northern Chinese City Li Geng 李耕 Contributors Index
