Ritual Alliances of the Putian Plain: Historical Introduction to the Return of the Gods (1) (Handbook of Oriental Studies / Handbuch der Orientalistik: Section 4, China, 23)

Making ingenious use of a wide variety of sources, and old as well as modern technical resources, Kenneth Dean and Zheng Zhenman here set a new standard for an histoire totale for a coherently well-defined cultural region in China. At the same time it deals in-depth with the ongoing negotiation of modernity in Chinese village rituals.
Over the past thirty years, local popular religion has been revived and re-invented in the villages of the irrigated alluvial plain of Putian, Fujian, China. Volume 1 provides a historical introduction to the formation of 153 regional ritual alliances made up of 724 villages. Early popular cults, Ming lineages, Qing multi-village alliances, late Qing spirit-medium associations, 20th century state attacks on local religion, and the role of Overseas Chinese and local communities in rebuilding the temple networks are discussed. Volume 2 surveys the current population, lineages, temples, gods, and annual rituals of these villages. Maps of each ritual alliance, the distribution of major cults and lineages, are included.

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Kenneth Dean (Ph.D. Stanford 1988) is Lee Chair and James McGill Professor of Chinese at McGill University. His publications include Taoist ritual and popular cults of Southeast China (Princeton, 1992) and Lord of the Three in One (Princeton, 1998).