David A. Palmer

Gift and market in the Chinese religious economy

Religious market theory has figured prominently in recent scholarly debates in the social scientific study of religion in China. This article argues that the existence of ‘religious markets’ should not be assumed as axiomatic but should be investigated as concrete social processes, distinguishing between market and non-market relations. Based on field research among popular religious and spiritual groups in China and drawing on the literature of economic anthropology, the author proposes an alternative model of a ‘religious gift economy’ made up of gifting exchanges between humans and between gods and humans. Five ethnographic cases from China illustrate the operation and coexistence of gift and market exchanges. In contemporary China, there is a tendency towards an increasing marketisation of religion, with a simultaneous growth of religious movements explicitly offering non-market forms of sociality. Rather than subsuming all exchanges under the blanket concept of the market, studies of religion must be attentive to the distinct logics of different models of exchange.

Chinese Redemptive Societies and Salvationist Religion: Historical Phenomenon or Sociological Category?

This paper outlines a conceptual framework for research on Chinese redemptive societies and salvationist religion. I begin with a review of past scholarship on Republican era salvationist movements and their contemporary communities, comparing their treatment in three bodies of scholarly literature dealing with the history and scriptures of ”popular sects” in the late imperial era, the history of ”secret societies” of the Republican period, and the ethnography of ”popular religion” in the contemporary Chinese world. I then assess Prasenjit Duaras formulation of ”redemptive societies” as a label for a constellation of religious groups active in the republican period, and, after comparing the characteristics of the main groups in question (such as the Tongshanshe, Daoyuan, Yiguandao and others), argue that an analytical distinction needs to be made between ”salvationist movements” as a sociological category, which have appeared throughout Chinese history and until today, and redemptive societies as one historical instance of a wave of salvationist movements, which appeared in the Republican period and bear the imprint of the socio-cultural conditions and concerns of that period. Finally, I discuss issues for future research and the significance of redemptive societies in the social, political and intellectual history of modern China, and in the modern history of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism.

Is Chinese (Lack of) Religion Exceptional

China is widely considered to be the least religious country in the world or a country where “religion” has never existed. The historical, anthropological, and sociological evidence makes it clear that religion is not absent from China and that, indeed, the vast majority of Chinese people have some type of belief or practice that anthropologists or sociologists would define as religious. However, most Chinese people do not consider such beliefs or practices to be religious. In this chapter, I formulate a substantive definition of religion and adopt a bottom-up methodology to demonstrate that, in everyday practices and conceptions, as shown by historical and ethnographic data, the basic building blocks of religion in China are much the same as elsewhere. It is at the higher-level modes of organization of these basic building blocks—institutionally, conceptually, and politically—that we find unique patterns in different cultures and civilizations, in China as elsewhere.

Transnational Sacralizations: When Daoist Monks meet Global Spiritual Tourists

This article examines the production of sacrality in the context of globalization, through the case of encounters between international spiritual tourists and Chinese monks. The sacred mountain of Huashan has historically been localized in the context of Daoist cosmology, Chinese imperial civilizing, socialist nation-building and, now, global capitalism. While the monks experience Huashan as a gateway for embeddedness into Daoist lineage, ritual, and cosmology, the spiritual tourists approach it as a fountain of raw, consumable energy on a path of disembedding and individuation. But encounters between the two groups lead to the mutual interference and interpenetration of both trajectories. Undermining dichotomist concepts of the sacred which define it as either essentially Other or as socially constructed and contested, the sacrality of Huashan serves as both an anchor for multiple centralizing projects and forces, and as a catalyst and node for the formation of interconnecting and expanding horizontal networks.

Secularization, Sacralization and Subject Formation in Modern China

Modern Chinese history can be recounted in terms of three seemingly contradictory narratives: forced secularization; religious resilience and revival; and the sacralization of the nation and its secular state. Secularization, de-secularization and sacralization have been simultaneous and often mutually reinforcing processes. Reviewing the relationship between Chinese political movements and religious impulses in the late imperial, Republican, Mao and Reform-eras, we argue that this apparent paradox derives from a uni-linear understanding of secularization vs. desecularization. China’s encounter with secular modernity cannot be adequately understood as a trend towards a “more” or “less” religious society, but ought to be described in terms of a changing configuration of four “poles” of religious subject formation: the sacred–profane and the enchanted–secular. This shifting configuration has led to the sacralization of the Communist Party, the profanation of society, and the growth of an “enchanted underbelly” of religious networks and practices in the local interstices of the nation-state.

Daoism and Human Rights: Integrating the Incommensurable

There is practically no explicit discourse on human rights in the Daoist tradition or in contemporary Daoist scholarship and practice. This article begins by discussing the ontological incommensurability between Daoist notions of inner spontaneity and self-transcendence, and the external frameworks of the state, agonistic legal systems, and contractual rights and obligations between self-interested individuals that underpin human rights regimes. And yet, while Daoism and human rights may be incommensurable, they are compatible. In an imaginary Daoist utopia, a legal regime of human rights would be unnecessary, as all people would attain a spontaneous harmony in which no person would infringe on another. But since, in the reality of the world of common people and rulers, most people are unable to control their will to power over others, human rights are thus necessary as a basic protection for each individual against the interference of others and of the state. A Daoist, then, might see human rights as a desirable foundation, that must be coupled with the supreme value of self-cultivation to embody Dao, ultimately transcending the very need for human obligations and rights.

The Charisma of Shangri-la

for general audiences, such as the work of Zhang, became highly successful. The authors’ discussion of biopolitics is most intriguing in relation to this literature. Did policies of the Ministry of Health to shift the burden of healthcare from government to families and individuals through the privatization of healthcare increase yangsheng enthusiasms and heighten interest in traditional Chinese medicine? Did the decline in trust in biomedicine lead to this increased interest and life-nurturing activities? The authors suggest yes, as they write that doctors were once viewed as “the white coated angel” and now are regarded as “the white eyed wolf” (127). “Daily Life” weaves excerpts from interviews with yangsheng enthusiasts with the authors’ own commentaries on “what they thought they saw and heard.” This is a creative mix—the recorded stories of those interviewed, the commentaries by authors Zhang and Farquhar, the inserts from Chinese medicine texts. Aging well and being happy is good for the individual, good for society, good for the nation, notes a 60-year-old woman. Zhang suggests the collective endeavor to live long is a post-Mao modern Chinese habitus. Explorations of emotionality flesh out the chapter, with discussions of the dangers of anger. Inserts from classical Chinese medicine texts describe the disruptions of qi and the bodily chaos prolonged emotions can have; thus “Don’t Get Angry” (208). Stories of “balancing the bitter and the sweet” and setting aside one’s worries about the future through engaging deliberately in yangsheng dancing and crafting a life through embodiment of activity brings a reader to consider the universal wisdom in much traditional Chinese medicine and yangsheng philosophy. The final substantive chapter, “The Meaning of Life,” discusses Zhang’s work on Chinese medical classics as well as his many layered studies on the etymology of sheng and the meaning of life. Filled with brilliant nuggets, densely discussed, the chapter will be of great interest to those who wish to delve more deeply into the etymology of sheng and the complexities of Chinese philosophy. I find particularly magical the authors’ choice for a concluding paragraph, an excerpt from Zhuangzi, “the founding figure of Chinese Daoism.” The quote begins “The sorts of myriad things come from the work of the most minute. In the water . . .” and ends with “Serenity bugs give birth to leopards; leopards give birth to horses; horses give birth to humans; humans return to the unfathomable works. The ten thousand things all come out of the works, and all return to the works” (278). And thus what makes this dense book unique and special is that at its heart is a process exuberantly seeking to nurture life by bringing ways of understanding the meaning of life and of “ten thousand things.”

Urban Development, Private Property, and Public Activism in China

The most tangible sign of the changes in Chinese urban economy and society over the past decades has been in urban development and housing. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the typical cityscape was one of endless expanses of drab 7-story concrete apartment blocks in danwei (socialist work unit) compounds, as well as, in the downtown districts, older neighborhoods of dilapidated homes in the traditional architecture. Most peoples’ homes were owned by the state and assigned by their work units. By the 1990s, private ownership of homes became possible, and the private real estate market began to take off. Many were able to purchase their flats at rock-bottom prices from their work units, while others became buyers in the private market; in the space of a few years, a middle class of homeowners was suddenly created. By the early twentyfirst century, the property market had become one of the main arenas for many of the dreams, fantasies, conflicts, and tensions of postreform Chinese society: urban landscapes were transformed to a degree never achieved even at the height of revolutionary social engineering, with both older neighborhoods and danwei compounds being demolished to make way for new commercial and residential developments in increasingly sophisticated modern architectural styles; real estate developers became powerful members of the rising business class; a property market boom became the target of runaway speculation and repeated government efforts to “cool the bubble” and rein in prices, as incidents of conflict, protests, and even violence became ever more frequent, owing to forced relocations, illegal land expropriations, insufficient compensation, or simply the skyrocketing property prices that made the new dream (and social expectation) of home ownership increasingly impossible to attain for ordinary Chinese. How have these profound transformations affected the daily lives, dreams, and social tensions of urban Chinese? Li Zhang’s In Search of Paradise is an anthropological exploration of this question, through 15 months of fieldwork among middle class property owners in Kunming, conducted from 2000 to 2007. The book opens a fascinating window into contemporary Chinese society and culture through the prism of home development and ownership with its discussion ranging from

Catégories et politiques du religieux en Chine

Depuis les annees quatre-vingt-dix, on observe un essor considerable, dans toutes les disciplines academiques – histoire, anthropologie, sciences politiques notamment – des etudes sur la religion dans le monde chinois moderne et contemporain qui rendent compte des manifestations de plus en plus variees et globalisees de la vitalite religieuse chinoise. Seule la sociologie des religions est restee relativement en retrait. Les comparaisons avec d’autres mondes culturels sont assez rares, et le ...