Vincent Goossaert

Le Destin de la Religion Chinoise au 20ème Siècle

Throughout the 20th century, Chinese religion has undergone a process of massive destruction, which historiography has so far largely ignored. Traditional relations between the state, society and religion broke down around 1898. This break led within a few decades to the destruction of most Chinese temples. The western notion of “religion” upon which both Nationalist and Communist China built their religious policies separated legitimate forms of religion (world religions) from local cults considered as folklore and superstition. The author outlines the political and intellectual history of this process of partition and selective destruction, and then attempts to evaluate the role of the science of religions in the current reinvention of religion in China.

The Concept of Religion in China and the West

The religious question in China, which is today marked by various conflicts between the state and unrecognized confessional organizations, can be understood only in a historical perspective. In particular the adoption early in the 20th century of a notion of religion coming directly from the West, and narrowly defined, has justified a policy that grants a relative but controlled freedom to five great religions while actively condemning others, which are seen as ‘superstitions’. The article details the implications of this notion of ‘religion’ in modern and contemporary China and looks at how Chinese religious traditions have adapted to it.

Irrepressible Female Piety. Late Imperial Bans on Women Visiting Temples

Late imperial officials, from the highest-ranking ministers in Peking down to the county magistrates, repeatedly issued proclamations prohibiting women from visiting temples. Such bans were often ignored, but both normative and anecdotal evidence from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries documents a number of sustained attempts at enforcement. This article summarizes interpretations given to such bans by historians and analyzes the parameters of enforcement. While all-out bans were rarely envisioned, because of the total lack of public support, some officials tried to curb certain types of female participation in temple life that were considered particularly offensive (ritual roles for women, staying overnight, spectacular penitential practices, and so forth). This article argues that while outright repression of women (jailing and punishing all women entering temples or joining festivals) or temples (closure or destruction) was difficult to maintain on a long-term basis, it might serve as a threat in negotiations between official and local elites. In the course of such negotiations, elite members agreed to try to curb some “excessive” female practices in temples in exchange for official approval for temple festivals.

Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity (review)

The study of the modern transformations of religion in Chinese society, under the radical political reforms of the late imperial, warlord, Nationalist, and Communist governments, was for a long time a blind spot in Chinese studies. Scholars of religious studies have primarily been interested in ancient history, texts, or “traditional” rural practices, while historians of modern China have asserted or implied that religion became irrelevant after (if not long before) the Revolution of 1911. Over the course of the past decade, however, the field of modern Chinese religious history has grown rapidly, as contemporary political and religious developments have encouraged historians to search for their origins in the recent past.1 Nedostup’s book is an outstanding example of this recent flurry of scholarly production. Nedostup is a historian of modern Chinese politics, particularly of the Kuomintang (KMT); she explores the formation and the effects of the KMT’s religious policies in order to shed new light on processes of state building and social reforms. But, in stark contrast to the many previous historians who have broached such topics in rather naïve ways, she has a solid and nuanced understanding of what religion actually was in Republican-period Chinese society and never confuses ideological categories with social practice. She has notably taken stock of the most recent research on Republican-period redemptive societies (by Prasenjit Duara, David Ownby, and David Palmer) and has thus been able to astutely critique the characterizations of such religious groups by politicians. Her work is therefore extremely useful for scholars in the fields of religious studies and political, intellectual, and social history. For this alone, Nedostup’s study is a historiographical milestone that demonstrates that the subject of religion is entering mainstream scholarship on Chinese modern history. That this milestone reflects an impressive command of a staggering body of primary and secondary

Burning for Buddha: Self-Immolation in Chinese Buddhism (review)

women and sow the seeds that enable ghosts to be reborn as flesh-andblood women are frustrated scholars who inhabit the yang-deficient sites of wilderness, graves, and private libraries in which little orthodox studying or self-cultivation is done. Not infrequently, the bodies of these male protagonists physically manifest yang deficiency. What are the implications of this lack of enthusiasm for imperially approved masculine power? Given the medical context in which interest in male fertility eclipsed the study of obstetrics, what are we to make of the fascination with a sexuality that gives birth not to sons, but to emotions and culturally dense erotic fantasies? That The Phantom Heroine picks up and develops themes from Zeitlin’s earlier work on Pu Songling and the Peony Pavilion gives me hope that she will return to this rich body of material.2 Thanks to the primal ability of ghosts to multiply and transmogrify, I now find my imagination possessed and will pull out a copy of Liaozhai zhiyi to reacquaint myself with old friends I know I will be seeing in a new light.

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 ...