Books

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, these books deal in-depthwith the ongoing negotiation of modernity in Chinese rituals.

Over the past thirty years, local popular religion has been revived and re-invented in the villages of the irrigated allu-vial plain of Putia, Fujian, China. Volume I provides a his-torical introduction to the formation of 153 regional ritual alliances made up of 724 villages. Early popular cults, Minglineages, Qing multi-village alliances, late Qing spirit-medi-um 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 sur-veys 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.