ARI Working Paper Series

In a country where “religion” is narrowly defined and strongly regulated, de facto religious activities vibrantly revived in the last three decades along with the steady growth of state-legible religions. The paper reviews the anthropological study of religion in the last three decades against the social, political, and academic contexts. I argue that this field is a fuzzy one. In response to the religious revival since the 1980s, the anthropological studies are rather fragmentary and diffused. One of the reasons is the fact that many scholars consciously or unconsciously adopt terms alternative to “religion” as subjects of study, terms like “culture”, “folklore”, “symbol”, “heritage”. Intensively involved in cross-border academic collaborations, anthropological studies of religion also cross-fertilise with history, folklore, religious studies, and ethnology. However, quality empirical studies on Chinese religious landscape is still insufficient, to the extent that two theoretical proposals are far from satisfactory. New trends include a focus on institutional religions and the creation of the journal Anthropology of Religion.