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Demon Hordes and Burning Boats

Author	: Paul R. Katz
Publisher	: State University of New York Press
Total Pages	: 286
Release	: 1995-11-02
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 143840848X

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One of the few full-length regional studies of popular religion in late imperial China, this book presents the history of the cult of Marshal Wen, a plague-fighting deity whose cult flourished through Chekiang and its neighboring provinces. The author provides a lively account of the rise of Wen's cult during the tumultuous years of the Southern Sung dynasty, as well as its spread during subsequent dynasties. In exploring the roles played by scholar-officials, merchants, and Taoist priests in the growth of Wen's cult, the author pays special attention to the various representations of this deity held by different social groups, and shows that these were constantly interacting in a process he calls "reverberation." His analysis of plague expulsion festivals featuring Marshal Wen reveals that they functioned as rites of affliction designed to both achieve communal purification and resolve social crises. This book draws on a wide variety of sources, including Taoist scriptures and liturgical texts, stele inscriptions, literati writings (including poetry), manuscripts from local archives, as well as popular novels and folktales. The author also supplements his historical research with data gathered during fieldwork in Chekiang and Taiwan

Steps of Perfection

Author	: Donald S. Sutton
Publisher	: BRILL
Total Pages	: 445
Release	: 2020-03-23
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 1684173787

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"Despite Taiwan’s rise as an economic force in the world, modernity has not led to a Weberian process of disenchantment or curbed religiosity. To the contrary, other factors—social, economic, political—have stimulated religion. How and why this has happened are central issues in this book. One part of Taiwan’s flourishing religious culture is the elaborate and colorful procession of local gods accompanied by troupes of musicians and dancers. Among them are performers with outlandishly painted faces portraying underworld generals who serve the gods and punish the living. Through their performances, these troupes claim to exorcise harmful forces from the community. In conducting fieldwork among these troupes, Donald Sutton confronted their claims to a long history—when all evidence indicated that the troupes had been insignificant until the 1970s—and their assertions of devotion to tradition given the diversity of performances. Concentrating on the stylistic variations in performances, the author describes the troupes as organizations shaped by the “market forces” of supply and demand in the culture of religious festivals. By focusing on performances as the nexus of market and art, he shows how bodily performance is the site where religious statements are made and the power of the gods made visible."

The Sinitic Encounter in Southeast China through the First Millennium CE

Author	: Hugh R. Clark
Publisher	: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages	: 289
Release	: 2015-10-31
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 0824857186

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This work engages two of the most neglected themes in China’s long history: the integration of lands south of the Yangtze River into China and its impact on Chinese culture. The roots of Chinese civilization are commonly traced to the North. For millennia after the foundations of the northern culture had been laid, the South was not part of its mandate, and long after the imperial center had claimed political control in the late first millennium BCE, it remained culturally distinct. Yet for the past one thousand years the South has been the cultural, demographic, economic—and, on occasion, political—center of China. The process whereby this was accomplished has long been overlooked in Chinese historiography. Hugh Clark offers a new perspective on the process of assimilation and accommodation that led to the new alignment. He begins by focusing on the stages of encounter between the sinitic north and the culturally diverse and alien south. Initially northerners and southerners looked on each other with antipathy: To the former, the non-sinitic inhabitants of the South were “barbarians.” To these “barbarians,” northerners were arrogantly hegemonic. Such attitudes led to patterns of resistance and alienation across the South that endured for many centuries until, as Clark suggests, the South grew in importance within the empire—a development that was finally recognized under the Song. Clark’s approach to the second theme poses a fundamental challenge to what is meant by “Chinese culture.” Drawing on his long familiarity with southern Fujian, he closely examines the pre-sinitic cultural and religious heritage as well as later cults on the southeast coast to argue that an enduring legacy of pre-sinitic indigenous southern culture contributed significantly to late imperial and modern China, effectively challenging the paradigm of northern cultural hegemony that has dominated Chinese history for centuries. The Sinitic Encounter in Southeast China is a path-breaking book that puts long-neglected issues back on the historian’s table for further investigation.

Gods, Ghosts, and Gangsters

Author	: Avron Boretz
Publisher	: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages	: 289
Release	: 2010-10-31
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 0824860713

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Demon warrior puppets, sword-wielding Taoist priests, spirit mediums lacerating their bodies with spikes and blades—these are among the most dramatic images in Chinese religion. Usually linked to the propitiation of plague gods and the worship of popular military deities, such ritual practices have an obvious but previously unexamined kinship with the traditional Chinese martial arts. The long and durable history of martial arts iconography and ritual in Chinese religion suggests something far deeper than mere historical coincidence. Avron Boretz argues that martial arts gestures and movements are so deeply embedded in the ritual repertoire in part because they iconify masculine qualities of violence, aggressivity, and physical prowess, the implicit core of Chinese patriliny and patriarchy. At the same time, for actors and audience alike, martial arts gestures evoke the mythos of the jianghu, a shadowy, often violent realm of vagabonds, outlaws, and masters of martial and magic arts. Through the direct bodily practice of martial arts movement and creative rendering of jianghu narratives, martial ritual practitioners are able to identify and represent themselves, however briefly and incompletely, as men of prowess, a reward otherwise denied those confined to the lower limits of this deeply patriarchal society. Based on fieldwork in China and Taiwan spanning nearly two decades, Gods, Ghosts, and Gangsters offers a thorough and original account of violent ritual and ritual violence in Chinese religion and society. Close-up, sensitive portrayals and the voices of ritual actors themselves—mostly working-class men, many of them members of sworn brotherhoods and gangs—convincingly link martial ritual practice to the lives and desires of men on the margins of Chinese society. This work is a significant contribution to the study of Chinese ritual and religion, the history and sociology of Chinese underworld, the history and anthropology of the martial arts, and the anthropology of masculinity.

A Comparative Sociology of World Religions

Author	: Stephen Sharot
Publisher	: NYU Press
Total Pages	: 352
Release	: 2001-08
Genre	: Religion
ISBN	: 0814798047

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Sharot (sociology, Ben-Gurion U. of the Neger) focuses on the differences and interrelationships between religious elites and lay masses. He presents several relevant concepts and theories including a model of religious action based on the work of Max Weber, and a discussion of elites and masses as represented in Weber's comparison of world religions. Coverage encompasses religious action in world religions; Brahmans, Renouncers, and Hinduisim in India; Buddhism and Animism in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia; traditional Catholicism in Europe; Islam and Judaism; Protestants, Catholics and the reform of popular religion; and a comparison of religious elites and popular religions. c. Book News Inc.

Practicing Kinship

Author	: Michael Szonyi
Publisher	: Stanford University Press
Total Pages	: 340
Release	: 2002
Genre	: Social Science
ISBN	: 9780804742610

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Presenting a new approach to the history of Chinese kinship, this book attempts to bridge the gap between anthropological and historical scholarship on the Chinese lineage. It explores the historical development of kinship in the villages of the Fuzhou region of southeastern Fujian province.

Religion and Chinese Society: Ancient and medieval China

Author	: John Lagerwey
Publisher	: Chinese University Press
Total Pages	: 562
Release	: 2004
Genre	: China
ISBN	: 9789629961237

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These volumes contain a selection of twenty-one essays presented in a conference convened jointly by the Ecole francaise d'Extreme-Orient and the Centre for the Study of Religion and Chinese Society of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, on "Religion and Chinese Society: The Transformation of a Field and Its Implications for the Study of Chinese Culture." The collection provides as wide a coverage as possible of recent research in the history of Chinese religion and seeks to draw some tentative conclusions about the implications for the study of Chinese religion and society in general.

Religion and Chinese Society Vol. 1

Author	: John Lagerwey
Publisher	: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press
Total Pages	: 552
Release	: 2021-09-24
Genre	: Religion
ISBN	:

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Thirty years ago, Hu Shih's views of Chinese society and history were representative of Sinology in general: China itself had no native religion, just local customs; its only real religion was an import, Buddhism. These views have now been completely overturned, with massive implications for our understanding not only of China but also of humanity as a whole: it is no longer possible to imagine that at least one major traditional society constructed and construed itself without reference to a non-mundane world that permeated every facet of society, and it therefore becomes indispensable for students of China to take the history of Chinese religion into account and for students of religion to take into account the Chinese experience of and Chinese categories for dealing with religious phenomena. The present volumes contain a selection of twenty-one essays presented in a conference convened jointly by the Ecole francaise d'Extreme-Orient and the Centre for the Study of Religion and Chinese Society of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, on "Religion and Chinese Society: The Transformation of a Field and Its Implications for the Study of Chinese Culture" held on May 29-June 2, 2000. The collection aims at providing as wide a coverage as possible of recent research in the history of Chinese religion and seeks to draw some tentative conclusions about the implications for the study of Chinese religion and society in general.

Heavenly Masters

Author	: Vincent Goossaert
Publisher	: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press
Total Pages	: 433
Release	: 2021-12-15
Genre	: Religion
ISBN	: 9882372023

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The book is on the shortlist of ICAS Book Prize 2023 Humanities The origins of modern Daoism can be traced to the Church of the Heavenly Master (Tianshidao), reputedly established by the formidable Zhang Daoling. In 142 CE, according to Daoist tradition, Zhang was visited by the Lord on High, who named him his vicar on Earth with the title Heavenly Master. The dispensation articulated an eschatological vision of saving initiates—the pure, those destined to become immortals— by enforcing a strict moral code. Under evolving forms, Tianshidao has remained central to Chinese society, and Daoist priests have upheld their spiritual allegiance to Zhang, their now divinized founder. This book tells the story of the longue durée evolution of the Heavenly Master leadership and institution. Later hagiography credits Zhang Daoling’s great-grandson, putatively the fourth Heavenly Master, with settling the family at Longhushan (Dragon and Tiger Mountain); in time his descendants—down to the present contested sixty-fifth Heavenly Master living in Taiwan— made the extraordinary claim of being able to transmit hereditarily the function of the Heavenly Master and the power to grant salvation. Over the next twelve centuries, the Zhangs turned Longhushan into a major holy site and a household name in the Chinese world, and constructed a large administrative center for the bureaucratic management of Chinese society. They gradually built the Heavenly Master institution, which included a sacred site; a patriarchal line of successive Heavenly Masters wielding vast monopolistic powers to ordain humans and gods; a Zhang lineage that nurtured talent and accumulated wealth; and a bureaucratic apparatus comprised of temples, training centers, and a clerical hierarchy. So well-designed was this institution that it remained stable for more than a millennium, far outlasting the longest dynasties, and had ramifications for every city and village in imperial China. In this ambitious work, Vincent Goossaert traces the Heavenly Master bureaucracy from medieval times to the modern Chinese nation-state as well as its expansion. His in-depth portraits of influential Heavenly Masters are skillfully embedded in a large-scale analysis of the institution and its rules, ideology, and vision of society.

Beyond Cadfael

Author	: Lucy C. Barnhouse
Publisher	: Trivent Publishing
Total Pages	: 330
Release	: 2023-06-01
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 6156405828

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Medievalism and medieval medicine are vibrant subfields of medieval studies, enjoying sustained scholarly attention and popularity among undergraduates. Popular perceptions of medieval medicine, however, remain understudied. This book aims to fill that lacuna by providing a multifaceted study of medical medievalism, defined as modern representations of medieval medicine intended for popular audiences. The volume takes as its starting point the fictional medieval detective Brother Cadfael, whose observations on bodies, herbs, and death have shaped many popular conceptions of medieval medicine in the Anglophone world. The ten contributing authors move beyond Cadfael by exploring global medical medievalisms in a range of genres and cultural contexts. Beyond Cadfael is organized into three sections, the first of which engages with how disease, injury, and the sick are imagined in fictitious medieval worlds. The second, on doctors at work, looks at medieval medical practice in novels, films and television, and public commemorative practice. These essays examine how practitioners are represented and imagined in medieval and pseudo-medieval worlds. The third section discusses medicine designed for and practiced by women in the Middle Ages and today, with a focus on East Asian medical traditions. These essays are guided by the recognition that medieval medical practices are often in dialogue with contemporary medical practices that fall outside the norms of Western biomedicine.

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Demon Hordes And Burning Boats