Year: 2019
Type: article
Abstract: Folk, Popular, or Minjian Religion?This issue brings together a collection of articles on various dimensions of what is often referred to as "popular religion" or "folk religion" in the field of studies of religion in China.Empirical case studies presented here include Pan Junliang's ethnography of spirit mediums in Wenzhou, Andrew Kipnis's study of the transformations of funeral rites in contemporary China, and Selina Chan's study on the local politics of heritage and ethnic community surrounding the "ghost festival" in Hong Kong.David Ownby offers an overview of recent developments in the scholarship on the salvationist movements called "redemptive societies."All of these different forms of popular religion are expressions of a common cosmology that is intimately tied to the historical formation of state and religion over more than two thousand years of Chinese history.John Lagerwey offers a sweeping overview of the evolution of this cosmology, while I explore, through the work of the French sociologist and sinologist Marcel Granet, what the study of this cosmology in social practice can offer to anthropological and sociological theory.Earlier drafts of these contributions were presented at a workshop held at the University of Hong Kong and sponsored by the Purdue University Center on Religion and Chinese Society, on May 5, 2018.At the time, different views were expressed on the type of religion being discussed: in the sociology of religion, the term "folk religion" is preferred, while in the field of research on Chinese religion, in which historians and anthropologists are predominant, the term "popular religion" enjoys broad currency.And why not speak of minjian 民間 religion, following the Chinese convention?Scholars in the field know that all of these terms are problematic, and few would bother arguing about how to name a type of religion that is precisely nameless.But perhaps it's worth pausing for a moment to reflect on the terms that are most often used to name this residual category that encompasses all that doesn't fit into the "institutionalized" religions, but often ends up englobing
Author: David A. Palmer
Institution: University of Hong Kong
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2995142570