Re-enchanting Modernity: Ritual Economy and Society in Wenzhou, China

This book is a thorough study of religion, community, and social action in Wenzhou, a unique and distinctive area on the central China coast south of Shanghai. Wenzhou has unique languages, a unique cuisine, and a centuries-old tradition of entrepreneurship that serves them well in the modern world. They have an even older tradition of varied religions, to which they devote a great deal of effort and expense. Dr. Yang shows that this community spirit and the local entrepreneurship are part and parcel of the same dynamic, highly textured social order. She provides a thorough description of the traditional local religions--folk cults and rites, Daoism, Buddhism--and then grounds these in the social order. She discusses the back-and-forth, hot-and-cold interactions with the religion-hating Communist tradition; it seems that religion has substantially won, but there is still a great deal of pushback. She draws on Weber and Durkheim, with due qualifications and thoughtful amendments, and on modern theorists like Duara, Latour, and Giddings. I am always struck by how well the old-timers hold up; in particular, Durkheim and Weber fly over such French philosophes as Deleuze and Guattari as an eagle flies over a coronavirus. Duara, Latour, GIddings, and Yang herself do very much better, though.I bought this book in the certainty that it would be good solid ethnography backed up by sophisticated, insightful theory. It went beyond my wildest expectations. This is a monumental job. It will be a classic of China studies and of the ethnography of religion.