by Quan Gan
This book is a 273-page synthetic summary of the eight-volume monumental contribution to an outstanding series on Chinese Studies, i.e., Section 4 of HdO (Handbuch der Orientalistik). The author, John Lagerwey, a Harvard-trained East Asian area specialist, has worked for decades outside the States, in affiliation with the École française d’Extrême-Orient (1977-2000), the École Pratique des Hautes Études (2000-2011), and the Centre of East Asian Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong (until present), respectively. Lagerwey’s academic ambition and vision encapsulate several important parallels between being an area specialist of China and being a scholar of religion.
I commend this book as a great opportunity for scholars of religion, especially those with comparative and historical interest, to reflect what concrete synergy would arise if Area Studies (here East Asian/Chinese studies) and religious studies are more explicitly and organically connected.
Before I identify some key insights from this book and the decade-long project behind it, a parenthesis could help to understand this unusual book. In British historiography, there are two dominant types of scholarly outputs, the Cambridge and the Oxford type. A Cambridge-type work is usually an expansive volume, of which each individual chapter is drafted by a leading specialist on certain aspects of the human experience within a demarcated region and a clear timespan. This is how the eight volumes are conducted. An Oxford-type book is, on the other hand, a single-authored synthesis on one specific theme with great comparative and theoretic insights.
The two-decade project is a typical Cambridge-type venture and reflects the diverse stages of art across a wide gamut of fields. Lagerwey’s 2019 book, therefore, provides an Oxford-type synthesis, of which three guiding principles are clear. First, Lagerwey seeks to provide a meaningful periodization of Chinese social history from mid-Shang to our time; second, he explains the rationale behind the recommended periodization, that is a distinction between periods of cumulative development and periods of paradigm shifts. Last, he convincingly argues for the value of adding a ‘religious dimension’ into all interpretative schemes of the Chinese experience, including, of course, its periodization.
Lagerwey’s periodization contains four periods of paradigm shift. The first two are long and gradual: the first period of transformation ranges from c. 1250 BCE–the reign of Wu Ding–through 220 CE–the end of Han, but more concentrated in its second half, encompassing China’s ‘Axial Age’, i.e., the mid-first millennium BCE and the imperial consolidation. The second one corresponds to the Period of Division (220-589 CE) in Chinese traditional historiography. During this period, Buddhism became established in China and brought about the 3+1 discursive structure, namely the three institutional religions, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism, and the ‘popular religion,’ an umbrella term comprising everything else that modern scholars consider religious but is not indisputably connected with any of the three institutions above in the élite discourse during this period. While the pivotal moments of the latter two seem much clearer: third, 960 CE, the founding of Song dynasty also heralded as the onset of the Chinese nation or modern China; and last c. 1850, when trans-national and/or global discourses, above all that of modern science, and institutions, above all the industrialized market economy, began to systematically transform China.
Echoing the spirit of Lagerwey’s 2010 monograph, China, A Religious State, he concludes with a twofold call-to-arms. First, Lagerwey urges area specialists of China to better engage with cross-cultural questions. In this book under review, Lagerwey recognizes four such recurrent themes shared by all four periods, namely rationalization, interiorization, secularization, and masculinization.
At the same time, Lagerwey invites social scientists, especially scholars of religion, to incorporate Chinese experience, which area specialists of China have long argued as the most unique and densely documented in the world (one such manifesto-type proclamation is The Journal of Asian Studies, Aug., 1964, Vol. 23, No. 4.).
For instance, he offers a brilliant analysis–quoted below–about the potential insights scholars of religion ought to gain from Chinese dualism (pp. 258 – 268), i.e., a unique set of parallel dualities evident and central since pre-imperial writings and practice.
body soul
matter spirit
letter spirit
outer inner
ritual myth
space time
female male
If, in the West, everything in the left hand column is inferior to what is in the right, in China, it is a matter of priority and what we may call elementary “set theory”: that which is on the left is prior to that which is on the right, and encompasses it. Ultimately, in China likewise, patriarchy rules, and the male is superior to the female, but the route followed by the Chinese to get to that point of view is very different from the West: everything in the right hand column is inside its counterpart on the left. Thus mythology—or, more generally, discourse—is implicit within ritual and need not, indeed should not be made explicit. (p. 259)
To name but one such alternative conceptualized duality, i.e., that between ritual and myth, its insights to religious studies, a discipline obsessed with language and discourses, are evident. Lagerwey implies that such an obsession itself reflects more the intellectual genealogy of our discipline.
More implicitly and dispersed throughout the whole book, Lagerwey observes several enduring characteristics. I focus on one here, the intersection between China’s religious field with the political in both temporal and spatial aspects. Government in China at all scopes–from the empire down to a single household–in all times covered in this project concerns both the people and the territory. As a result, ritual infrastructure and the according rationalization evolve to synthesize the two. The governance of the people concerns the structure of kinship, ancestral sacrifice, and eventually the conception of time, especially through the change and continuity of royal dynasties. At the same time, the governance of the territory concerns a royal registration of and systematic sacrifice to natural deities, such as mountains and rivers. This eventually gives rise to the routinization of earth deity sacrifice: offering sacrifice became a part of a local governor’s duty; earth deity shrines became a necessary part of urban planning and its rationalization through agriculture ethos. I believe it is fruitful to further this insight and consider how religious practice or ritual made both time and territories indispensable in Chinese cultural memory. As a result, any of the two concepts, the king of the Chinese and the king of China, could not have cultural meaning without entailing the other in this religious modality. The differentiable yet almost never separated status between authority over territory and authority through temporality is by no means universal or even often attested in various political traditions before the rise and spread of modern national state.
Using Lagerwey’s standard as a benchmark to measure the individual volumes, it seems that only the two volumes concerning the first period, from 1250 BCE to 220 CE, are seriously challenging the boundary of religion set by the western intellectual genealogy. In this truly impressive section, few symbols/practices are presumed to be either intrinsically religious or completely devoid of a religious dimension. Rather, the context of material and practice together with the discursive reference are fruitfully combined to evaluate the changing role of royal ancestors (to name only just one example) in government, in the court-local relationship, in the making of a moral self.
Such a critical attitude is not as persistent in the other three sections. Since the introduction of Buddhism, some religious symbols, resources, and personnel became assembled into social systems, sanctioned at an institutional level by the state. To what extent were those resources used in a religious way or for a religiously structured audience are questions overlooked or glossed over. A good part of Part II provides an (admittedly very good) discursive analysis of Daoist, Buddhist, or ‘Confucian’ ritual, texts, and institutions. Similarly, the institutional history of the imperial bureaucracy, especially the impact of the matured civil examination system, dominates Part III. Part IV gravitates around the question of modernization, simultaneously inheriting some problematic presumptions of the differentiated fields, including economics, science, and religion.
In this light, it is less clear what a paradigm shift means here. Does it refer to a completely different, to the extent of being incompatible, way for the society to think and act about the meaning/function of ‘religion’ in Chinese history? (What Part I does.) Or is it really a paradigm shift in the élite control of the body politic through a ‘religious’ discourse? (What other three do.) These are precisely the important and challenging questions enabled and provoked by Lagerwey’s ground-breaking project. It is not exaggerated to say that the project itself is a paradigm shift–in Kuhn’s original sense–of contemporary scholarship on religious experience in China’s past and present.
Quan Gan is a comparative social historian of Latin Christendom and imperial China whose long-term research interests gravitate around two themes: monasteries and royal dynasties. His work is both taxonomic (providing a typology of rituals) and illuminative (asking unconventional questions for more established scholarly circles).
