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

Mayfair Yang's exciting and rich ethnography informed by critical theory stands alone among other books on the restoration of religious traditions in post-Mao China in examining religious and ritual associations and activity as grassroots forms of voluntary association and civil society with value for communities, as economic stimulus, and as brakes on overheated capital accumulation at the heart of unsustainable wealth inequality. This book will be of great interest to scholars of civil society, economics, and religion in contemporary China and is a must-read for anyone interested in alternative trajectories of development and examples of what resilient local cultures look like in practice.This book, divided into three parts, is a culmination of forty-two weeks of ethnographic research spread over twenty-six years (1990–2016) into civil and religious life in Wenzhou in the southeastern corner of Zhejiang, just north of Fujian. Part 1 is an introduction to the framework of the study and to the Wenzhou economic model. Part 2 contains chapter-length overviews of popular religion, Daoism, and Buddhism based on highly textured ethnographic descriptions supplemented by relevant historical context. The chapter on popular religion is the most detailed and accessible introduction to the topic that I know of. Part 3 is the heart of the book; it contains five theoretically rich chapters examining forms of religious and ritual organizing and activity as examples of Indigenous “lines of flight.” Lines of flight are forms of cultural preservation that escape attempts of state penetration and elimination. They are contrasted with confrontation or revolution as more viable alternatives. Yang argues that the Wenzhou line of flight “reterritorializes state administrative space and recodes state legal and social codes to form new spaces of communities defined by deity cults, cultivation of religious transcendence, scriptural study, ritual practices, and lineage affiliations” (31).The first chapter falls short of being a postsecular manifesto, but it contains the building blocks of one—namely, a new form of knowledge making fusing relgio-ethico-cosmological logic into scientific paradigms. And why is such a fusion needed? This book successfully argues that in the case of this corner of Southeast China, ritual and religious traditions provide an important and effective means of recapturing forms of local agency, community building, civil society, and systems of ritual exchange that “moderate or challenge” otherwise hegemonic late capitalist logic (9). Interestingly, the streams of religion that Yang found most prominent in her research are forms she identifies as “preaxial” shamanistic rituals and ancestor veneration. This is interesting to me, because axial religions characteristically denigrate the material world of life for a transcendent realm or heaven, and there is a trend to turn to preaxial Indigenous knowledge and land-management practices as a response to the global ecological crisis.1Moving to part 3, chapter 6, “Sprouts of Religious Civil Society,” examines several examples of grassroots rebuilding, defending, and expanding religious institutions that serve public needs, including charitable associations. Chapter 7, “The Rebirth of the Lineage,” details the post-Mao revival of the Wang lineage, ancestor hall, and ritual events. Yang also highlights changes in traditional patriarchal structures, as evidenced in women being included in genealogies as well as lineage events and rituals, and receiving education and scholarships. Apart from these shifting gender dynamics, the chapter suggests how the revival of lineage activities outside of state control has provided lineage members with local, ancestral forms of identification outside state and party.Chapter 8, “Of Mothers, Goddesses, and Bodhisattvas,” which analyzes how women's religious agency may strengthen, adjust, or transform patriarchal structures, is a fine example of decolonial scholarship. Building on the work of Saba Mahmood on women's agency in Egypt, Yang points out that a narrow Western liberal feminist view of agency as resistance, counterdiscourse, or rebellion, cannot be assumed to match the embodied agency of women in all cultural contexts. She writes, “Our understanding of women's agency must be broadened to include the ethos of submission to social norms, self-discipline, and religious self-cultivation” (229). Yang delineates five modes of women's religious agency that demonstrate unintended consequences that either support or weaken patriarchal structures.Chapter 9, “Broadening and Pluralizing the Modern Category of ‘Civil Society’: A Friendly Quarrel with Durkheim,” provides an important decolonial critique of the modern notion of society as a singular abstraction, as something unified and totalizing analogous to the political power of the modern nation-state. Neither the Australian clans that Durkheim studied nor the communities in Wenzhou are society-writ-large; they are local and plural social formations. Related is Durkheim's treatment of totems and deities as abstract objects or symbols for reflection, which was critiqued by Bruno Latour, who proposed recognizing the agency such objects possess in cocreating society. Yang sees this understanding as an ingredient in a postsecular future of localized civil society in which “gods and ancestors help humans construct alternative forms of society” (275).Chapter 10, “What's Missing in the Wenzhou Model? The ‘Ritual Economy’ and ‘Wasting of Wealth,’” is arguably the most important chapter of the book. It refers back to chapter 2 and asks what is missing from the Wenzhou miracle, arguing that the ritual economy detailed throughout the book has been part of the Wenzhou economy from the beginning and acts as a built-in break to reduce the gap between rich and poor by redistributing wealth, in part to provide community services. The material presented represents a reversal of the relationship to wealth proposed by Weber as the hallmark of capitalist society—namely, endless accumulation to alleviate Puritan anxiety. The Wenzhou communities of this study assert that spending and “wasting” wealth on ritual expenditures is how a sense of security (both supernatural and social) is gained.This original and stimulating book achieves its impact, in part, by bringing a laser focus to certain questions and data. Inevitably, additional data would strengthen or weaken some of the claims. By limiting the scope of her study to Wenzhou, Yang misses an opportunity to expand along China's economically and religiously vibrant southeast coast to Fujian, where very similar conditions detailed for Wenzhou hold for southern Fujian (Minnan). Similarly, Yang's investigation into women's religious agency would have been bolstered by incorporating Marjorie Topley's early work on the subject, including the Buddhist tradition of “vegetarian aunties” (caigu) in contemporary Fujian who continue to reject domestic life to live as lay nuns.2As suggested earlier, this study fills an important gap in the literature on civil society in China by perceptively focusing on religious and ritual life, and at the same time it fills a gap on studies of religion in post-Mao China by examining gender and economics in local communities. Those concerned about the contemporary polycrisis are hungry for alternative models to rapacious consumption and undemocratic organizations and for the undoing of patriarchy and colonial legacies. As a model of decolonial scholarship, the book touches on all of these needs and envisions components of a postcapitalist future in a way that opens the door for further investigations and dialogue. As this book suggests, a more just and healthy future is local with repaired relations with the land and ancestors.3

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