The Cult of the Fox: Power, Gender, and Popular Religion in Late Imperial and Modern China (review)

During the last ten years or so the attention of scholars has been shifting toward spirits that do not easily fit into the established tripartite structure of gods, ghosts, and ancestors. The latter categorization has dominated our view of popular religion since the publication in the early 1970s of Arthur Wolf 's and David K. Jordan's classic studies.¹ In this perspective, the spirit world of Chinese (or Taiwanese) popular religion breaks down into three major types of beings that correspond to the major categories of experience: gods who are compared to the bureaucrats and government officials of the human world, ancestors who represent familial authority, and ghosts who are seen to parallel the forces of disorder and anomie, such as beggars and bandits. This neat Durkheimian model has much to recommend itself and has inspired valuable research, but it is also rather too neat. What about the many spirits that do not quite fit these categories: goddesses, gods of demonic or ghostly origin, Daoist transcendents, and rogue deities that just won't do as celestial bureaucrats? Where do they fit into the picture? Will an attempt to incorporate them into the model change it and therefore our view of Chinese popular religion in significant ways? Mary Douglas has taught us that we can learn much about a culture's values and sense of identity by looking at the boundaries it draws-boundaries between us and them, between women and men, between humans and animals, and between gods and ghosts. Whatever or whoever crosses these boundaries is a source of danger and power and provides the scholar with unique insights into the cultural dynamic erupting along boundary lines that are less stable than earlier, functionalist interpretations assumed. Borders of all kinds need to be defended and maintained all the time against the pollution arising from their violation; yet the same border crossings create a power that people try to tap into for the pursuit of their own goals.

In this perspective then, the categories of gods, ghosts, and ancestors are not a final picture, but a first sketch of the principal outlines. With this sketch in place we can turn our attention to the always-contested borders between cultural categories, to the gray areas that paradoxically afford us a clearer view of the underlying dynamic of popular religion as a cultural system. It is with this agenda in mind that scholars have been turning their attention to "unruly gods" (thus the felicitous title of an important conference volume), to goddesses such as Mazu and Guanyin, to the place of Daoist transcendents in popular religion, and to various deities that combine divine and demonic elements, such as the Five Fury Spirits, Wutong, and Marshal Wen.²

Xiaofei Kang's book continues this trend by focusing on the place of fox spirits in popular imagination and religious practice. The fox is almost the quintessential border crosser: a member of the canine family with feline characteristics, wild and generally untamable (pace The Little Prince), yet often living and hunting in close proximity to human habitations. As such, foxes have attracted other marks of a "betwixt-and-between" type of identity: they are seen as shape-shifters that can take human form, engage in illicit sexual relationships with men and women, and procure ill-gotten wealth for their devotees. Kang mines Chinese foxlore to present a comprehensive overview of the role and place of this critter in the Chinese religious imagination from ancient times to the present, with a focus on North China in the Late Imperial period.

Kang's study also follows another trend in recent scholarship, namely the growing use of traditional literary genres such as anecdotes, novellas, novels, and tales of the supernatural as windows on popular religious practice. The fundamental problem we face in the historical study of popular culture...