God Aboveground: Catholic Church, Postsocialist State and Transnational Processes in a Chinese Village (review)

God Aboveground is an ethnography of a Hakka village in Guangdong Province. Given its title and subtitle, one might expect it to foreground the Catholic church and religious belief in a Chinese village. However, the book is primarily about subjectivity in deterritorialized transnational communities, which proceeds in the village through the conflation of Catholicism, Hakka identity, and images of modernity. The result is an account of the meaning to the villagers of their existence in the contemporary world. It contains especially rich insights into the significance of Catholic practice to the villagers and its integration with other aspects of their situation. These insights are especially welcome because, by departing considerably from such conventional "politicized" scholarly and popular concerns on religion in China as freedom of belief, civil society, and societal resistance, they expand a new avenue of inquiry.

The study, conducted as dissertation research, was motivated by the author's personal situation as a practicing Catholic. While serving as a U.S. Marine in Hong Kong, he attended Catholic services there. Although he could not understand the Cantonese liturgy he was struck by the familiarity of the rituals and the fellowship. This led him to graduate study in anthropology at Harvard University to understand how local Chinese experience the global institution of the Catholic Church.

The book's interpretative framework echoes the findings of James Watson, Lozada's dissertation advisor, on transnational processes. Watson and his collaborators examined McDonald's in Asian settings and found much agency by local people in transforming this global institution into meanings that made sense of their history and social relations. Similarly, God Aboveground argues that the local manifestation of the Catholic Church is not the bottom of a hegemonic hierarchy but rather a set of malleable practices. They are universal in that they are recognizable as Catholic rituals and local in that their meanings reflect the villagers' history and situations.

The author's insights were obtained through fieldwork from 1993 to 1997, including two years of residence in a village that the author calls Little Rome. Little Rome is notable for its Catholic fervor and for being in the Hakka heartland of Meizhou Prefecture. It has been Catholic since the mid-nineteenth century, and its underground church was active during the Cultural Revolution. Following changes in religious policy after the Cultural Revolution, the church was rebuilt in the early 1980s, and religious holidays such as Christmas and All Souls' Day were once again openly celebrated. Most villagers are Catholic and the church is the center of village social life. Villagers are also aware and proud of their Hakka heritage, and, like other Hakka communities in southeastern China, many kin pursue education and careers in the boom towns of Shenzhen and Guangzhou, and in Europe, the United States, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.

The opening puzzle in God Aboveground is the significance for the villagers of Catholic rituals. To help resolve this puzzle, Lozada deploys the concept of charisma. Charisma is one of Max Weber's classic sources of legitimacy that emphasizes how a person's authority stems from the perception by others that she or he is extraordinary in some way. Employing the concept as extended by the sociologist Edward Shils and the anthropologist Stanley Tambiah, Lozada sees charisma as produced in rituals. It stems from the interpretations that persons give to their actions while participating in rituals and which become meanings by which to understand their history, situation, and environment. Persons who similarly interpret rituals are an imagined community with a shared identity.

Lozada argues that Catholic rituals in Little Rome integrate other aspects of the villagers' transnational embeddedness, which include market consumption, economic migration, and nation-state building, into a coherent identity. Through rituals, the villagers rework these disparate flows into a conception of what it means to be modern in the contemporary world. For example, chapter . describes...