The Imperial Metaphor: Popular Religion in China (review)

Reviews 397 Stephan Feuchtwang. The Imperial Metaphor: PopularReligion in China. New York: Routledge, 1992. Hardcover $79.95, isbn 0-415-02146-4. TheImperialMetaphoris replete with original argument and intriguing ethnographic detail. Stephan Feuchtwang is clearly one ofthe most creative anthropologists working on China and things Chinese. In a series ofimportant articles beginning in the 1970s, Feuchtwang established the relevance ofethnography both to broader issues in sinology and to such Western intellectual trends as structuralism and Marxism. For example, the arcana of calendrical systems and their linkages to systems ofpower and authority requires sinological erudition ofa sort that has intimidated otiier fieldwork-oriented researchers. Yet in The Imperial Metaphor, Feuchtwang shows not only how ethnography can enrich sinology, but also how erudition in apparendy arcane areas of sinology like calendrical history and geomancy can be marshaled to enhance the understanding oflife in real communities like Mountainstreet, the small Taiwanese town where Feuchtwang conducted his fieldwork. There is no refuge for the fieldworking anthropologist in localist functionalism ; the vast cultural resources from which localities have produced their divergent local traditions cannot be disregarded ifwe are to make even the local intelligible. By the same token, divorced from a sense oftheir meaning in the real contexts of local social life, both our own and Chinese senses of these cultural "resources" can take on a disembodied, even reified aura. Drawing upon his knowledge of geomancy and calendrical history in China, Feuchtwang sets a challenging standard for other researchers to consider more closely and more thoroughly the local in all ofits textual, historical, and spatial contextualizations. As noted above, Feuchtwang's articles were among the first in Chinese anthropology to engage seriously structuralist and Marxist insights, and in The Imperial Metaphor the influence ofpoststructuralism (regarding, for example, the discursive production ofsubjectivities and the utility ofDerrida's concepts of "deference," "erasure," and his critique ofthe "metaphysics ofpresence") manifests Feuchtwang's continuing involvement with Western intellectual trends. Feuchtwang's ability to locate his work at the juxtaposition of sinology, ethnography , and (for want of a better term) "theory" is both enviable and, I would argue, necessary ifwe hope to grope toward a deeper and more accurate understanding ofour elusive object of study, Chinese culture.© 1996 by UniversityAlthough TheImperialMetaphoris enlivened by ethnographic example and ofHawai'i Pressevidence throughout, only the chapters on "Local Festivals and Their Cults" and "Ang Gong, or the Truth ofPuppets" focus mainly on Feuchtwang's fieldwork. Other chapters are, in effect, essays on a variety oftopics, all having to do with 398 China Review International: Vol. 3, No. 2, Fall 1996 how (or, indeed, whether) it makes sense to speak of "Chinese culture." More concretely, Feuchtwang is interested in rethinking the relations among local religion , the imperial state, and liturgical Daoism. In chapter 1, "History, Identification, and Belief," Feuchtwang poses one of the focal questions animating his studies: "It is possible to read a dissenting history , deeply embedded in the myth and ritual oflate imperial Chinese popular religion . Is it merely dissenting, or does it approach rivalry with the official eternity? Is it an altogether alternative form ofhistoricisation?" (p. 7). Feuchtwang leans toward an affirmative answer to the latter question: "[Sangren and Freedman] . . . each . . . asserts the existence in religious collective representations of a whole social being called China or Chineseness. Indeed they see this to be the compulsory object of their analysis, even if this time they may have only approximated it. I do not feel this compulsion" (p. 14). Such sentiments notwithstanding, Feuchtwang's illuminations of the complexity of the relationships between local particularities and integral images such as "the imperial metaphor" do not deviate toward either local particularism or cultural totalization. Without denying the social and political efficacy of totalizing images of the cosmos, mainly in official religion and liturgical Daoism, Feuchtwang argues that in the perspective oflocal religion one finds evidence ofa more skeptical, sometimes even oppositional, attitude toward such representations of a cosmological cum social whole. These issues resonate in other chapters that focus on the calendar, official and local cults, ritual discourse, and Daoism. Throughout, Feuchtwang engages in some low-key but extremely interesting polemics. For example, he disputes James Watson's influential argument to the effect that traditional...