The Sacred Village: Social Change and Religious Life in Rural North China (review)

The Sacred Village is a study of local religion in the villages of Cang County in southeastern Hebei Province. The author attempts to combine three kinds of documents to depict the historical changes in the religious lives of these villages from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century. These documents consist of official investigations, writings of literati, and ethnographic descriptions, the last mostly based on the author's own fieldwork interviews. The subject matter is presented topically rather than chronologically, the main point of this social history being to show how local village-based religion was, and remains, a vital force in the consciousness of Cang County villagers and is not simply the passing expression of the larger historical forces sweeping this region of China.

DuBois moves quickly to assert this theme by describing how the villages of Cang County, although rarely the focus of "a collective ritual regimen," have endured as the unit of organization and identity for temples and sectarian groups despite, or in some cases because of, social upheavals over the past century and a half. Each chapter traces the formation of a particular expression of village religion beginning with the "intensely immediate" demonic fox spirits, the maladies they cause, and the shamanic healing arts that are mobilized to scourge them. Chapter 4 addresses an aspect of religion more familiar to most readers, that of formal institutional Buddhism in the garb of its clergy and temples. We learn, however, that Buddhist monks, who once constituted a viable monastic presence in Cang County, have lost the doctrinal content of their formal beliefs and practices and become virtually indistinguishable from other popular religious specialists.

Other sectarian religious movements that have swept across North China in the past century and a half have met with similar fates in the villages of Cang County. Chapter 5 looks at one of these, the Li Sect, which was partly modeled on Monastic Buddhism in its historical development and achieved its most popular appeal during the Republican period, when it gained a significant following in the city of Tianjin. But at lower levels of the urban-rural hierarchy, for example in the town of Duliu, its function changed from a religious order to a welfare agency sponsored by the local elite, while in the surrounding villages of Cang County, the Li Sect failed to have much impact other than as a temperance league. Chapter 6 traces the precipitous rise and fall of another sect, the Way of Penetrating Unity, which with its apocalyptic tendencies had no lasting influence on village religion with the establishment of communist power in 1951. Chapter 7 follows two other sects, which unlike the ones previously mentioned, have had an enduring presence in the religious life of Cang County villages. Here the Teaching of the Most Supreme and the Heaven and Earth Sect are virtually identical with village life in the exercise of ritual power by persons trained in the esoteric practices of these sects. DuBois thus analyses how religious sects serve different interests and take on different forms over time at different levels of social concentration from the regional city of Tianjin to the town of Duliu and the surrounding villages of Cang County.

These findings are in concert with recent attempts to model urban-rural hierarchies in the overlapping domains of economic, political, cultural, and religious affairs. An important dimension of this hierarchy is the eternal tension between state and local society from the succession of dynasties to the succession of republics.

But the analysis does not end with the cultural nexus of village religion, as DuBois is determined to add the dimension of individual subjectivity that is manifest in individual beliefs and ritual practices. This dimension is based on the materials gleaned from interviews with Cang County villagers. Although the villagers are enveloped by religious influences, organizations, and specialists, the...