Daoist Priests of the Li Family: Ritual Life in Village China by Stephen Jones (review)

Stephen Jones has engaged in fieldwork on the ritual and music of northern China for the past thirty years, and his previous book In Search of the Folk Daoists of North China¹ brought the hereditary Daoist priests of Shanxi, Hebei, and Gansu to the forefront of his work. Daoist Priests of the Li Family continues this focus, but shifts from a large-scale survey to deeply intimate portraits of the Daoists (or Yinyang 陰陽, as they are referred to locally) Li Manshan 李满山, his deceased father Li Qing 李清, and other members of the current band of ritual performers. Jones first met the group in 1991, returning to the village in 2001 and 2003, and has focused his research primarily on them since 2011.The book and accompanying film² illustrate a close connection between Jones and Li, providing great detail on the family of Daoists and Jones’ interactions with them.

The work is something of a reference book to the Li family, chronicling their history, ritual and musical performances, and manuscript collection. It is divided into six parts, each with three to four chapters, as well as introductory and concluding chapters, and three appendices. The first three parts present a history of the Li family from Li Qing’s father’s early life in the 1920s, through the Maoist era, and up to the present based largely on interviews with Li Manshan and other surviving relatives, as well as drawing on gazetteers and other local historical documents.

Part 4 explains the collection of hand-written manuscripts that Li Manshan currently holds, though as Jones points out, these are generally not used. Here Jones stresses the importance of performance over text on the assumption that texts, not ethnography, are what the reader is interested in. Part 5 contrasts the texts with the sound and performance of rituals; he describes the various instruments used and details the funerary rites, which are now the most common rituals, as well as rites for thanking the earth for individual households, which are no longer performed, and temple fair rites, which are no longer common for this Daoist group to perform. Here numerous musical scores and translations of hymns are included, but the Chinese text is only present in images of certain manuscripts.

The final section focuses on the future outlooks for the Daoists, their rising prestige through government Intangible Cultural Heritage projects, and travels abroad for performances organized by Jones. These shifts have occurred alongside declining interest paid to them by the rural residents who would normally hire them, perceptions of the instability of the tradition in the future due to its limited income, and simplification of ritual practices. The first appendix presents an argument for fieldwork, with a focus on performance and oral history in Daoist studies, though these points can be found repeatedly throughout the text. The other two appendices list the collection of ritual manuals and describe the chanted scriptures.

Jones should be commended for the great detail provided about a tradition for which he clearly has much respect and admiration. While he writes that his expertise lies in ethnomusicology and not ritual studies, it is evident that he has developed a serious understanding of many of the subtleties of Daoist texts and ritual performance. However, those seeking a more analytic or theoretical account of the Shanxi Daoists will be disappointed. The monograph is largely descriptive, lacking much analysis of the changing social life in rural north China or the rituals themselves. Jones’ main argument is largely the same as in his previous book, that the field of Daoist studies is overly concerned with textual evidence and that local historians draw on fieldwork as if contemporary rural life can be taken as a mirror of local society in late imperial times. Additionally, he points out the problematic division of household Daoists in southern China and monastic...