Mortality in Traditional Chinese Thought ed. by Amy Olberding, Philip J. Ivanhoe (review)

130 Journal of Chinese Religions planning, and the development and management of historical sites, in which the social reality does not match with regulatory categories. But in the 1930s the secularizing reformers were on the ascendant; today, their ideological and regulatory framework is unraveling, and, in reference to Chinese popular religion, increasingly appears to remain in place primarily for reasons of political inertia. The extent and speed of this unraveling, and the new tensions and hybridities to which it will lead, will be fascinating areas to observe in the years to come. Superstitious Regimes is an indispensable work for understanding the origins of the contemporary religious issue in China, and for analyzing the dynamics of state-religion relations throughout China’s tumultuous modern history. It is essential reading for any student of modern Chinese history and religion, and a signal contribution to the comparative history of secularism. DAVID A. PALMER, The University of Hong Kong Mortality in Traditional Chinese Thought Edited by AMY OLBERDING & PHILIP J. IVANHOE. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2011. 313 pages. ISBN 978-1438435633. US$ 85.00 hardcover. Death traverses and defines a large part of Chinese civilization’s political institutions, social practices, intellectual production, and religious uses. It is no exaggeration to state that death’s horizon and the influence of the dead are omnipresent in traditional China, from the cult of ancestors, which prescribes sacrificial offerings and shapes a hierarchically structured social body, through to filial piety, the true cornerstone of family relations and blueprint for moral conduct. In contrast with other significant moments in an individual’s lifetime (birth, entrée into the adult world, the beginning of sexual relations, betrothals, etc.), which are given relatively short shrift in the classical ritual compendia, a vast amount of attention is given in these same writings to the ceremonies pertaining to death. The cardinal status accorded to death in traditional Chinese culture and to the awesome array of funeral procedures that attend it is also conspicuous in the terrain of ideas. It is sufficient, for example, to recall that the earliest intellectual debates recorded in the texts that have come down to us—with the followers of the Confucian school, on the one hand, pitted against Mozi’s 墨子 disciples on the other—highlight the disputed question of the appropriate duration of the period of mourning together with the lavishness or frugality of its economic Book Reviews 131 aspects. Moreover, since the early twentieth century, archaeology, ever more precise and systematic, has been supplying valuable information about the different ways of understanding death from a material standpoint and, depending on the case, these more recent interpretations have either challenged or confirmed the views scholars had previously held concerning beliefs and practices associated with mortality in different periods and regions of China. However, monographic studies on this crucial subject published hitherto in English have not been precisely abundant in the case of China (especially if they are compared with studies published on other civilizations). Hence, the opportune appearance of this book edited by Amy Olberding and Philip J. Ivanhoe is clearly very good news since it remedies a major bibliographic deficit in the field. The articles brought together in this collaborative book begin with three chapters devoted to a study of death from the material point of view. Hence, the opening contribution by Muchou Poo, titled “Preparation for the Afterlife in Ancient China,” presents an account of the evolution in conceptions of the afterlife in pre-Buddhist China, in particular on the basis of an analysis of changes that occurred in the design of funerary spaces. Poo considers that, in contrast with what happened in earlier periods when there were very few elements that could offer a glimpse of any coherent set of beliefs or systematic burial practices among the social and political elites, new forms of burial began to appear in the closing years of the Warring States period. These were to take definitive shape in the Qin and Han dynasties and, unsurprisingly, led to a more homogenous conception of the hereafter. In the second chapter, which is titled “Ascend to Heaven or Stay in the Tomb?,” Eugene Y. Wang analyzes some...