Ritual Words: Daoist Liturgy and the Confucian Liumen Tradition in Sichuan Province by Volker Olles (review)

values and modern messages were more efficiently delivered to ordinary Muslim women through jingge 經歌—popular songs women chanted in women’s mosques. Part II presents a complex picture of the different ways in which Chinese virgins in urban and rural settings reacted to the Catholic institution as a modernizing force for women. Whereas the urban educated Catholic women in Kaifeng insisted on a celibate life outside of the convents in order to assume their moral and spiritual superiority, convents in rural Jin’gang were reserved only for the educated few and shunned poor and uneducated virgins. The authors further argue that the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) efforts to remap the gendered space ultimately failed as the revolutionary women and their organizations were subjected to the political agendas of national and class struggles. This leads to the argument in part III, where the authors pick up the stories of women’s mosques in Zhengzhou, the Daoist nuns of the Jiuku miao, and the Catholic celibate women in Kaifeng, all in contemporary times. The female leaders in these religious institutions, each in their own way, rely on and invent new forms of religious organization in order to negotiate with the state patriarchy, to construct female religious identity, and to engage with China’s modern development. This is a timely book that bridges the current gap between the study of religion and of women in modern China. It complements well, although it could also have engaged more with, the growing body of scholarship on the reconstruction of religion in modern China. This is especially true in the case of the Jiuku miao, where, unlike in the case of their Muslim and Catholic counterparts, terms such as ‘‘faith’’ and ‘‘believers’’ are generally considered less-effective tools for conveying the ritually and communally based religious practices that often cut across disciplinary and clerical boundaries of Buddhism and Daoism. In another vein, while holding the Communist state accountable for exercising gender hierarchy, one also begs to learn more about the extent to which post-Mao female religious leaders have internalized and manipulated the very same Communist rhetoric of gender equality and women’s liberation to advance their own agendas and to create their own gendered space. These minor quibbles notwithstanding, this book should be a must-read for every student of religion and of women’s and gender studies in China. XIAOFEI KANG The George Washington University VOLKER OLLES, Ritual Words: Daoist Liturgy and the Confucian Liumen Tradition in Sichuan Province. Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, vol. 83. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2013. xviii, 253 pp. J68 (hb). ISBN 978-3-44706862 -8 The preface to this book starts with a disclaimer: Originally intended as a full scale study of the Liumen tradition, an intellectual and spiritual movement in Sichuan virtually unknown to BOOK REVIEWS 165 Western scholarship, the book’s focus eventually shifted to a unique form of Daoist liturgy, which evolved from the interaction between Liumen and Daoism in the first half of the 19th century (p. xv). However, as Olles also mentions, ‘‘the book’s aim is not only to introduce this canon and the associated branch of liturgical Daoism, but also to identify some basic features of Daoist ritual practices in modern and contemporary Sichuan’’ (p. xv). This is in fact what Olles proceeds to do in this book, which is, as he says, the first attempt to give a comprehensive look at the fascinating and poorly studied Liumen 劉門 tradition. The book consists of the following sections: N A short preface in which Olles clearly defines the scope and aims of the book; N Acknowledgments, where it becomes clear that Olles feels strongly indebted to the surviving members of the Liu family as well as the practicing priests of the ritual tradition for their help in recovering texts and providing historical context, as well as explaining the intricacies of the rituals; N A lengthy fifty-page introduction (which could easily have been a full chapter) describing the intellectual, historical, and social context within which the Liumen tradition developed and flourished in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the conditions of its demise after 1949, and...