Cantonese Society in Hong Kong and Singapore: Gender, Religion, Medicine and Society by Marjorie Topley (review)

For Ren Jiyu the question had been: what prevented China from becoming modern? On the Confucius2000.com website the question has become: How can China regain a moral compass in the post-socialist order? Anna Sun scrutinizes these controversies with a keen eye for their institutional structures and historical contexts. She shows that the question of Confucian religiousness has rarely been posed without strings attached to other concerns. ‘‘Confucianism’’ has been a byproduct of other discourses concerning monotheism , the secular state, modernity, socialism, etc. Many of those who pose the question are less interested in a scholarly inquiry into the elements that made—or did not make—Confucianism religious, but rather how Confucianism may or may not have constituted a vehicle for something else. Attempts to prescribe a definition of Confucianism have proved futile in part because such attempts themselves are burdened by questionable ulterior motives. Sun advances her own innovative approach to these questions by arguing that Confucianism is a matter of what people actually do. One does not think of oneself as a Confucian, nor does one convert to Confucianism, Sun avers, rather one becomes Confucian based on how one behaves, how one lives one’s life. She maps out three sets of criteria of Confucian behavior, each of which revolves around specific behaviors, including what she calls ‘‘minimal’’ forms of worship in a Confucius temple, such as praying or offering incense before a statue or spirit tablet of Confucius; an ‘‘inclusive criterion,’’ including rites at an ancestral temple or grave site; and an ‘‘extended criterion,’’ including practicing Confucian virtues or reading the Classics. Some scholars may contest these claims, though few if any in the academy are in any position to dictate to practitioners what is or is not real Confucianism. Sun mentions the view of Confucianism as a secular philosophy of China’s ruling elite, which arguably predominates post-WWII Sinology, particularly in the Social Sciences and among many historians. What are the institutional structures and historical contexts that have secured for this secularized view of Confucianism the status of widely accepted fact? A single book cannot cover all of the contested histories of Confucianism, yet one wonders what insights into such claims a sociology of knowledge might yield. Anna Sun’s book makes an important contribution to the analysis of the contested claims about the meaning of Confucianism by boldly moving the site of this debate to actual conditions on the ground in contemporary China. Written in accessible, elegant prose, this book is well suited for courses on Chinese religion, Confucianism, or the emergence of World Religions as a discourse. THOMAS WILSON Hamilton College MARJORIE TOPLEY, edited and introduced by JEAN DEBERNARDI, Cantonese Society in Hong Kong and Singapore: Gender, Religion, Medicine and Society. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011. xii, 609 pp. HK$350, US$60 (hb). ISBN 978-988-802-14-6 Marjorie Topley (1927–2010), as Jean DeBernardi notes in the introduction to this book, was the first undergraduate student to study anthropology at the London 132 BOOK REVIEWS School of Economics and Political Science—under the tutelage of Raymond Firth, the successor to Bronislaw Malinowski. She went on to become one of a handful of British social anthropologists who focused on Chinese society during the 1950s—a distinguished cohort that includes Maurice Freedman and Barbara Ward. Topley’s published work, much of which is reproduced in this compendium, focuses on Hong Kong and Singapore, where she lived from 1951 to 1983. Dr. Topley is perhaps best known for her path-breaking essay on marriage resistance among Cantonese women that appeared in Women in Chinese Society.1 Based on her extensive interviews with women from the Shunde 順德 District of Guangdong 廣東 Province, Topley argued that rural women had several alternatives to marriage—including a hitherto unrecognized proxy arrangement whereby an employed woman could pay for a substitute bride and thus maintain a connection to a functioning family. This ethnographic discovery revolutionized the study of Chinese marriage and family life. The volume under review incorporates Topley’s published work on Chinese religion and the closely related topic of Chinese ‘‘folk’’ medicine. Of special interest to readers of the Journal of Chinese Religions are...