The Modern Spirit of Asia: The Spiritual and the Secular in China and India by Peter van der Veer (review)

more than four decades have passed since, and given also that in the meantime a staggering number of works have been published on various aspects of the oracle bone inscriptions and Shang culture more generally (an excellent, accessible introduction in English would be David Keightley’s Ancestral Landscape27 ), one wonders whether the author could not have consulted this recent body of scholarship. Similar reservations can be raised, mutatis mutandis, with regard to each section of the present work. In sum, Wolfgang Ommerborn demonstrates remarkable erudition and admirable ambition in presenting a coherent narrative of Chinese religious concepts from the Neolithic to the Western Han. Unfortunately, his effort is sometimes undermined by certain shortcomings. That said, readers interested in Heaven, ritual, fate, and virtue in early China will doubtless benefit from studying this book. OLIVER WEINGARTEN Oriental Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague PETER VAN DER VEER, The Modern Spirit of Asia: The Spiritual and the Secular in China and India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. xi, 282 pp. US$24.95, £16.95 (pb). ISBN: 978-0-691-12815-3 This is an ambitious book comparing the fate of traditional religiosities in China and India in the “imperial modernity” of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Van der Veer traces the genealogy of today’s Hindu religious nationalism and China’s ultra-secularist state control of religious forces. In an academic world increasingly fragmented by over-specialization, with studies usually limited to one country, this book provides a refreshing macro-level perspective in examining transnational flows of culture and knowledge across China, India, and the West. It compares how these two ancient and agrarian civilizations dealt with Western colonialism and negotiated their entry into modernity and the nation-state form. Van der Veer’s stated aim is to avoid the common Eurocentric tendency for scholars of non-Western religions to always refer back to the modern West, as if the West were the standard and measure of modernity. While resisting the cultural essentialism of nineteenth-century Western thinkers, the author takes as his inspiration the works of comparative religion by such prominent thinkers as Max Weber, Robert Bellah, Shmuel Eisenstadt, and Clifford Geertz. As a specialist of South Asian religions, van der Veer came to the study of China later in life, and even studied Chinese language, although his book relies on secondary sources. This work is a beacon for a younger generation of scholars to rise up above narrow areas of expertise and to dare to think more globally and cross-culturally, for the modern world is crisscrossed so densely with transnational flows that no culture can maintain cultural integrity or hard boundaries. 27 David N. Keightley, The Ancestral Landscape: Time, Space, and Community in Late Shang China, ca. 1200–1045 B.C. (Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley; Center for Chinese Studies, 2000). BOOK REVIEWS 115 The argument of this book is that, despite their differences, both China and India were shaped by a common set of modern Western categories of thought that informed how they constructed their own modern collective identities, and how they transformed their religious systems. These new categories of thought van der Veer describes as a “syntagmatic chain” of the concepts of “religion-magicsecularity -spirituality.” They form a chain because the meaning of each category only arises in relation to the others, and thus, they are interconnected concepts that have driven religious modernity and secularization. Each chapter of the book focuses on one of these new categories of knowledge. Chapter 2 discusses how the category of “spirituality” emerged in the modern West in tandem with secularization, as a way of opposing the institutional church authority of organized religion. It also becomes distinguished from both “religion” and “the secular,” and is differentiated from “materiality” and “the body.” With secularization and scientific rationality, a Western sense of the loss of religion necessitated a concept of religiosity that was not tied to the Church, and this longing for lost “spirituality” was projected onto the “mystical East” of India and China. Elites in both India and China adopted this label and identity for themselves, to claim moral superiority and to resist the materialism and aggression of the West...