Throughout the past decade, there has been growing attention given to the survival and revival of local religious life in post-Mao China, and Hunan and Guangxi in the south as well as Shanxi and Shaanxi in the north have been major hotspots in the study of religion and locality.Mayfair Yang's Re-Enchanting Modernity: Ritual Economy and Society in Wenzhou, China, however, turns to a distinctive spot on China's eastern coast: Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province.Wenzhou's claim to fame is due to the fact that it is the birthplace of the private economy in China, known as the "Wenzhou model" (Wenzhou moshi).Also known as "China's Jerusalem" (Zhongguo de Yelusaleng), Wenzhou is populated by one million Christians out of its 8 million population, and by Buddhists, Daoists, and practitioners of popular religions.As an economic powerhouse and home to multiple faiths, Wenzhou is a vantage point for observing the relationship between economy and religion.Re-Enchanting Modernity provides us with a picture of grassroots initiatives for pursuing religious vocation in a rapidly changing socioeconomic context, offering a unique and in-depth insight into ritual economy, religiosity, and modernity.This book is based on twenty-six years (1990-2016) of ethnographic fieldwork.The author spent forty-two weeks, distributed over thirteen trips, conducting research on religious and ritual practices of local people and grassroots organizations in Wenzhou.Trained as a cultural anthropologist, Yang is able to combine the contemporary ethnographic material collected from her fieldwork with a historical inquiry into the local religiosity of the past six hundred years of the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing dynasties.Taking a bottom-up approach, the author, rather than exploring the elite and orthodox practices of religious traditions, focuses on Chinese "popular religion," including "deity worship, shamanism, ancestor worship, divination, and Chinese geomancy (fengshui), as well as popular Daoist and Buddhist practices" (5).Throughout her rich ethnography, Yang masterfully deploys theories and responds to scholars-such as Max Weber, Marcel Mauss, Georges Bataille, mile Durkheim, and Saba Mahmood-to explore issues such as religious ethics and capitalist logic, gift-giving, local identity, and female religious agency, among other topics.The book is composed of three parts.In part 1, "Introduction" (chapters 1-2), Yang sketches a brief social and cultural history of Wenzhou from the nineteenth century to the present, focusing on the secularization accompanying its economic and industrial development.The introduction sets the scene for the rest of the book, and the readability of this part is greatly enhanced by the author's rich and up-to-date ethnographic notes on her fieldwork experience, including some odd and awe-inspiring moments in modern Wenzhou.For example, she describes her "supervised" field trips and monitored communication with her local informants via WeChat.She also notes that the Wenzhou dialect, once a language barrier for the author, is much less so today as it is no longer used by younger generations, who now speak Mandarin.In chapter 2, the uniqueness of the "Wenzhou model" and its impressive economic achievements are discussed in relation to "private family enterprise" (36), "indigenous self-generating capital" (38), and the "high mobility of people and goods" (42), as well as the environmental degradation that comes with industrialization.This discussion of the "Wenzhou Model" not only responds to Hill Gates's (1996) notion of "petty capitalist
Xiaosu Sun (Fri,) studied this question.