The Sacred Village

The Sacred Village by Thomas David Dubois represents a new trend of combining historical archival materials with ethnographic work in the study of Chinese religions. The fruitful result of the book proves that such a combination is critical to explore the depth and richness of Chinese religious life at the local level. It will also have a broader impact on the studies of religion and local society in general. Additionally, as previous studies of Chinese popular religion have mostly drawn on sources from southeast China and Taiwan, the book's focus on rural north China makes it one of the few new scholarly works to fill an important gap in our current understanding of the historical changes and continuities of Chinese religion and local society. Furthermore, the book forces us to rethink about the relationships between institutional religions and Chinese religiosity, for it makes a compelling case that Chinese villages are a vibrant arena of religious activities without much presence of Buddhist, Daoist, or any other monastic leadership and institutions.

Archaeology · Buddhism · China · Ethnography · Political science · Religiosity · Religious life · Sociology · Anthropology · Chinese history and philosophy · Gender Studies · History · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies