Mayfair Yang's exciting and rich ethnography informed by critical theory stands alone among other books on the restoration of religious traditions in post-Mao China in examining religious and ritual associations and activity as grassroots forms of voluntary association and civil society with value for communities, as economic stimulus, and as brakes on overheated capital accumulation at the heart of unsustainable wealth inequality. This book will be of great interest to scholars of civil society, economics, and religion in contemporary China and is a must-read for anyone interested in alternative trajectories of development and examples of what resilient local cultures look like in practice.
This book, divided into three parts, is a culmination of forty-two weeks of ethnographic research spread over twenty-six years (1990–2016) into civil and religious life in Wenzhou in the southeastern corner of Zhejiang, just north of Fujian. Part 1 is an introduction to the framework of the...
