CHINESE RELIGION AND FAMILISM: THE BASIS OF CHINESE CULTURE, SOCIETY, AND GOVERNMENT. By JordanPaper. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. Pp. xiv+181. Hardback, $90.00.

This book is an “ethnographic history” of jiajiang (“Infernal Generals” as translated by the author), a peculiar type of ritual dance troupe that has long been an eye-catching feature of southern Taiwan's temple festivals and pilgrimages. Based on extensive ethnographic and historical data collected by Sutton in southern Taiwan between 1988 and 2001, the two main questions that he addresses in this book are framed squarely within the decades-long paradigmatic problematique of Sinology. The first question is “Why and how are the diverse forms of Chinese culture generated from a shared groundwork?” More precisely, in contrast to many attempts to discern a unitary “Chineseness” from extensive variations between local Chinese culture forms, the author aspires to examine how one single tradition in Chinese culture evolved into various local styles. The second question is “Why do local religions keep on thriving in Taiwan despite the fact that the island has modernized to become a world-known industrial economy?” Put differently, why and how does Taiwan's experience repudiate Max Weber's hypothesis on disenchantment?

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Diversify Integration Models: Healing Tradition and Spirituality in Chinese Culture

PsycEXTRA Dataset ◽

10.1037/e523282007-001 ◽

2006 ◽

Author(s):

Rachel Sing-Kiat Ting

Keyword(s):

Chinese Culture ◽

Healing Tradition

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Development and Validation of a Chinese Culture-Based Adult Attachment Scale

PsycEXTRA Dataset ◽

10.1037/e608702010-001 ◽

2010 ◽

Author(s):

Chia-Chih D. C. Wang ◽

Sachiko Ogata ◽

Young S. Song ◽

Ayleen Gomez ◽

Kathy Julio ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Adult Attachment ◽

Chinese Culture ◽

Development And Validation

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Contextualising ‘Sin’ in Chinese Culture: A Historian's Perspective

Studies in World Christianity ◽

10.3366/swc.2016.0145 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 22 (2) ◽

pp. 105-124 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Danny Hsu

Keyword(s):

Chinese Culture ◽

Actual Practice ◽

Religious Traditions ◽

Christian Teaching ◽

Practice Perspective ◽

History Of

Is the Christian teaching on sin a ‘stumbling block’ to Chinese accepting Christianity? This paper critiques the notion that Chinese have difficulty comprehending ‘sin’ because of the culture's long-standing belief in the humanistic potential for self-perfection without any reference to the divine. This view of Chinese culture has been too narrow and does not account for the fact that Chinese religious traditions have always had at their disposal a wide variety of resources to comprehend the Christian concept of sin. Incorporating a history-of-practice perspective can contribute to a more productive balance between the representation of Chinese culture and its actual practice and avoid the current tendency to posit Western theology against a narrowly constructed and idealised version of Chinese culture that is severed from both historical and present-day realities.

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Ritual, Rejuvenation Practices, and the Experience of Aging in Early Chinese Religion

Body and Religion ◽

10.1558/bar.31737 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 1 (1) ◽

pp. 31-47 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Ori Tavor

Keyword(s):

Aging Process ◽

Filial Piety ◽

Religious Culture ◽

Chinese Religion ◽

Human History ◽

Early China ◽

Technological Means ◽

Lasting Influence ◽

The Ideal ◽

Scientific Advances

Scientific advances in the field of biomedicine have fundamentally changed the ways in which we think about our bodies. Disease, aging, and even death, are no longer seen as inevitable realities but as obstacles that can be controlled, and in some cases even reversed, by technological means. The current discourse, however, can be enriched by an investigation of the various ways in which the aging process was perceived and explained throughout human history. In this article, I argue that in early China, the experience of aging and the challenges and anxieties it produced played a constitutive role in the shaping of religious culture. Drawing on a variety of medical, philosophical, and liturgical sources, I outline two models of aging: one that presented aging, and especially the loss of virility, as an undesirable but solvable condition that can be reversed with the aid of various rejuvenation techniques, and a more socially conscious model that depicted aging as a process of gradual social ascension, a natural but fundamentally unalterable condition that should be accepted, marked, and even celebrated through ritual. I conclude by demonstrating the legacy and lasting influence of these models on two of the most fundamental tenets of Chinese religion: the pursuit of longevity and the ideal of filial piety.

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