BOOK REVIEWS
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beliefs and practices still occupied an important role in the lives of the people (we have so little information on the contemporary position of the popular cults), it is doubtful whether we could ever cover the immense range of variation in the material.
Gods worshipped by the ordinary folk, the celebration of their festivals, stories about them, and what they were believed able to do for the people in a community, differed not only from region to region, as we know from the literature on the subject, but even between different localities within a region.
But immigrants from various parts of the homeland have taken many of their local beliefs and practices with them (although they have sometimes come to occupy a different role in their societies). And it is still possible, therefore, to enlarge our knowledge of such things from study of the Chinese overseas.
This short handbook by Father Saso, a Jesuit living in Taiwan, provides us with some welcome new material on some of the beliefs and practices of the region as followed by the Taiwanese, a people originating from round the Amoy area in Fukien province.
The author takes us through the lunar year discussing gods of local popularity and their festivals, and the social customs associated with them. He also discusses some local customs associated with festivals which enjoyed a wider popularity in China, and some of their possible origins. Discussion is based on written sources, including some in Taiwanese and Japanese, on information from a temple to the city god in Hsinchu, which helped him track down stories and identify the many temple "patrons", and on his own observations particularly of the celebrations and customs of one family.
The reader not approaching Chinese religious phenomena from a Christian angle might be disconcerted to read that divinities in the temples can hardly be called gods because they are spirits of human beings who lived long ago, and the student of religion will recognise some of the pitfalls of trying to disentangle the various elements which go to make up this typically syncretic Chinese folk-type religious material. Nevertheless, points such as these are not unduly distracting. There is much of interest in the book.
Those working on problems of comparative religion might have welcomed more information on who, more precisely, in the