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critique and is as such beyond blame. However, his way of proceeding may be subject to doubt; one cannot completely cut off the roots of past research: "What is needed, he says, is a new set of concepts... with which all religious phenomena can be analyzed, concepts which do not depend upon historical reconstructions, and which are empirically derived from field work." (p. 85). Here the anthropologist goes too far. The project is more complex than to be explainable with field work only, and in many instances needs to be clarified with historical information about the origins and development of cult phenomena.
Chapter III, “Temple and Home, Family and Community" (pp. 85-135), is one of the basic chapters of the whole book.* A great amount of important new information is presented. The author first discusses the various temple types found in Taiwan: ancestral temples (87-90), putative ancestral temples (90-96), the community cult and temple (96-104), the private community temple (104-109), the t'an (109-113), the monastery (113-117), bone temples (118-121); he next offers a schema of three major and three minor (or derived) temple types (122-123) and concludes the chapter with a short treatise on the 'genesis of temples' (124-135).
Although the chapter is richly documented with field experiences, the treatment suffers from a basic ambiguity of scope, also noticeable in other chapters. The author wants to offer an alternative model for explaining the religion of China rather than sticking to the old three-fold division, already mentioned in Chapter II:
"Because of the complexity of Taiwanese religion, with its infinite mixing of various elements from the different religious traditions, it is practically impossible to classify temple types on the basis of their religious affiliation.” (p. 85),
One ambiguity consists in the mixing up by the author of 'temple types' with ‘religion' as a whole; the temples are an important aspect of religious life, but are not the whole of it. Moreover, the author's scope is to define, describe and analyze the “folk religion" (p. 85) which is not the same as the three religions. Instead of rejecting the three religions-model as inadequate, he just could leave it alone: everyone knows that the folk religion and the three traditional religions are not the same reality. The author might
* Accordingly the discussion centring on this chapter extends until page 15 of this review.