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JULIAN F. PAS
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Another incorrectness is found on p. 273:
... at the level of the town, the cult of the local people and the cult of the Confucian officialdom merged imperceptibly into one and the same figure that of the City God." This is a quite questionable statement: in many towns the City God temple is not the main deity of the community at all: Matsu is an example, Kuan-yin another one. I admit that officialdom made great efforts to positively control the community cults and promoted the City God temples, but I'd rather like to see examples of townships where his cult has become the main focus of worship. Moreover, City Gods do not seem to have arisen from so-called "hungry ghosts" but are rather deified men of great merit. The genesis of these gods does not fit in with the author's theory of deity formation.
In the latter part of Chapter 7, the author discusses cult leadership. There are several forms or patterns (i) the rotating pattern: all the heads of households in turn become "stove-master". (I'd prefer to call him 'incense-master', since in the Chinese term lu-chu the word lu means 'stove' in some contexts, but here it means incensor or incense container); (ii) election by divination (casting the divining blocks), usually for a limited term; (iii) appointment of a committee and chairman and often of a temple manager. Here the author is not clear as to how the appointments are made. If committees appoint chairmen and managers, by whom are the committees appointed? Very often larger temples elect wealthy local businessmen or politicians to their committee, and even in smaller temples local leaders often serve on the temple committee. Wealthy and influential personalities are hoped to guarantee the good luck of a temple in more than one way.
It is now time to recapitulate the main themes of the whole book: to point out its merits and its shortcomings. First of all, the book starts off with some kind of ambiguity concerning what the author's real objective is. On p. 1 he announces his intention as "to develop a new analytical model to account for certain features of belief and behavior in Taiwanese temple cults, and to provide a classificatory framework for temple types in urban Taiwan"; in particular he wishes to examine certain aspects of "community religion". What those "certain aspects" entail is not clear, but an indication is given when author says that his "major goal is to classify temples”, (p. 4). On the other hand, he also seems to aim at revealing "the systematic nature of the folk beliefs" (p. 4), which