CHINESE RELIGION REDISCUSSED
175
he believes, a priori, to be different from the three traditional systems. He wants to discover "another system of analyzing Chinese religion" (p. 11). I find this lack of precision rather alarming, and wish the author would have told us whether he just wants to concentrate on a description of temple types or whether he further wants to correlate these temple types with the overall religious world view of the community. Now he wavers from one to the other; he goes beyond an ethnographic temple study but leaves many questions concerning the "systematic and unitary nature” (p. 7) of the folk religion unanswered. I see his main objective as it appears through the various chapters ----- as an effort to clarify the nature of community religion by focussing on different temple types as indicators of that religion, but he has not succeeded in clarifying its relationship with the three traditional systems. Logically as I see it - the thesis of his research should be formulated along these lines: the folk religion (community religion) of Taiwan can be characterized as permeated by a yin-yang view of the universe, expressed in their religious rituals through a differentiation between rituals for the living and rituals for the dead. Temples have each their own range of rituals emphasizing the one or the other.
What I find most wanting is the absence of a formal discussion of community, community cult, community temple and ultimately community world view. Several aspects are present, but scattered around in different places. Although I do recognize that there is a great amount of new information presented to us, its usefulness is very often compromised by the way the author draws his conclusions: as I indicated in the appropriate contexts, the presence of many "subtle distortions" especially of the type of causality-links discredits not the "raw materials" of the research but the final product.
CHINESE RELIGION REDISCUSSED
175
he believes, a priori, to be different from the three traditional sys- tems. He wants to discover "another system of analyzing Chinese religion" (p. 11). I find this lack of precision rather alarming, and wish the author would have told us whether he just wants to con- centrate on a description of temple types or whether he further wants to correlate these temple types with the overall religious world view of the community. Now he wavers from one to the other; he goes beyond an ethnographic temple study but leaves many questions concerning the "systematic and unitary nature” (p. 7) of the folk religion unanswered. I see his main objective as it appears through the various chapters ----- as an effort to clarify the nature of community religion by focussing on different temple types as indicators of that religion, but he has not succeeded in clarifying its relationship with the three traditional systems. Logi- cally as I see it - the thesis of his research should be formulated along these lines: the folk religion (community religion) of Taiwan can be characterized as permeated by a yin-yang view of the uni- verse, expressed in their religious rituals through a differentiation between rituals for the living and rituals for the dead. Temples have each their own range of rituals emphasizing the one or the other.
What I find most wanting is the absence of a formal discussion of community, community cult, community temple and ultimately community world view. Several aspects are present, but scattered around in different places. Although I do recognize that there is a great amount of new information presented to us, its usefulness is very often compromised by the way the author draws his conclu- sions: as I indicated in the appropriate contexts, the presence of many "subtle distortions" especially of the type of causality-links discredits not the "raw materials" of the research but the final product.
No comments yet.
Private notes are available after approval.