Dry Spells: State Rainmaking and Local Governance in Late Imperial China by Jeffrey Snyder-Reinke (review)

Abstract

132 Journal of Chinese Religions Power of Place will be an essential text for anyone studying Chinese sacred space and those engaged in crossing doctrinal divides. This book will also be important reading for those involved in the study of Daoism or Buddhism during the medieval period. However, specialists should not just read the chapters on Daoism or just the ones on Buddhism, because by doing so they would miss the key innovations in this work. BRIAN R. DOTT, Whitman College Dry Spells: State Rainmaking and Local Governance in Late Imperial China JEFFREY SNYDER-REINKE. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, distributed by Harvard University Press, 2009. Harvard East Asian Monographs 311. xii, 314 pages. ISBN 978-0-674-03334-4. US$45.00,£33.95, €40.50 hardcover. Dry Spells is a refreshing book. It explores how late Imperial local officials dealt with that unsettling and all-too-common predicament: praying for rain in times of drought, knowing that a virtuous official was supposed to be successful in his prayers. By doing so, and without excessive forays into theory or grand generalizations, it shows that Ming and Qing local officials behaved quite differently from what we have repeatedly been told was their habitus—upholding Confucian values and standards, fighting against anything else. In this crucial matter, standards were few, and disregarded anyhow; instead local officials engaged in all kinds of “magic,” gladly struck deals with Buddhists and Daoists, and sometimes staged themselves as star performers in grand public rituals. I confidently expect all JCR readers to enjoy the book, but I also hope it will make an impact on scholars of late imperial sociopolitical history who think that “religion” and “ritual” constitute a separate realm that they do not need to explore themselves. For, as the author argues in his conclusion, the book is as much a contribution to the study of imperial governance as to religious history. The book, distilled from a Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Michigan (2006), is dense and very readable. While the first chapter introduces cases from the late Qing press (a key source in this book) and establishes the questions to be considered, and chapter 2 provides the history of official rainmaking in broad strokes from antiquity to the late imperial period, the core of the book is basically micro-narrative, attempting as it does to sketch out what happened when a drought forced a local official to do something about it, however much the Book Reviews 133 official in question was reluctant (understandably so) to act. Chapter 3 lays out the official norms (imperial rituals and regulations for local officials) and chapter 4 details what these officials actually did, choosing among a large array of options. Chapter 5 is devoted to one particular rainmaking liturgy that seems to have been widely disseminated and used, written by a most interesting figure, Ji Dakui 紀大奎 (1746-1825), who deserves a monograph devoted just to him. The more liturgical aspects of the rituals are discussed in the appendices with three translations of liturgical manuals (one from the Han period by Dong Zhongshu [董 仲舒, 179–104 BCE], and two versions of Ji Dakui’s liturgy). While it could have been possible to use this fascinating material for a ritual-structural analysis, Snyder-Reinke has aptly sorted out and laid out the material for other scholars who would want to go in that direction. Finally, chapter 6 rejoins the current debates on late imperial official and elite religiosity, aptly engaging authors like Watson, Duara, or Szonyi by analyzing how the actual process of rainmaking was contested and negotiated and fell short of expressing, much less imposing, a coherent, empire-wide religious/ritual culture. The author is clearly out to destroy the claim that local officials (and all Chinese elites) were pure Confucians. He argues that decisions on rituals were complex, underdetermined from above (or below), and open to individual creativity, choice, and negotiation. That, in my opinion, is indeed the correct approach to understanding the working of local society and state-society relationships. So, to be clear, I warmly recommend this book to anyone working on late imperial China. The remarks below are not criticisms; rather they...