Religion in Modern Taiwan: Tradition and Innovation in a Changing Society. Edited by Philip Clart and Charles B. Jones. [Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003. x+333 pp. $49.00. ISBN 0-8248-2564-0.

Abstract

Religion is profuse in Taiwan, and this is reflected in publications. In the last chapter of this collection, Randall Nadeau and Chang Hsun point out that Taiwanese academic publications on religion in Taiwan have increased hugely in the last two decades. Taiwanese anthropologists have probably been most prominent in this study. But this book contains only one chapter by an anthropologist writing as such. He is Huang Shiu-wey. Typical of an old anthropological habit, now that Chinese, according to Nadeau and Chang, are more studied than aboriginal inhabitants (yuanzhumin) by Taiwanese anthropologists, Huang's chapter is on the Ami. It stands awkwardly among the others, which are by historians and teachers in religious studies departments, with its use of anthropological concepts of culture and identity and its concentration on ritual and avoidance of a discrete concept of religion. One other chapter is about “religious culture.” It is by Julian Pas, the justly renowned editor of the Journal of Chinese Religions, who died before he could polish his chapter. The book is dedicated to him. But honouring his efforts to enrich the study of religion in China and Taiwan and sympathy for his state of health at the time will not prevent a reader from noticing how short and thin his chapter is, precisely because he misses so much that anthropologists have written. The book as a whole shares this failing. The introduction does not make the conceptual and informative links to provide a social analysis of the remarkable cultural and religious changes that each chapter describes within its own narrow remit. The editors simply state that religion is dynamic, that modernization includes the fact that traditions change, and that the aim of the book is to chart those changes. They introduce each chapter without linking it to the others.