Women, Religion, and Space in China: Islamic Mosques & Daoist Temples, Catholic Convents & Chinese Virgins by Maria Jaschok, Shui Jingjun (review)

Abstract

Those working in Confucian ethics will notice that Ing tends to view Confucian ethics solely in terms of rituals and to interpret Confucian texts as being primarily focused on ritual behavior. At times he seems to present all ethical actions as ritual actions, and while there are relationships between the two in early Confucian texts and they sometimes overlap, an important distinction remains. Indeed, early Confucian texts raise many issues in ethics that are not primarily focused on ritual behavior. Scholars in Confucian ethics also may wonder how the view of vulnerability that Ing describes compares with prominent accounts that have been given by philosophers like Martha Nussbaum and Alasdair MacIntyre, and whether those working in Confucian ethics (even those using virtue-ethical approaches) have as much in common as Ing argues they do. It also seems to me that some contemporary interpreters describe the doubts and vulnerabilities of early Confucians to a greater extent than Ing suggests (and in works he does not discuss).1 Ing’s effort to highlight the importance of the Liji and his claim that Confucian views of ritual can make significant contributions to ritual theory are most laudable, although he departs from the Liji partly in order to argue against the interpretations of scholars working on other early Confucian texts. At one point he says these interpretations ‘‘are not necessarily misreadings of the texts—I am, of course, speaking about the Liji, whereas most other contemporary scholars are writing about the Analects, Mencius, or Xunzi, and as such I remain open to the possibility that there are significant differences between these texts’’ (p. 77). But Ing’s critique suggests that he thinks these early texts all present the same view of ritual failure— something that I doubt the scholars he criticizes, or others working in Confucian ethics, would easily accept. Given that one of Ing’s central aims is to show how the Liji presents a distinctive view of ritual and is therefore worth studying, one cannot help but wonder: if the Liji offers a novel theory of ritual and if a concern with unpreventable failures of ritual is one of the central features of that theory, is it possible that contemporary scholars of early Confucianism have not addressed this matter because other early Confucian texts are not as concerned with it? ERIN M. CLINE Georgetown University MARIA JASCHOK and SHUI JINGJUN, Women, Religion, and Space in China: Islamic Mosques & Daoist Temples, Catholic Convents & Chinese Virgins. New York and London: Routledge, 2011. xx, 276 pp. US$125/£80 (hb). ISBN 978-0-41587485 -4 Following their pioneering study of women and Islam, Maria Jaschok and Shui Jingjun’s new book makes another major contribution to the study of women and 1 For example, Ing criticizes the interpretations of Edward Slingerland and Philip J. Ivanhoe, but does not discuss or cite Slingerland’s major work, Effortless Action: Wu-wei as Conceptual Metaphor and Spiritual Ideal in Early China (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), or works by Ivanhoe such as Confucian Moral Self Cultivation (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000) and ‘‘Heaven as a Source for Ethical Warrant in Early Confucianism,’’ Dao 6 (2007): 211–220. All of these works seem to problematize Ing’s view. BOOK REVIEWS 163 gender in the history of Chinese religions. So far this is the only book-length study on women and religion through the twentieth-century and contemporary China. As the title makes clear, it offers wide coverage of women’s experiences within three different religious institutions—Daoist, Catholic, and Islamic—and its local focus is in Kaifeng 開封, Zhengzhou 鄭州, and Jin’gang 靳崗, in both urban and rural Henan 河南 province, a part of north-central China that still remains understudied by scholars of Chinese religions. The effective collaboration of the two authors also brings out the best in combining theoretical sophistication with an in-depth exploration of historical texts, archival materials, and ethnographic data. Jaschok and Shui claim to follow in the footsteps of feminist historians like Dorothy Ko and Susan Mann in dispelling the ‘‘victim narratives’’ that defined the ‘‘traditional Chinese woman’’ as ‘‘victimized, passive, and vulnerable to abuse outside her allocated sphere of respectable female place and conduct’’ (p. 13...