Reviews for Religion: The Great Questions - Denise Lardner Carmody - Paperback

The average rating for Religion: The Great Questions - Denise Lardner Carmody - Paperback based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-07-26 00:00:00 Lane Kramer Chau's research is refreshingly practical. He lives at a village temple for several seasons, watching how the locals manage things. As he gets to know the leaders and rubs shoulders with festival goers, the whole situation grows as clear as the setting in a good novel. The temple functions partly as a business-generating community enterprise. It's managers include Communist party officials. The festivals are magnetic sites of "red-hot sociality." Many of the actors, singers, story tellers, and dancers used to work in state propaganda campaigns.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-06-12 00:00:00 robert grimes This book started really well. The author was very strong on his theory. When discussing the different approaches anthropolgists who'd studied Chinese religion in the past had taken and when he was talking about the strengths and weaknesses of their different theories I was nearly always in agreement with him. There was some very interesting theory in this book but where it feel down a little was the practical side. Chau had done fieldwork in a large Chinese temple for over a year but there was very little description of any of the results from his field work. He mostly talked about the head of the temple and his role in the community to the point where it felt more like a biography than an anthropological study. When he did discuss the community it was mainly from the practical side. How money from the temple was counted and what it was spent on for the festivals. It was good for someone to focus on the practical side of Chinese religion, but this felt like it could have been exactly the same if he'd studied a village fete at a C of E Church in the middle of the English countryside. There wasn't really anything that was culturaly or religiously specific. He didn't seem to spend time on the beliefs or practices of the people in the village. He talked about the ling or magical efficency of a temple, but this was something that had been discussed before. He talked about how the religion survived repression but only in the context of buildings. He didn't seem interested in the actual "religion" itself. He mentioned how the changing story of the god had several versions about his official sanction by the Qing government, how he had been tempted to see if this was true but decided not to. I think this is the biggest difference between the historian and the anthropolgist. A historian would have checked and wanted to find out how these ideas had changed over time and where the different stories had come from. I also felt that he totally ignored the gender issue. He mentioned that women didn't really participate in the festival, except as prostitutes. He also said they didn't have much to do with the temple either, but no mention on why this was. Or what women's religious life was like instead. In fact he almost totally ignored women. Of the three photos he included of the festival, two were of groups of almost entirely men, one of a group of almost entirely women. One of the men's photos they were clearly watching the opera, but the other photos no explanation was given. What were the different activities that the men and women were participating in? Why was there this gender segregation? He also mentioned an interaction with only one woman in the entire book, even though he directly quoted her he only referred to her as "so and so's wife". I did enjoy reading this and I'm glad I bought a copy. The theory was very strong I just wish there had been more practical evidence to back up his ideas. It definitely wasn't as good as the age of wild ghosts.