Re-enchanting Modernity

In <i>Re-enchanting Modernity</i> Mayfair Yang examines the resurgence of religious and ritual life after decades of enforced secularization in the coastal area of Wenzhou China. Drawing on twenty-five years of ethnographic fieldwork Yang shows how the local practices of popular religion Daoism and Buddhism are based in community-oriented grassroots organizations that create spaces for relative local autonomy and self-governance. Central to Wenzhou's religious civil society is what Yang calls a ritual economy in which an ethos of generosity is expressed through donations to temples clerics ritual events and charities in exchange for spiritual gain. With these investments in transcendent realms Yang adopts Georges Bataille's notion of ritual expenditures to challenge the idea that rural Wenzhou's economic development can be described in terms of Max Weber's notion of a Protestant Ethic. Instead Yang suggests that Wenzhou's ritual economy forges an alternate path to capitalist modernity.