In comparison with other forms of Chinese religions, the study of Chinese Buddhism benefits from several factors. First, the international range of Buddhism allows for fruitful comparison with developments in other neighboring cultures such as India and Japan, and the contemporary identity of Buddhism as a missionary—or at least adoptable—religion provides a continuing audience and community of scholars. Second, the maturity of Buddhist studies as a field of scholarly inquiry, especially in Japan and Europe, has allowed for synergistic cooperation with colleagues having different educational backgrounds and points of view. And, third, the recent emphasis on the study of nonmainstream or popular religious practices has presented challenges that have led the field in new and exciting directions. An attempt to bring together scholars working in these different areas is reported in McRae and Armijo-Hussein et al. 1989.

As china's leading “treaty port” city, Shanghai has long been stereotyped as the prime bridgehead for foreign encroachment on China and as the most westernized city of the country (Tang and Shen 1989: introduction). Recent scholarship in the West still refers to Shanghai as “the other China,” “in China but not of it,” “a foreign city even in its own country” (Bergere 1981; Murphey 1992:346; Clifford 1991:9). In the first half of the twentieth century, was the influence of the West in Shanghai so strong that the city was alienated from the rest of China? Was Shanghai firmly in the grip of modernization, which in China was often associated with a tendency to change toward things Western? Or, alternatively, was Shanghai home to a strong and vibrant current of traditionalism, a traditionalism that can be equated with continuity or persistence of things indigenously Chinese? The answers to these questions can be very diverse, depending in large measure on the dimensions one chooses to examine. Most of our assumptions and judgments on this issue have been drawn from broad and sweeping political or economic perspectives with little attention paid to the everyday lives of ordinary people. How the common people continued to live their everyday lives is, I believe, most relevant to the question of the impact of modernity (or of the West) upon urban China.

If each world region has its own style of anthropological analysis, then surely Southeast Asia has come to be the place where interpretive approaches to culture have reigned, whether in anthropology, history, or politics. Interpretive anthropologists, drawing largely on Boas and Weber, analyze culture into publicly accessible forms and the interpretations different actors give those forms. Despite recent criticisms by political economists as well as postmodernists, this approach continues to guide much of the current research by anthropologists working in Southeast Asia.

The study of islam in china has been strongly influenced by what Lila Abu-Lughod (1989:269) termed “zones of theory” in the general Western scholarship of Islam, in which studies of the Middle Eastern “core” have been privileged over Islam on the so-called periphery. Muslims in China, relegated to the distant margins of both Sinological and Islamic scholarship, have rarely received much academic attention. This summary attempts a brief overview of past scholarship on Islam in China and recent contributions to the field. It is concerned primarily with Islam among the people known as the “Hui,” as they are the “Muslim Chinese” proper, whereas the other nine Muslim nationalities identified by the Prc government do not speak Chinese as their native languages and belong more properly to Central Asian studies. The 1990 census revealed that there are a total of 17.6 million members of the ten mainly Muslim nationalities, with the Hui numbering 8.4 million. Like the U.S. census, religion is not a category on the Chinese census, so this figure includes some members of these nationalities who may not believe in or practice the Islamic religion, as well as excluding Han and other minority nationalities who might believe in Islam. Though some Muslims, especially Uygur, complain of underreporting of their populations, this is a fairly good initial estimate of the number of Muslims in China, indicating an increase of 1.2 million over the 1982 figure, a 13 percent increase (Gladney 1991:20).

The study of chinese religions is a lively and growing field. Its major bibliographer in the West, Laurence G. Thompson, comments that in revising his bibliography of Western-language publications through 1980 to include those published in the following ten years, the index of various types of contributors increased by over 1,100 names, and the number of research categories grew from eighty-four to one hundred and three (Thompson 1985, 1993). Anna Seidel of the École Françhise d'Extrême-Orient, Section de Kyoto, published in 1990 a discussion and bibliography of Taoist studies in the West from 1950 to 1990 that for this topic alone is 124 pages long (Seidel 1989–90). New documents, from Shang oracle bones to twentieth-century spirit-writing texts, are being discovered, the Taoist canon has been systematically surveyed for the first time, and fresh interpretations

The common occurrence of cults of the dead in Neolithic and early Bronze Age societies around the world raises at least one major question about early Chinese religion: what factors account for the elaboration of ancestor worship in China and for the degree to which—compared to its role in other cultures—it endured? The study of Chinese religion in the Neolithic and Shang periods (ca. 4000–1050 B.C.E.) can contribute to our understanding of such matters, but the bulk of recent scholarship is inevitably and properly focused on technical analyses of sites, artifacts, rituals, and spiritual Powers. Many studies address problems of definition, such as the nature of Ti, the high god of the Shang, and his cult (Akatsuka 1977:471–537; Ikeda 1981:25–39; Eno 1990); images of T'ien (Heaven, Sky) (Hayashi 1989a); the nature of the Earth Power and its associated altar of the soil (Tai Chia-hsiang 1986); the role of sun, bird, and other totems in Neolithic and Shang belief (Hu Hou-hsüan 1977; Allan 1981; Tu Chin-p'eng 1992; Wu Hung 1985; Paper 1986; Ch'ien Chihch'iang 1988; Juyü 1991; Wang Chi-huai 1992; Xiong Chuanxin 1992; Chang Teshui 1993; Chang Wen 1994; Wang Lu-ch'ang 1994); methods and objects of sacrifice (Ikeda 1980; Ch'iu Hsi-kuei 1985; Childs-Johnson 1987; Lien Shao-ming 1989; Itō 1990; Hao Pen-hsing 1992); the religious dimensions of illness (Takashima 1980) and of settlement building (Akatsuka 1977:494–99).

The population of traditional china, from government officials to artisans and farmers, shared a wide range of religious practice and belief, including ancestor veneration, annual festivals, funeral rituals, exorcism of harmful forces, and procedures for the auspicious siting of graves and residences. The definition of popular religion is a contested issue in the current state of the field.

Although chinese intellectuals have generally regarded the Western Chou dynasty (1045–771 B.C.E.) as the formative period of Chinese culture, because there was no organized church at the time, studies of religion in China often begin with later developments. While this is a legitimate interpretive principle, it is nevertheless certainly the case that there were facets of religious experience characteristic of Western Chou society.

No longer does the state in vietnam require that farm land be aggregated, consolidated, and farmed collectively by work teams under the direction of rural cooperatives. Instead, the state is open to diverse production arrangements. In particular, family farming, which for decades was officially discouraged and outlawed, is now officially celebrated. Households may work their own fields, to which they have use rights (leaseholds) for several years. This is a major policy change, comparable to the shift that occurred in northern Vietnam when the extensive land redistribution of the mid-1950s was followed almost immediately by the collectivizing of that land.

In the history of chinese religions the Ch'un-ch'iu or Spring and Autumn period (eighth to fifth centuries B.C.E.) was a time of transition between the court rituals of the Western Chou gift-giving society and the private or local cult practices evident in the later Eastern Chou market economy (Cook 1993a). This was the time when the local lords usurped the Chou king's ritual “power” (te) to “charge” (ming) and the Chou lineage lost its authority. The transition is most evident in the speeches (yueh) of the kings and local rulers inscribed on the eating or striking surfaces of the late Western Chou and early Ch'un-ch'iu-period ritual bronze vessels and bells. These speeches or “spoken” liturgies of legitimation initially focused on the spiritually sanctioned right of the ruler to “charge” a gift recipient, but later simply focused on the right of the vessel-maker to charge himself. This shift is most evident after 771 B.C.E. when a western tribal group forced the Chou to flee their ancestral lands and altars. Local lords, originally on the periphery of Chou authority, called themselves kings and manipulated the Chou ideology to legitimate their own independent identities (see Cook on Chu in Cook and Major forthcoming). They relied on the guidance of ritualists (possibly descendants of the Western Chou shih and yin)whose knowledge of Chou liturgy and rites was a valued commodity at local courts (Cook 1993b).

As a way of opening this critique of historical writing on early Southeast Asia, I ask, What interest do today's historians have in studying early Southeast Asia? What are they looking for in the early past? An essay by F. R. Ankersmit, in which he talks about what the modern reader brings to evidence from the past, serves as a point of departure for my answer. Rather than labor at accumulating more and more evidence about the past, historians should reflect on the difference between our own mentality and that of an earlier period. The past acquires point and meaning “only through confrontation with the mentality of the later period in which the historian lives and writes.” The experience of confronting this mentality Ankersmit calls “the historical sensation,” “which is accompanied by the complete conviction of genuineness, truth” (Ankersmit 1989:146). “A phase in historiography has perhaps now begun,” he says, “in which meaning is more important than reconstruction and genesis.”