| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Richard Von Glahn . The Sinister Way: The Divine and the Demonic in Chinese Religious Culture. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2004. Pp. xii, 385. $55.00.
This book is one of a number of recent works exploring the "sinister" side of Chinese worship, in which divinity works through raw power more than bureaucratic authority and emphasizes market greed over moral rectitude. It offers an important and welcome addition to earlier understandings of Chinese divinity, which often tended to assume a naïve Durkheimian reading of Chinese deities as a reflection of social categories. Richard von Glahn argues instead that Chinese religion fostered a long argument between an exorcistic side that focused on fearful beings of capricious power and an equilibrium-based view of the moral balance of the universe. These two views evolved through an interplay of different social groups (officials, local elites, Buddhists, Daoists, peasants, shopkeepers) who both shaped the system and were shaped by it, leading to important reworkings in the Han and Song dynasties.	1
Von Glahn's argument turns on the case of the Wutong and their more and less respectable transformations (Wuxian, Wusheng, and many more). This set of five deities has ancient roots in stories of mountain goblins, but the cult came into its own especially in the Song through Ming dynasties in the Jiangnan region—a commercial and educational center throughout this period. There has been a remarkable outpouring of scholarship on this cult over the last few years, with important work by Ursula-Angelika Cedzich, Michael Szonyi, and Guo Qitao. All of these scholars have added to our understanding of the social dynamics of this complex cult, although there still remain numerous areas of conflicting interpretation.	. . .

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