| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Donald S. Sutton. Steps of Perfection: Exorcistic Performers and Chinese Religion in Twentieth-Century Taiwan. (Harvard East Asian Monographs, number 218.) Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center. 2003. Pp. xiii, 418. $45.00.
Donald S. Sutton investigates the Infernal Generals (Jiajiang), costumed trance performers who accompany processions in southern Taiwan and enliven them by performing coordinated martial arts-like displays. Sutton skillfully blends ethnographic and historical research to demonstrate that despite claims of conservatism and antiquity, the practices associated with the Jiajiang tradition are both creative and dynamic. He richly documents the recent history of Jiajiang performance in Taiwan, concluding that the tradition is "emblematic of a tendency toward a distinct Taiwan culture emerging from Taiwan's peculiar twentieth-century history" (p. 289).	1
In this study, Sutton adopts an innovative interdisciplinary approach to the study of the history of performance. As a historian, Sutton found written sources on the Jiajiang tradition to be sketchy and misleading. He further concluded that textual sources can only offer limited insight into popular religious practice since "bodily performance, not texts, is the site where religious statements are made and the power of the gods rendered visible" (p. 10). As a consequence, between 1988 and 2001 he closely studied Jiajiang troupes, seeking to find out "what the troupe can mean for people, what it can do for them, and how their participation as organizers, performers, customers, or watchers has affected its evolution" (p. 13).	. . .

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