Faiths On Display

Introduction
Tim Oakes And Donald Sutton
Spirit Money: Tourism And Pilgrimage On The Sacred Slopes Of Mount Tai
Brian Dott
The Alchemy Of The Ancestors: Rituals Of Genealogy In The Service Of The Nation In Rural China
Tim Oakes
Pilgrim Or Tourist? The Transformation Of China’s Revolutionary Holy Land
Yu Luo Rioux
Making Tourists And Remaking Locals: Religion, Ethnicity And Patriotism On Display In Northern Sichuan
Donald Sutton And Xiaofei Kang
Minzu, Market And The Mandala: National Exhibitionism And Tibetan Buddhist Revival In Post-Mao China
Charlene Makley
Economic Development And The Buddhist-Industrial Complex Of Xishuangbanna
Susan K. McCarthy
Naxi Religion And Ethnic Tourism: Persistence And (Re)creation
Chas McKhann
Tourist Itineraries, Spatial Management, And Hidden Temples: The Revival Of Religious Sites In A Water Town
Marina Svensson
South-East Asian Emigrant Communities And The Revival Of Putian Spirit Medium Troupes
Kenneth Dean
Afterword
Rubie S. Watson

Additional Info
Providing a unique perspective on China’s changing relationship with religion, this groundbreaking book explores the role the Chinese state continues to play in religious revival today. Over the past several decades, China has experienced a rapid expansion of religious spaces and activities. More recently, a growing middle-class urban society has fueled an upsurge in Chinese domestic tourism. Faiths on Display challenges the common separation of religious and tourist activities, showing how these practices overlap and blend together. A group of leading scholars explores the unlikely interaction between these exuberant phenomena, finding a surprisingly clear lens through which to view a rapidly transforming society. Even the most casual observer is struck by the Chinese rediscovery of traditional culture, particularly at revived religious festivals and pilgrimages in suburbs, rural areas, and at China’s margins where religious practices of ethnic minorities attract particular tourist attention.

A set of fascinating case studies shows how state organizations are helping revive “sacred spaces” as exploitable sites for tourism development and revenue generation. While this may appear to be a straightforward collision of Chinese tradition with modernization, the contributors argue that the results of combining religion and tourism offer important insights not only into the practice of religion and the rise of “leisure culture” in contemporary China, but also into the changing and contested nature of state governance. The policies of an authoritarian, modernizing state obviously influence both religion and tourism, but religious practices, the book clearly illustrates, tend to slip out of state control, and tourist tastes push development into directions not anticipated or welcomed by the state.

Special Features:

-Offers a unique perspective on the Chinese state’s changing relationship with religion, and the role the state continues to play in religious revival in China today

-Challenges that common separation of religious and tourist activities, showing how these practices overlap and blend together

-Shows how state efforts to control cultural practices and economic transformations are both unstable and highly contested

-Presents a case for tourism as a crucial framework within which to better understand both the revival of religion in contemporary China as well as the state’s efforts to usurp, authorize, and narrate that revival for its own