Returning Gods-Ethnography On A County's Rebuilding Temple

Since the 1980s, there has emerged a phenomenon of temple rebuilding in China. In order to understand this, many researchers discussed from the perspectives of politics, economy and religion. Meanwhile, sociologists and anthropologists connected it with local tradition, collective memory, culture capital and country power. Though all of these researches inspired us greatly, most of them did not pay attention to the specific temples and the micro aspects of the temples. As to the scholars who are really concerned about the specific temples, they usually ignored role of the local history in temple renewal or exaggerate the use of renewed temple in expressing traditional local culture. For all of these, it is necessary to further explore the relationship between the temple renewal and the local society.In this dissertation, the author bases the investigation and study on J village that in South Jiangsu Province and designs four dimensions to observe the temple renewal in this village. The first aspect is about why and how the temple was rebuilt, that is, what is the original motivation of the rebuilding. The second concerns when the country power interfered and what has resulted from this power. The third involves villagers interacted with the rebuilt temple and how they understood the ritual practice of that temple. The final point is about the economy logic and operation that maintain the temple to survive and expand in village and about whether this kind of logic has brought forth new changes.By this detailed ethnography, we can see that the rebuilding of the temple at J village in 1995 is a reflection of local history and combination of collective memory, power of shaman and popular authority. However, in the process of entering of country power and seeking for legality, that temple experienced a great turning and all of the local vectors have been marginalized since 1998. As to now, the temple means differently to various villagers. It represents scared field to those devout Buddhists, mysterious power to those daily pilgrims, and ritual tool to those temple organizers. In order to attract more pilgrims, "temple is for money, money is for temple" has been the main principle of the temple organizers. Because of the profitable chances hiding in this principle, internal monks and external cadres of this renewed temple are all scrambling and all of these at last make this temple aliened with J village greatly.As a case study, the fieldwork and the conclusions in this paper inevitably show some particularities. Nevertheless, the author still believes that the stories happening in J village can help us to understand the relationship between temple renewal and local society better. From the theoretical point of view, the collective memory, country power and logic of market economy coexisted in the temple tell us that on one hand there is a closer tie between renewed temple and local society and on the other hand the rebuilt temple perhaps goes beyond local limitation and has changed to be a polyhedron under the influences of new factors. In the sense of practice, a lot of related data and facts about the temple remind the specific relevant departments that laws and regulations on temple renewal are not perfect and it is pressing to take measures to improve them.