Text and Context

Redemptive Societies in the History of Religions of Modern and Contemporary China

Abstract

In recent years, scholars of modern and contemporary Chinese religion have turned their attention to the subject of “redemptive societies”, a term coined by Prasenjit Duara in 2001 to refer to groups such as the Yiguandao, the Daoyuan, the Tongshanshe , the Wushanshe, and others which had a major socio-religious impact during the Republican period. Spiritually authoritative or sacred texts play a number of crucial roles within redemptive societies. First and foremost, of course, they record and codify a redemptive society’s beliefs and rituals and are thus key sources for the analysis of these aspects of a specific religious system. As obvious as this may appear, such analyses have not been carried out for many of these texts, which more commonly serve as quarries in which to collect data on the organizational structure or social and political history of a particular group. Research that takes the doctrinal systems encoded in modern redemptive societies’ sacred texts seriously has been fairly rare. We have therefore put together an international team of scholars from Europe, Taiwan, Canada, China, Hong Kong, and Japan to focus on the textual and contextual histories of redemptive societies, with an eye toward giving their past – and their future – the attention they deserve.