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politico-religious culture extremely seriously. As he points out very convincingly, the very history of Daoism since the Celestial Master’s first revelations is intimately tied to the adoption of sinitic political ideals, of what we might call Mandate of Heaven lore, by local cultures. These cultures are conventionally constructed as “ethnic,” but the differences with so-called Han cultures probably were only a matter of degree.
Hakka culture could be studied as the outcome of a very similar evolutionary process, in which the adoption of Daoist culture also took place, but was then given up to some extant in exchange for Christian and Confucian inspired ideologies. Here we can expect to profit from the ongoing project led by John Lagerwey and others on Hakka culture in southern China (especially in Jiangxi province). A similar project is required for Cantonese and Minnanese cultures, in order to establish the precise ways in which they eventually became “Chinese.” Preliminary historical work here has been carried out by David Faure and Michael Szonyi, but much still remains to be done.
The adoption by the Yao of what we call “Daoism” did not signify simply the taking over of a religious culture, as much as it was the acceptance of a politico-religious system with the Son of Heaven as the central representative and bestower of crucial rights. As such it gave these local cultures a whole new set of rights. Given the fact that “Daoism” is a modern term to begin with, these cultures undoubtedly did not think of the event as a religious conversion. Indeed, as demonstrated by Eli Alberts, they thought of it primarily in political terms. And to be honest, since the Yao were able to survive into the twenty-first century, it might be argued that their adoption of this political culture was quite successful for a long period of time.
To me, therefore, this book is not only the history of Daoism in connection with the creation of a Yao cultural identity, which eventually shaped an ethnic one; it also points to the importance of understanding this Daoism as both a religious and a political religious enterprise. This brilliant study by Eli Alberts has now cleared away much of the cloud that has been caused by previous, mostly impressionistic