THE FORMATION AND FUNCTION OF THE CATEGORY “RELIGION” IN ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES OF TAIWAN
For decades, anthropologists treated Taiwan as a stand-in for a greater China, and its religious practices as the key to an underlying Chinese essence. This paper traces how the category “religion” came to do that work—signifying the pre-modern, dividing a dynamic West from a static Orient—and how it broke down under the twin critiques of orientalism and of culture as a bounded unit of analysis. It argues that the strength of contemporary approaches lies in treating religion not as a code to be deciphered but as an occasion for place-making and representational practice. A closing interview with Stephan Feuchtwang reflects on over thirty years of writing on religion in China and Taiwan.
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