The Competition for Gifts: The Social Mechanism of the Revival of Popular Religion – An Ethnographic Study of Fu Village in Eastern Zhejiang

Abstract This article uses the “gift paradigm” to understand the social mechanism of the revival of popular religion in developed rural areas. In eastern Zhejiang, peasants burn “Buddha paper [money]” (fozhi) Although fo literally means “Buddha,” in the local dialect of Zhejiang it is better understood as a generic term for “deity,” including Buddha. – Trans. as a gift when making vows and praying to deities. They consider the fulfillment of their prayers repayment by the deities. The reciprocity between human and deity forms a chain of return gifts, with the household as the unit and the year as the interval, which is permeated with affection and morality. In recent years the economic growth of rural economies in eastern Zhejiang has synchronized with social diversification. Village upper classes, which are the most sensitive to risk, have become the main bodies of faith consumption, purchasing masses of Buddha paper or even hiring people to chant scriptures. Their potlatch-style gift display has led to imitation by other classes. Different classes have gone into intense competition over the degree of intimacy with the deities. The competition for symbolic capital is the driving force of the constant expansion of popular religious activities in this area. The rapid growth of Buddha paper consumption has made it impossible for household providers who offer ritual services to meet the demand. They therefore convene older people to form scripture-recitation groups to enlarge their supplies. The use of scripture chanting (nianfo, literally “reciting Buddhist texts”) results in a redistribution of superfluous wealth in villages to their middle and lower classes, via acquaintance networks. Everyday practices of eastern Zhejiang villagers show that popular religious activities in their society have a self-contained logic that has brought about an expansion in the competition for intimacy with deities. Society, on the other hand, has achieved integration in the circle of gift exchange between human and deity. Although the holistic view of the “gift paradigm” is the key to unlocking this popular religion revival, both the “power paradigm” and the “society paradigm” of gift exchange are indispensable in understanding the nature of the relationship in local popular religion.