In early July 2004, a group of young altar servants held their summer camp in a house in Mui Wo, a remote bay of the Hong Kong territory. The Catholic priest in charge of their parish, a young French missionary, invited me to join this three-day camp. I had already been in Hong Kong for about a year as a volunteer for the local Catholic Church, organizing pastoral activities for French expatriates while living in a local parish and learning Cantonese at Hong Kong University. Joining this summer camp was an opportunity to further immerse myself among young local Catholics.
When all the activities were over, and everyone prepared for bed, a group assigned to sleep in the upper room of the building came to me begging for my sahpjihga. Thanks to their gestures and efforts to repeat the term many times, I finally understood that they were looking for my cross. Unfortunately, the French seminarian that I was, I did not wear any cross. Once they understood my lack of piety, they turned to the priest and begged for his cross. Since they were supposed to spend the night alone upstairs, he agreed to give them the cross he wears since his ordination to get peace and reassure everyone. The problem was solved.
Yet, I did not understand what was going on and which problem was behind this âcross hunting.â Why were these teenagers so concerned about getting one cross? The priest explained that they were simply afraid of ghosts and wanted protection. Since our building was in the middle of some abandoned fields and in a quite poor condition, these Hong Kong teenagers not used to sleep in such a remote environment were simply scared by the potential wandering spirits filling the surroundings. These explanations were far from satisfying, and all kinds of questions raised in me. How could such modern and well-educated young Christians still be afraid of ghosts? If ghosts exist by any means, how can a piece of wood, even shaped as a Christian cross, be enough to stop their dangerous influence? Should we not challenge their âchildishâ and âsuperstitiousâ behavior?
Coming from a French and rural background where the idea of Halloween was entirely foreign, and where ghosts were perceived as a vanished superstition from the Middle Ages, I still knew how objects are crucial in the deployment of a Christian faith. At my parentsâ and grandparentsâ farms, we put pieces of blessed palms at the front of the doors. At church, we sign ourselves with holy water. And once a year, we join a local pilgrimage during which priests bless our cars. So, indeed, material objects were everywhere in my own experience of Christianity, and as a seminarian, I was used to introducing younger generations to sacraments through a pedagogy centered on objects. But, apart from the Holy Eucharist, objects were always used as symbols to indirectly refer to and recall the presence of the Christian God. They were not the presence itself, or any part of it. They were about meaning.
These Hong Kong teenagers puzzled me. In some sense, their belief in the presence of ghosts and in the power of the cross appeared silly, naĂŻve, and somehow from another age. Since we were all Catholics, I was surprised by the operant connection they made between a material object and invisible beings as if a protective mechanism exists there. How could these young, educated, and committed Christians have such strong feelings toward ghosts, and at the same time such an approach to material objects? Can we really believe that religious objects hold protective power? How far can a Christian be still afraid of ghosts and rely âmagicallyâ on objects to keep them at bay? Should their relation to Christ not free them from these concerns?
Fourteen years later, it is a similar set of questions that this book aims to investigate. When Chinese people turn to the religion of the cross, what difference does it make? How are the ways in which they perceive and connect things together maintained or transformed? What are the cultural continuities and discontinuities implied by a turn to Christianity? These questions not solely aim to enquire who is acting and how, but to also shift our attention beyond specific social actors in order to wonder âwhat is acting?â What is it about Christianity that pushes Christians to act and inter-act this way?
1.1 Dialoguing with the Anthropology of Religion and Anthropology of Christianity
These questions are not new for anthropologists. Indeed, they have generated a rich anthropological literature that explores the turn to Christianity and its cultural implications (Hefner 1993; Cannell 2006; Keane 2007; Robbins 2007). In this section, I briefly introduce some of this literature and the ways in which it approaches the cultural continuities and discontinuities induced by the religion of the cross in order not to provide an exhaustive review but to better situate how this book intends to contribute to this conversation.
A major part of the research on the relationship between Christianity and cultural change takes roots in studies on African churches. Seminal investigations explored the relationship between Christianity and âtraditional religionsâ in regard to the question of Africanization (Comaroff 1985; Meyer 2004). In an intellectual context interested in the question of modernity, some early anthropologists insisted on the modernizing rupture brought by the religion of the cross and foreign missionaries to African societies because Christianity was characterized, for example, as a religion of transcendence (Evens and Peacock 1990; Gluckman 1964; Fortes 1970). Soon enough, other studies highlighted the continuities between traditional African religions and Christianity, downplaying the transformative and disruptive power of the new religion and pointing to the importance of other broader socio-political changes (Horton 1971; Vail 1989; Peel 2000). For instance, Jean Comaroff has studied how the Barolong Boo Ratshidi, an ethnic group of the South Africa-Botswana, have struggled over 150 years to construct an order of Christian symbols and practices through which they can act upon the forces that surround them. Comparing pre-colonial body rituals and contemporary ones found in the local churches of Zion, Comaroff theorizes âthe role of the Tshidi as determined, yet determining, in their own history; as human beings who, in their everyday production of goods and meanings, acquiesce yet protest, reproduce yet seek to transform their predicamentâ (Comaroff 1985: 1). In her approach, Christianity is conceived as a lingua franca between colonizers and colonized, a malleable tool to reconstruct a sense of history and identity which encapsulates both dominance and resistance.
Subsequently, new forms of Pentecostal churches and of transnational born-again movements in Africa and elsewhere across the world led the research to further question previous assumptions that opposed modernity and tradition, and local and global religions (Corten and Marshall 2001; Englund and Leach 2000). An influential contribution to these conversations on continuities and discontinuities has been made by Joel Robbins through his ethnographic description of the moral dilemma encountered by a tiny ethnic group in Papua New Guinea, the Urapmin (Robbins 2004). Since the 1970s, they have embraced a form of Pentecostalism and constantly deployed efforts in confessions and sin-removal rituals. And yet, they remain deeply and painfully convinced that they are sinners. For Robbins, this manifests how the Urapmin juxtapose two contradictory cultural logics, a traditional moral system and a Christian one. In the tensions between a Urapmin social life, where one has to assert himself in acts of will, and a particular âChristian moral systemâ condemning desires, jealousies, and envy, Urapmin are doomed to perceive themselves as sinful (Robbins 2004: 248). In this model, Robbins portrays Christianity as a cultural system of moral values in discontinuity with the traditional Urapmin culture. In later works, though, Robbins embraced a more pluralistic view, but still insists on its disruptive power because âmany kinds of Christianity stress radical changeâ (Robbins 2007: 5).
At the same moment, but moving in the opposite direction, Fenella Cannell et al. explored multiples forms of Christianity in various places to present how this religion is first and foremost in continuity with the cultural milieu in which it grows. âChristianity is not an arbitrary construct, but that it is a historically complex oneâ (Cannell 2006: 7). For Cannell, since the core of Christianity lies in paradoxical teaching about incarnation and redemption, it provides room for each society and time period to develop its own interpretations and social forms of it. By exploring types of personhood, ideas of religious power, kinship, or ritual practices across various churches, those scholars illustrate how the religion of the cross is marked by all types of continuities with non-Christian cultures. For those researchers, Christianity is first and foremost âa changeable phenomenonâ (Cannell 2006: 25), and eventually âa tool to assert and maintain cultural stabilityâ(Marshall 2016: 4).
Clearly, social scientists have developed several ways of approaching, evaluating, and theorizing the continuities and discontinuities that Christianity may bring into a cultural system. Still, the field remains deeply influenced by the Western and Protestant world in which it has emerged (Robbins 2007). Most conversations have evolved around a few concepts central to a certain Protestant imaginary. Notions of rupture, sincerity, and interiority have been repeatedly discussed, and little attention has been paid to non-Protestant communities and their distinctive imaginaries (Hann 2014; Brown and Feener 2017).
Consequently, it is in relation with these particular debates but within the specific historic-cultural context of China that scholars studying Chinese Christians have forged their own conversations. Several historians argue that the initial moral, social, and political disruption brought by Christianity into China has been, in the long run, accustomed to the Chinese religious landscape (Menegon 2009; Xi 2010). By contrast, Henrietta Harrison claims that Chinese Catholicism has followed the opposite path (2013). She argues that forms of Italian piety initially introduced to northern China were extremely similar to Chinese popular religion. But then, Chinese Catholics have worked over the centuries to make their religion increasingly distinct. In a similar way, social scientists suggest that the current appeal of Protestantism in China is fueled by popular opposition to the authoritarian and communist regime and by a disillus...