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“ Taiwanese Pilgrimage in China is symphonic. Its prevailing topic is that of cultural invention. Its leitmotif and the complex phenomenon whose historical ontology it pursues is minjian xinyang —‘popular belief.’ Its variations circle around a thematic of complicity that encompasses Taiwanese pilgrims and their hosts on the mainland; folkloric societies and tourists; historians and intellectuals; and, not least, the ethnographer and his interlocutors, consultants, patrons and clients. Hatfield is a virtuoso of his materials. He is erudite and always acute. He is also discerning enough to recognize that cultural invention never unfolds in the theoretical mid-air of one or another rational actor's strategic calculus. The subjects of Taiwanese Pilgrimage —the subject of the ethnographer included—instead emerge, find their feet and sometimes also lose them within a field of forces that is at once generative and constrictive of the very subjects they

Taiwanese Pilgrimage in China is symphonic. Its prevailing topic is that of cultural invention. Its leitmotif and the complex phenomenon whose historical ontology it pursues is minjian xinyang --'popular belief.' Its variations circle around a thematic of complicity that encompasses Taiwanese pilgrims and their hosts on the mainland; folkloric societies and tourists; historians and intellectuals; and, not least, the ethnographer and his interlocutors, consultants, patrons and clients. Hatfield is a virtuoso of his materials. He is erudite and always acute. He is also discerning enough to recognize that cultural invention never unfolds in the theoretical mid-air of one or another rational actor's strategic calculus. The subjects of Taiwanese Pilgrimage --the subject of the ethnographer included--instead emerge, find their feet and sometimes also lose them within a field of forces that is at once generative and constrictive of the very subjects they might and can be. Their task is t

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D.J. HATFIELD is Associate in Research at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Study at Harvard University, USA.

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