Gift and market in the Chinese religious economy

Abstract

Religious market theory has figured prominently in recent scholarly debates in the social scientific study of religion in China. This article argues that the existence of ‘religious markets’ should not be assumed as axiomatic but should be investigated as concrete social processes, distinguishing between market and non-market relations. Based on field research among popular religious and spiritual groups in China and drawing on the literature of economic anthropology, the author proposes an alternative model of a ‘religious gift economy’ made up of gifting exchanges between humans and between gods and humans. Five ethnographic cases from China illustrate the operation and coexistence of gift and market exchanges. In contemporary China, there is a tendency towards an increasing marketisation of religion, with a simultaneous growth of religious movements explicitly offering non-market forms of sociality. Rather than subsuming all exchanges under the blanket concept of the market, studies of religion must be attentive to the distinct logics of different models of exchange.

Keywords:

• religious economy
• gift economy
• religious market
• China
• economic anthropology

Acknowledgements

This article is an output of the project ‘Volunteerism in China: Moral Discourse and Social Spaces’, funded by the General Research Fund of the Hong Kong Universities Grants Council. I would also like to thank warmly Thoralf Klein and Christian Meyer for inviting me to the workshop on ‘Beyond the Religious Market’ at the University of Wales at Lampeter in December 2009, as well as the workshop participants and the reviewers for Religion for their valuable comments and suggestions, which have greatly enriched the ideas in this article.