Dry Spells: State Rainmaking and Local Governance in Late Imperial China

Harvard East Asian Monographs #311

by Jeffrey Snyder-Reinke

Chinese officials put considerable effort into managing the fiscal and legal affairs of their jurisdictions, but they also devoted significant time and energy to performing religious rituals on behalf of the state. This groundbreaking study explores this underappreciated aspect of Chinese political life by investigating rainmaking activities organized or conducted by local officials in the Qing dynasty. Using a wide variety of primary sources, this study explains how and why state rainmaking became a prominent feature of the late imperial religious landscape. It also vividly describes the esoteric, spectacular, and occasionally grotesque techniques officials used to pray for rain. Charting the ways in which rainmaking performances were contested by local communities, this study argues that state rainmaking provided an important venue where the relationship between officials and their constituents was established and maintained. For this reason, the author concludes that official rainmaking was instrumental in constituting state power at the local level. This monograph addresses issues that are central to the study of late imperial Chinese society and culture, including the religious activities of Chinese officials, the nature of state orthodoxy, and the symbolic dimensions of local governance.

320 pages, Hardcover

First published March 15, 2009

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short and solid monograph that makes a persuasive case for the centrality of official rainmaking rituals to the consolidation of local authority in imperial China. Where the book takes a critical position is on the question of whether this authority was exclusively Confucian; Snyder-Reinke argues that official authority was much more ecumenical in practice than state ideology or local gazeteers would lead one to believe. Confucianism never became, as the leading historiographic convention would have it, the integrative glue that bound Chinese society together from top to bottom. In a sense, Confucianism was always in play, and never free of competition from Daoist, Buddhist, or other local belief systems. Rainmaking ritual, as colorfully described in 'Dry Spells', makes clear the eclecticism of its ritual sources, so much so that to someone more familiar with Western traditions the pragmatism of the practices, however bizarre, approach something like the experimentalism of modern science.

Most interesting, apart from the descriptions of ritual rainmaking itself, are the discussions of contested rituals, when officials or their representatives find their practice mocked, challenged, or supervened by local traditions or skeptics that the Empire could never fully silence or co-opt. These are powerful details, shocking in the picture they give of popular dissent just below the surface of Qing imperial authority.

Yet, to a non-specialist reader, the image that one takes away is of a polyvocal heterodoxy with an arbitrary center that managed to only superficially deploy a unifying ideology throughout a vast domain. There is a certain echo here of the premodern European state, typically imperial, asserting a universalist culture across an ethnic hodge-podge, one that is powerful and compelling but not until the modern period succeeds in laying its foundations deep in the soil of local, popular culture - at the expense of the latter.

What would have been interesting, though admittedly beyond the scope of this monograph, would be a study of the ritual and religious relations of all hydrological practice - both rainmaking and rain *stopping*, and these with the array of concrete policies for water management in times of both famine *and* flood. Sima Qian related that the first emperor of the unifying Qin Dynasty was associated with the water principle; a similar effort of conceptual unification on this all important topic would be welcome.

Lastly, it would be interesting to see some of the same material treated by Snyder-Reinke, a historian, treated by an anthropologist. When it comes to systems of meaning ('cultures'), historians can be at a methodological disadvantage, whereas those trained to tease out patterns might be able to harmonize what seems like disparate material. Snyder-Reinke states repeatedly that Chinese rainmaking ritual was an eclectic mess. Perhaps, but would someone more ethnographically oriented come to the same conclusion?