Power on the margins: The cult of the fox in late imperial China

The dissertation combines the disciplines of Chinese religious, literary and cultural history to examine the relationship between local cult practices and power in late imperial society. It studies the fox cult, which was regarded as an “illicit” cult by official standards but flourished in north China among a wide range of social classes from the late sixteenth to early twentieth century.; Chapter One studies the marginality of fox spirits in early Chinese tradition. Chapter Two discusses how during the Ming and Qing periods (1368–1911) fox cult practices subverted dominant cultural norms yet remained indispensable for practical needs in everyday life. Chapter Three examines the ways in which Ming-Qing people interpreted the fox in relation to ghosts, ancestors, celestial bureaucrats and female deities. Chapter Four charts the interaction among fox spirits, local people and officials. Chapter Five examines the multiple meanings of huxian, a popular term with which people addressed fox deities.; The case of the fox cult suggests that in the face of consistent official proscription and suppression, popular cults survived and often thrived precisely because their “illicit” content accommodated socially suppressed voices and culturally repressed desires. The development of the cult was characterized by a dialectical movement of promoting the cult with official and public standards on the one hand and keeping it in line with personal, local and practical demands on the other. Cultural diversity and congruity were simultaneously produced in the practices of worshipping, exorcising, narrating and recording fox spirits at local, regional and national level and by the combined efforts of elite men, officials, and commoners. Shifting between official and unofficial boundaries, the people of late imperial China manipulated the marginal power of the fox to negotiate order out of cultural conflicts and compromises and to come to grips with larger social and political changes. The history of the fox cult illuminates the importance of religious beliefs and practices in today's China and relates the Chinese ways of life and thinking to cultures outside China.