Ing, Michael David Kaulana, The Dysfunction of Ritual in Early Confucianism New York: Oxford University Press, 2012, 285 pages Kenneth W. Holloway Published online: 11 October 2013 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013 This book is on one level a close reading of the Liji 禮記 (Record of Ritual), a text of great importance that has received surprisingly little attention in recent years. Its contribution to scholarship is in fact far more profound. By leveraging the intellectual apparatus of religious studies, it shows that Confucianism is a religion and not merely a philosophy or a social ethic. The field of ritual studies proves an excellent tool for showing how the Liji is inescapably religious. As the name indicates, this long neglected text contains numerous discussions of how and why rituals should be performed. The simple answer to this how and why is Confucianism. Other recent scholarship by Prasenjit Duara, Mayfair Yang, and Rebecca Nedostup, among others, argue that our difficulty in appreciating the religious side of Confucianism is more a byproduct of the politics of modernity in the 20 th century than with anything inherent in historic primary sources. While the question of modernity is beyond the scope of Ing’ s book, his findings add important early support to this revisionist trend. One modern issue that is an integral aspect of Ing’ s analysis is his contribution to our understanding of the field of ritual studies. Careful connections are made between the analytical methods of ritual studies and the Liji that help us understand the religious dimension of early China. Comparative approaches such as this can at times fail to demonstrate their utility for understanding early texts, but this is certainly not the case here. In Chapter 2, “A Typology of Dysfunction,” Ing cites Victor Turner, who argues that a single event can have the potential to be interpreted differently by each individual attendee. This scholarship contributes to the book’ s close readings of the Liji by showing the ways that participant observers might have perceived alter- ations to standard procedures in a ritual as problematic. These alterations are framed by the scholarship of Clifford Geertz and Ronald Grimes, who provide valuable insight into the notion that a sense of dysfunction can arise when rituals encounter changing times. The connection between these two approaches is the idea that the success or failure of a ritual could be understood differently by individuals depending on a variety of factors, including their purpose in participating in the event. Dao (2013) 12:557–560 DOI 10.1007/s11712-013-9351-0 Kenneth W. Holloway (*) Department of History, Florida Atlantic University, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton, FL 33431, USA e-mail: khollow4@fau.edu