Book Reviews 411 revival in the contemporary mainland and Taiwan. The book draws on fieldwork conducted in a Taiwanese village near Taibei in 1966 and 1967 and on the observations of other anthropologists and historians, most also working in Taiwan. The final, new, chapter draws on additional evi- dence from several mainland provinces, including unpub- lished observations by the author's sometime collaborator, anthropologist Wang Mingming. Feuchtwang's starting point is the "Imperial" or bureau- cratic metaphor: The observation that the Chinese fre- quently constructed detailed spirit worlds modeled on the Chinese Imperial court, with hierarchies of spirit officials, bandits, and soldiers. Earlier analysts, especially E. Ahern and P. Steven Sangren, rejected the notion that such spirit worlds merely mirrored and lent legitimacy to the imperial state. They asked instead what other kinds of imagined rela- tions to state or class hierarchies might be evoked through relations to spirit bureaucracies. How, for instance, might engaging with spirit officials teach people to understand and manipulate real bureaucratic apparatuses or to create morally inflected means of imagining the activities of the often distant imperial state? In his introductory chapter, Feuchtwang distances himself from these predecessors, with the result that in all succeeding chapters but the last, all questions of the relations of religious practice to state or class domination are obscured, and religion becomes a play of cosmological representations that create and overcome temporal and spatial boundaries. Nevertheless, on its first publication, this book was an advance in the field. By combining broad surveys of the lit- eratures on territorial and local cults with careful field obser- vations of local festivals and Daoist rites, Feuchtwang dem- onstrates that popular religious practices never simply reflected worldly institutions in their bureaucratic meta- phors: They established differences to such institutions as well as similarities with them, and they created various levels of alternative cosmologies—some, such as those reflected in official cults, orderly and harmonious, others, such as those represented in popular beliefs about demons, chaotic or militaristic. Feuchtwang insists that bureaucratic metaphors, especially those that emerge from local and territorial cults, are forms of historical imagination, which may provide al- ternatives to official modes of historicization. These are stimulating suggestions. Unfortunately, Feucht- wang fails to forge them into a persuasive or unifying argu- ment, producing instead a series of loosely articulated chap- ters with no clear theoretical focus. In chapter 2, he outlines the ritual calendar and introduces some fundamentals of popular cosmology. In chapter 3, he explores the ways local heterodoxies distinguish themselves from official orthodox cults. Chapter 4 is a useful and interesting investigation of territorial cults, which details some of the complex ways that households and temples become embedded in locally rooted cosmologies. In chapter 5, Feuchtwang investigates divination and spirit writing as modes of communication with gods and posits that all religious ritual is communica- tive performance. Chapter 6 is a detailed account of a fiao, a major Daoist rite of renewal and cosmic readjustment per- formed in Feuchtwang's field site in the 1960s. Chapter 7 is a description of the complex and varied representations in festivals, texts, and rites of An Gong, the god of a local cult. The final, new chapter, a comparative analysis of political ritual and religious revival in the mainland and Taiwan, is apparently the grounds for republishing this book. Here, Feuchtwang considers religion in its social and political con- texts for the first time, with the effect, common in the an- thropology of China, that introducing the mainland rein- troduces history. In a broad survey of memoirs and recent ethnography, Feuchtwang discusses the suppression of popular religion and flourishing of political rites in the Maoist era, a somewhat similar suppression of popular relig- ion by the Japanese colonial administration in Taiwan, and the complex circumstances of the revival of religious prac- tice in both locations. The material on Maoist rituals con- tains little that is new or illuminating. The discussion of re- emerging territorial cults, however, is the best part of this book: It draws together the best recent ethnography, with some of Feuchtwang's own observations, into a broad, com- plex overview of the ways temple and cult revitalization ar- ticulate with local political practices, memories, and longings. The virtues of Feuchtwang's book are a refreshingly broad scope and an indefatigable insistence on complexity. Its drawbacks are blindness to historical transformation through- out most of the book, frequently muddled theorizing, capa- cious details often presented in such a way to be more tedi- ous than enlightening, and no unifying arguments to knit its many limbs together. In its two editions, this book is a centerpiece of the genre of anthropological studies of popu- lar religion in China based largely on fieldwork in Taiwan. As such, it explains something of why that genre has so rarely provided inspiration to, or gained a following, among anthropologists in general. Whispers on the Color Line: Rumor and Race in Amer- ica. Gary Alan Fine and Patricia A. Turner. Berkeley: Uni- versity of California Press, 2001. 270 pp. ANAND PRAHLAD University of Missouri Patricia A. Turner and Gary Alan Fine's new ambitious book seeks to wed folklore studies, social/political commentary, and popular psychology. It is highly unusual in its outright aspiration to assist in dismantling barriers that inhibit racial harmony. Although this underlying impulse has certainly driven many folklore studies, it is rarely acknowledged as an overarching focus. In most instances, scholars have worked to- ward this end through an examination of materials that ex- pose the racism of the dominant, white American culture (e.g., by focusing on the traditional expressions of African Ameri- cans). Implicit in such works is the assumption that the reader will gain a deeper understanding of black Americans, which will lead to improved race relations. In short, such studies may