Since the establishment of the PRC and the erection of the Bamboo Curtain, Taiwan provided a window, real or imagined, into Chinese society and culture for Western researchers in the social sciences and the humanities. With the opening up of China that began in 1978, however, Taiwan has gone from privileged to marginalized in the political, economic and even academic arenas. One area where that has not been the case is that of religious studies, particularly with respect to Chinese popular religion. Despite some attempts to limit the role of popular religion in Taiwanese society by KMT leaders after the island’s retrocession, traditions and practices that Chinese settlers brought over from the mainland in the 18th and 19th centuries thrived and adapted to new conditions, particularly in the wake of industrialization and Taiwan’s “economic miracle” of the 1970s. Improved cross-strait relations between the PRC and the ROC have even seen flows of “traditional knowledge” back to the mainland from Taiwan as restrictions on religious worship have resulted in an outburst of interest in popular religion. In that context, Professor Lin’s most recent work, Materializing Magic Power: Chinese Popular Religion in Villages and Cities, is an important contribution to the anthropology of religion. In particular is the book’s emphasis on the role of statues in materializing deities and their power as well as enabling them to enter into wide-ranging relations with worshippers. This is a fundamental feature of popular religion – and not necessarily just in China -- that has been largely overlooked and poorly understood up until now, possibly because of the generally negative view of “idols” in Abrahamic religions. In this book, Lin discusses how statues are employed to tie gods to a particular village and how personal relationships are built up between gods and villagers on the basis of those statues. Spirit mediums are a feature of popular religion that have already received considerable treatment. But by focusing on materialization and the agency of objects, Lin is able to describe how mediums, much like statues, act as personalized and localized manifestations of a deity that are integral to the god’s ability to interact with villagers and participate in their daily life. Statues and spirit mediums are thus shown to constitute a major difference between popular religion and other forms of religion such as Buddhism or Taoism that have their own clergies and a fixed textual tradition. The power of these materialized deities, a popular topic in the anthropological literature, is also shown to be based on relationships built up with the community through their physical form, whether human or wood. A further insight of this book is how the roles of materialized deities, particularly the spirit medium, have changed in Taiwan in response to urbanization and industrialization. Lin’s initial fieldwork was done in a rural village in southern Taiwan, and her ethnography details religious practices in the present together with a history of the village, its temples and deities. She goes beyond the standard ethnographic scope of a single village, however, to follow the development of local religious practices and the role of the spirit medium among families that migrated to a northern city to find work. In this way she shows how new relationships and emotional intimacy, subsumed under the metaphor of kinship, develop among the rural migrants in an urban setting. Perhaps even more significant is Lin’s description of how the role of the urban spirit medium has changed, an area that has scarcely been touched on in previous treatments of mediums. By delving into both ritual details and the thinking that informed the spirit medium’s decisions to introduce changes or create new forms of interaction between the deity and believers, Lin shows how the power of the village deity has been delocalized and how popular religion can be seen as taking a turn towards the personal and the individual, thus mirroring trends that have been termed the “affective turn” or the “subjective turn” elsewhere in the contemporary world. This shift toward the private or the intimate opens up a wide range of intriguing areas for further study in the field of religion and beyond. But while noting that such developments are not unique to Chinese society, Lin points to the importance of localizing the global by grounding further research in a firm understanding of fundamental Chinese cultural concepts like kinship and personhood. Reference: Wei-Ping Lin, Materializing Magic Power: Chinese Popular Religion in Villages and Cities, Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series (Book 97) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015 Reference Wei-Ping Lin. Materializing Magic Power: Chinese Popular Religion in Villages and Cities. Harvard- Yenching Institute Monograph Series (Book 97) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015 Professor Wei-Ping Lin Department of Anthropology wplin@ntu.edu.tw