Morality, Gift and Market: Communal Temple Restoration in Southwest China

This paper analyses a temple restoration initiative during a state-funded project to attract scattered villagers back to their old village centre in southwest China. While state agents who implemented the project created a public space to bring ‘civilisation’ to the ‘backward’ peasants, the villagers appropriated the project by restoring an old temple, which immediately became the venue for a variety of communal events. The paper argues that the temple restoration manifested the grassroots idea of moral life, which rests upon proper reciprocities between humans and the gods, as well as among humans in reference to the gods. This emphasis on gift relations explains why villagers prefer the temple for public events over the space of civilisation created by the state in its developmentalist project.