A Question of Control: Licensing Local Ritual Specialists in Jiangnan, 1850-1950

This paper considers various types of vernacular specialists, such as at-home Daoist masters (huoju daoshi 火居道士), lay Buddhist monks, Confucian priests 禮生, diviners (yinyang sheng 陰陽生), actors and musicians, storytellers, and spirit-mediums, with the primary focus on the first of these types. My primary geographical focus is on Jiangnan as a local system, but I also draw examples and comparisons from other areas. I will first consider late Qing practices as seen in newspaper reports, local archives, manuscript sources, and ethnographic writings, and then new policies of registering, monitoring, and in some cases banning vernacular priests enacted during the Republican period. One key actor in these processes was the Heavenly Master Zhang (Zhang tianshi 張天師), who was himself involved in licensing vernacular Daoist priests and diviners, while also working with the late imperial administration and subsequently Republican-era clerical associations