Abstract

Reclaiming the Wilderness: Contemporary Dynamics of the Yiguandao by Sébastien Billioud offers a fieldwork-based inquiry into the nature and transmission processes of a growing transnational religious movement as it attempts to "reclaim the wilderness" of mainland China. This group emerged as a prominent millenarian redemptive society in the first half of the 20th century in mainland China, before it was driven away to Taiwan as an illegal secret society by the anti-religion campaign of the Communist regime. The foundation of the book is Billioud's own participant observation within one particular hub of the religion in Hong Kong, but also includes some fieldwork in Taiwan, Macao, China, and Paris, along with...