Böcker av Sebastien (Professor of Chinese studies Billioud

A syncretistic and millenarian religious movement, the Yiguandao (Way of Pervading Unity) was one of the major redemptive societies of Republican China. It developed rapidly in the 1930s and the 1940s, attracting millions of members. Sébastien Billioud offers an in-depth anthropological and sociological study of the Yiguandao., Repressed and forbidden after 1949, the group is one of the most influential religious movements of the Chinese world and at the sametime one of the least known and understood. Reclaiming the Wilderness delves into a Yiguandao community in Hong Kong that serves as a node of circulations between Taiwan, Macau, China and elsewhere. It explores the expansionary dynamics of a group that now now reestablishinges itself in China and elsewherein Asia. In I, Sébastien Billioud offers the first in-depth anthropological and sociological study of the Yiguandao, focusing on a community in Hong Kong that now plays a central role in the circulation and growth of the movement.

After a century during which Confucianism was viewed by academics as a relic of the imperial past or, at best, a philosophical resource, its striking comeback in Chinese society today raises a number of questions about the role that this ancient tradition might play in a contemporary context.