ABSTRACT
This chapter has three broad sections. The first outlines the broad range of religious possibilities in China generally and Taiwan specifically. The focus is primarily on everyday religious practice, including some exploration of more formalized religious traditions and of the sectarian movements that have periodically been so important there. The second section briefly traces major religious and social changes over the past several centuries, and the third takes up two specific examples that help reveal the changing role of religion in Taiwanese life. The chapter concludes with some thoughts about one of the issues implicated by the arguments over “Taiwanese” identity so common in Taiwan today the degree to which it is sensible to argue for a uniquely Taiwanese religion. Most Taiwanese religious ritual involves spirits of the dead in one form or another. In its most obvious form in all Chinese societies, this involves the commemoration of ancestors by male descendants and their wives.
