ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how in the context of state economic reform efforts to revive and stimulate rural political economy in China during the early 1980s, secular commodity exchange fairs were given space to function. And once these secular “temple-less temple fairs” 1 were in place, they not only came to serve as venues for the proliferation of a great variety of popular cultural performance genres, but also as sites where a popular religious revival, already underway in many parts of China, found familiar and fertile ground in which to spread. Through their practice in these venues, performers both secular and religious have thereby played a role in expanding the envelope of acceptable popular discourse in contemporary China, while at the same time participating in the improvisation of a new habitus. 2
