Introduction

One of us, Stephan, spent seventeen months in 1966–8 doing fieldwork for his PhD dissertation on religious change in Shiding, a small town in northern Taiwan. Shiding had been settled in the nineteenth century by migrants from Anxi. By returning to Shiding and pairing it with the Anxi village of Meifa on the mainland, where the other one of us, Mingming, had already spent two months in 1992, we have been able to compare the use of similar cultural resources in what have become two quite different political systems.