"Kirsten Endres’s Performing the divine offers a window on contemporary spirit mediumship in the Four Palace Religion as practised in Hanoi, Vietnam. It adds to a growing literature on the flowering of popular religious practices since the opening of the Vietnamese market and general easing of social control in the late 1980s.
"Kirsten Endres’s Performing the divine offers a window on contemporary spirit mediumship in the Four Palace Religion as practised in Hanoi, Vietnam. It adds to a growing literature on the flowering of popular religious practices since the opening of the Vietnamese market and general easing of social control in the late 1980s.
Performing the divine is one more indication that serious comparative studies of Asian popular religions, East and Southeast, are long overdue. Such a project would benefit from the rigorous fieldwork and careful historical contextualization that Endres offers here."