Taoist Ritual in Chinese Society and History

John Lagerwey is a scholar of Chinese religion, and this Macmillan book is his academic study of Taoist ritual practice within the broader context of Chinese society and history, examining how Taoist liturgy actually functioned within local communities rather than treating it as abstract theology. Its strength is grounding the study in documented ritual practice and its social context, an approach that helped shift the wider field toward taking lived Taoist ritual seriously as a subject in its own right rather than as a secondary appendage to Taoist philosophy. Its limit is that it is a foundational study from the 1980s, so a claim about how a specific Taoist ritual tradition is practiced today needs a more recent ethnographic or fieldwork based source alongside this earlier academic study.