Gods, Ghosts, and Ancestors: The Folk Religion of a Taiwanese Village

David K. Jordan's Gods, Ghosts, and Ancestors, The Folk Religion of a Taiwanese Village, published by the University of California Press in 1972, is a classic ethnography of mid twentieth century Taiwanese folk religion, examining the tripartite classification of gods, ghosts and ancestors that structures household and village religious practice, household ancestor-tablet ritual, and villagers' own divination methods, based on Jordan's own fieldwork in a single Taiwanese village. Its strength is direct, sustained ethnographic fieldwork and its standing as a widely cited foundational text in the anthropology of Chinese folk religion. Its limit is that it is a single village study from a specific historical moment now more than fifty years past, so a claim generalising its findings to Chinese or Taiwanese folk religion broadly, or to contemporary practice, needs a more recent or more geographically extensive source alongside it.