This book explores how religion is and has been created, transmitted, embodied and changed in specific locations in late imperial, modern and contemporary Taiwan and China. Locating research not only on temples, mosques, churches, schools, tea houses, festival sites, burial grounds and shrines, but also cities, neighbourhoods, counties and districts, it explores the rich, and often overlooked, details that fill the lived experience of people doing religion. Seeking to focus on interactions between place, text and agency, this book aims to reflect on the layered and specific histories that develop as a consequence of this interplay. By reducing the scale of the studies to a specific locale, phenomena such as religious change, conversion practice, individual transformation and the transmission of texts, authority, and charisma, can be reappraised.
The contributors to this volume explore questions such as: How do the particular circumstances of time and place shape religious experience? What is specific to a location that influences the nature of religious practice there? What religious power is embodied in a place? How are narratives created around a location? What is characteristic of the religious world in a particular place? In particular, and in different ways, they ask how and why individual texts or sets of texts are transmitted in a particular place at a particular time, how such specific circumstances influence the transmission of authority within a group (or help to disperse that authority), and how authority and charisma are related to specific locations.
1928年中央研究院成立，首任院長蔡元培先生大力倡導國內民族學研究，遂於社會科學研究所內成立民族學組。1934年民族學組改隸屬歷史語言研究所。本院遷臺後，為了對當時為數約二十萬的臺灣南島民族以及在人數上佔優勢的漢民族社會與文化進行研究，遂於1955年8月1日成立民族學研究所籌備處，並於1965年4月間正式設所，創所所長為凌純聲先生。
民族學研究所自籌備階段開始，即以中國民族文化史的研究，臺灣土著民族社會文化的研究，臺灣漢人社會及民俗的研究，及東南亞華人社會的研究為長期研究重點。目前本所是國內外學術界公認為臺灣人類學研究的重鎮。對於國內人類學界而言，本所在研究議題開拓、學術人才培育與教學機構設置方面，扮演領導與樞紐的角色；對國際人類學界而言，本所也被視為臺灣南島民族研究和漢人社會研究的重鎮。本所研究人員的研究專業與學術聲望，以及本所的資源設備，長年以來成為國際學者訪問研究首選的接待機構，也是各種合作計畫、學術研討會與知識交流激盪的基地。
本所現有29名研究人員，其中研究員10名、副研究員11名，助研究員7名及研究助理1名。除個別的研究計畫外，目前同仁依個人研究旨趣與專長分別組成數個研究群，繼續積極推動跨所、跨院校與國際合作的整合型主題研究計畫。目前正在進行的 10 個研究群包括：比較南島研究群、當代情境中的巫師與儀式展演研究群、身體經驗研究群、本土心理療癒研究群、醫療人類學研究群、音聲發微研究群，家庭、世代與生命歷程研究群、宗教生活實踐研究群、區域研究與區域治理研究群，以及行動人類學研究群。
