This chapter examines the fate of Buddhism and Daoism, mainly in relation to folk religion, looking at Buddhist monks and nuns, lay Buddhists, and Buddhists who ran local temples. It discusses the two main forms of Daoist monasticism – Complete Perfection (Quanzhen) and Orthodox Unity (Zhengyi dao) – and household Daoists, who were married and had jobs but who provided ritual services to their communities. It shows that the majority of monks and nuns were forced out of religious life following land reform but also that monastic life persisted fitfully until the Cultural Revolution. It looks at the responses of Buddhists to the new regime and at the efforts of Chinese Buddhist Association and the Chinese Daoist Association to carry out reform of their structures and theologies. It shows that a small number of former monks and nuns continued to sell ritual services to individuals and local communities, especially for funerals, while household Daoists and musical associations sometimes continued to operate into the Cultural Revolution.

Bieral’s enlistment in the US Navy during the Panic of 1837 marked his transition from urban rowdy to global adventurer. Serving aboard the U.S.S. Columbia, he participated in a diplomatic and punitive expedition across Asia and the Pacific, including a retaliatory assault on Sumatran villages. The chapter details the brutal discipline aboard naval vessels, highlighting the normalization of corporal punishment and racial integration among sailors. Bieral’s promotion and survival amid disease and violence underscore his resilience. The voyage exemplifies the intersection of nationalism, violence, and racial fluidity.

Chapter 3 considers another prominent economic activity, the particular form of begging known as ‘doing documents’. Examining the performances and invocations of this practice, the chapter considers how the documents produced by these beggars attempted to legitimate the act of begging through formalisation and bureaucracy. This reflected an ideal of a valuable form of dependency, but conflicted with a moral logic of the dignity of independence and honest work. As such, the sentiment of conviviality and official regularity conveyed by the document was frequently at odds with the practice of exchange itself: donors frequently viewed disabled people as suspect and aggressive. This chapter examines the debates that ‘doing documents’ provokes on who is ‘deserving’, what kind of work is ‘honest’, and whether or not begging is truly work. Desiring shallow relationships with many donors, the beggars aimed to build ‘contractual dependencies’ with them, deploying the symbolism of the bureaucratic (social) contract both to enforce and limit the relationship.

Chapter 1 explores the discourse of ‘superstition’ (mixin) from the New Culture Movement (1915–20s) to the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), focusing on the intersection of the categories of ‘superstition’, ‘religion’, and ‘science’. Nationalist intellectuals and Guomindang leaders counterposed superstition to modern religion, seeing the former as an impediment to China’s becoming a modern nation-state. A strong theme in the discourse of the CCP was to counterpose superstition to science, and the chapter discusses briefly efforts to propagate scientific knowledge of the natural world. It examines the efforts of the CCP to rethink what religious policy might mean in a country where ‘religion’ did not conform to the implicitly European conception of religion that underpinned the Marxist–Leninist tradition.

The CCP rejected an ‘anti-religious’ policy such as the Soviet Union had developed in favour of one that reflected its commitment to a ‘united front’ with loyal and progressive religious leaders. It involved the setting up of five state-regulated national associations for each of the five religions the regime recognized – Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Christianity, and Catholicism. With the move to the phase of ’socialist construction’, the united front policy came under attack from leftists. Despite efforts by the United Front Work Department to maintain the policy from the Socialist Education Movement (1963–6), the policy mutated into an anti-religious policy that reached its apogee with the Cultural Revolution. The chapter explores how the Chinese Buddhist Association and the Chinese Daoist Association, set up in 1953 and 1957, were affected by the changing policy.

The first chapter provides an orientation in the lives of disabled people in Kinshasa through a consideration of how the interlocutors were identified and identified themselves as disabled, as handicapé – a relatively narrowly defined and recently agreed-upon category of persons. People sometimes overtly pursued this identity for the occasional advantages it could provide, but recognition as an handicapé, and enforcing associated privileges, is far from straightforward. Rather than a depoliticised knowable fact of the body, making handicapé into a recognised identity continues to be politically contested and destabilised, among others through internal rivalries among disabled people and between their organisations. The chapter thus considers the role of a wide variety of disabled peoples’ organisations, and especially the bureaucracy represented by their membership cards, as means of establishing disability status. ‘Real’ membership and leadership was ultimately uncertain and based on constant mutual evaluation. Keeping uncertainties alive allows for an expression of values on the distribution of resources, while creating a productive uncertainty around the question of membership itself.

The Conclusion urges us to consider practices that lead to becoming ‘valuable people’ as something that goes beyond overcoming stigma to changing the evaluations that define what is good. It brings the discussions about values together with a final example of how my interlocutors pursued valued inclusion, by embracing a biomedical model of personhood where people are judged on their minds rather than on their bodies. This draws attention to the wider relevance of questions of entitlement, distribution, and values: wherever my interlocutors went, discussions of values followed.

Supernatural politics is a theme that runs through the preceding chapters. It is intended to show how efforts to indigenize Communism by the CCP drew consciously and unconsciously on traditional religious culture, even though this was only ever one mode of political legitimation. It is hard to measure its effectiveness in promoting the legitimacy of the regime, although it certainly served to mystify the workings of power. Through an assessment of the CCP’s reliance on repression, its failure to forge a new-style religious policy based on the united front, its organizational incoherence, divisions among its grassroots cadres, popular resistance in defence of folk religion, its policies to improve health and popularize science, it concludes that the project to roll back the influence of the recognized religions and eliminate ‘feudal superstition’ had only limited success. Judged from the perspective of religion, the party-state is shown to be much weaker than is often assumed.

The introduction examines the CCP’s hope to break with a Soviet-style anti-religious policy. It examines policies towards the five religions that it recognized – Buddhism, Daoism, Protestantism, Catholicism (Islam is not discussed), as well as towards the folk religion of the vast majority of Chinese which the Party did not recognize as a religion and dismissed as feudal superstition. The CCP’s initial aim was to create a united front with patriotic religion leaders. However, this came under attack from those who increasingly saw religion as an obstacle to socialist advance. Through propaganda, campaigns and scientific education, the regime aimed to eradicate popular belief in supernatural agency. At the same time, it sought to bolster its legitimacy through what is called ‘supernatural politics’, i.e. the use of supernatural imagery and Confucian values to communicate its messages. This led to tensions within the ruling ideology. The introduction uses the steady move towards repression of religion to reflect on the unhappy relationship of Marxism to religion in general.

The Introduction combines a contextual introduction to disability in Kinshasa with an outline of the research problem as the tension between exceptionality and normality in a city that has long defined itself as in ‘crisis’. The interlocutors, their city, the times in which they lived, and their livelihood activities were all subject to ambiguous judgements as to whether they stood out as a negative or positive example, or if they were better viewed as simply part of the general experience of life in the wider community. The Introduction thus outlines the focus on mobility-impaired people in the grey area between work and welfare, where ‘crisis’ (mpiaka) opens a discursive space for experimentation, critique, and evaluation. The unpredictability that marks life in Kinshasa, in this respect, leads people to constantly reckon their social and economic value projects in relation to time. The Introduction introduces how crisis confronts people with choices of realising the short-term values of ‘fending for yourself’ or the long-term values of cultivating dependent relationships.

Focusing on the 1961 UNESCO Conference of African States on the Development of Education, this chapter shows how and why public schooling became the defining development project of West African independence. At the highpoint of African decolonization, two radically new propositions intersected, each shaping the other: the rise of new economic tools, including human capital theory and manpower planning, and the triumph of anticolonial and antiracist demands that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights indeed be universally applicable.

This chapter argues that colonial, Europhone education was the discursive terrain where battles over race and development were waged. Debates over education – access, curricula, credentials – were contests in which European and African men struggled over perceived limits to the African future. As such, contests over colonial education were clashes over different development visions, which were themselves veiled debates about race.