Liana Chua's ethnography attempts to answer the question why people who call themselves Christians would maintain continuity with a religion that they themselves identify as a traditional relic. The people she describes are Bidayuh of Malaysian Borneo. Their traditional religion is adat gawai. It centers on esteemed, senior ritual experts who can mediate relationships with an enchanted landscape on behalf of the community as a whole. Chua shows how this religion is reinforced and maintained by people who have come to believe these nature spirits are at best subordinate to an omnipotent, sovereign deity who needs no rite.

Chua places this case study in the context of two pressing debates going on now within the “anthropology of Christianity.” The first is whether Christianity is singular or plural, or whether Christianity has any culturally specific content, or is merely a name for a collection of diverse local instances. The second, and closely related, debate is what role Christianity plays in the process of cultural change, both as part of global Western expansion, and as an instance of a particular kind of intercultural encounter of moral orders. For Chua, the terms of these debates come largely from the work of Joel Robbins, especially his claim that Christianity needs to create a rupture in people's social world in order to instantiate its particular values of individualism. Chua poses Bidayuh Christianity as an exception to this thesis. While her presentation of the Robbins thesis and reactions to it is very well informed and accessible, one complaint is that people who are not so familiar with these debates may wonder what relevance this has for the anthropology of religion elsewhere.

Chua, like many people who have engaged Robbins's controversial thesis, views Christianity from the ground up, and emphasizes how Bidayuh have made foreign forms over to express a more communitarian morality. Other critics of Robbins have been content to point to many islands of Bongo Bongo (apologies to Mary Douglas), where the residents conveniently do, make, say, and think things that violate whatever general theory one may wish to puncture. Implied in this is a strong theory of cultural determinism. When people convert to Christianity, they have to modify it to suit their more deeply ingrained worldview. Chua gives this particularist argument a very intriguing twist: when people define their Christian identity in a vernacular idiom, they are operating in an essentially Christian logic of identity. In other words, Christianity needs culture and Christians need to see themselves as subjects of a culture. Thus, Christianity, for Bidayuh at least, thrives when it builds links of continuity with adat gawai.

The argument that Bidayuh Christianity needs Bidayuh culture is woven into the fabric of the book. It often reads like a series of attempts to arrive at this conclusion from different starting points. One such attempt starts from the concept of adat, which is a bedrock principle of Malaysia's official multiculturalism. Christianity is one such adat and so Bidayuh can rely upon Christianity as a way of gaining official recognition of themselves as Bidayuh. Another such attempt, and I think more profitable, is that Christians need to formulate their own account of why they are Christians. In order to do this, it is useful to define oneself in opposition to something like a tradition, and thus one reinforces a reified version of indigenous sociality and cosmology in the process of establishing oneself as a new kind of person. At times, Chua seems to say that the very idea of culture in anthropology has an epistemological kinship with Christian mind-body dualism. It would have been interesting to develop this further. Bidayuh continuity is relevant to Viverios de Castro's argument that anthropology tends to posit a world of many diverse cultures occupying one universal nature. It seems that the best proof that one has a transcendent soul to be saved would be to create a material world for one's body to live in.