A Poetics and Politics of Repression

A Poetics and Politics of Possession:
Taiwanese Spirit-Medium Cults and Autonomous Popular Cultural Space

Peter Nickerson
My intent in this essay is to discuss cults of spirit possession and healing
in Taiwan, to consider the potential for this form of popular culture to
create autonomous spaces, and to evaluate the larger social and political
consequences of such autonomy. However, before turning to discussion of
Taiwan, it would be useful to examine briey another recent study of posses-
sion cults in a perhaps not entirely dissimilar environment, namely, Michael
Taussigs barely ctionalized Venezuela. (Taiwan is also a former colony
with a well-developed modern economic sector.) In his Magic of the State,
Taussig describes a kind of symbiosis between the state and popular reli-
gion, in which the same force that animates the bodies of the possessed is the
history, and the historical gures and stereotypes, on which the state relies
for its legitimation: a sixteenth century cacique, an early nineteenth cen-
tury barefoot black cowboy freedom ghter, . . . the Liberator [Simon Bol-
var] himself, coughing blood. And in thus physically manifesting, making
positions 9:1 2001 by Duke University Press
positions 9:1 Spring 2001 188
palpably real, the normally merely metaphorical gurations on which the
nation-state depends for its own legitimating appropriation of history, pop-
ular religionthe bodies of the urban poorsuppl[ies] stately discourse
with its concrete referents. At the same time, participants in the possession
cults themselves become in some way empoweredable to make magic
from the magic of the state.
1
All of this might be applied to contemporary Taiwanese popular religion,
except the magic involved is that of a state that went out of existence in 1911.
Most discussions blithely skip over this issue, referring to the bureaucracy
of the other world as an obviously more or less accurate reection of this-
worldly administration, all the while failing to note that the Jade Emperors
earthly counterpart can no longer be found.
2
So that, perhaps, is one way of
stating the question this essay seeks to address: What possibilities open up
when the state chooses (as I shall discuss in more detail below) to rely on
other, secular sources for its legitimacy?
Taussigs analysis, which I by no means would wish to dispute, ts rather
nicely with many currently accepted notions of what constitutes popular
culture. As is well known, most debates on this topic have oscillated between
two poles. On one end of the spectrum is the gloomy view of the Frankfurt
school, according to which the public at large is subject to the hegemony of
a culture industry. Ordinary people, while presented with the illusion of
choice, consume culture the same way they consume any other industrial
product, and thus are placed under the same restraints to which their bour-
geois overlords subject them in the more purely economic spheres of labor
and the consumption of material goods.
3
On the other end of this spectrum,
those who have sought elements of resistance within popular culture have
done so by claiming that the dominated might make usein a subversive
mannerof what is given to them by the dominant classes. Such resistant
uses themselves then become a praxis that is not only consumption but also
the production of new meanings or readings. One might mention Michel
de Certeaus metaphor of the rented apartment, not owned but decorated to
the renters taste.
4
But, ultimately, only limited gains can be made. Consider
John Fiskes comparison of popular uses of the products of the dominated
to guerrilla warfare. The guerrillas may resist, and indeed may win con-
cessions from the established authorities, but ultimately, like so many Viet
Nickerson A Poetics and Politics of Possession 189
Cong, they need to melt into the general village population again, once more
indistinguishable from the rest of the compliant masses.
5
Taussigs stance is quite consistent with this latter view: the people use
what is given to them by the statethe history with which the State of the
Whole constructs itselfwhile the state appropriates the magic through
which those very symbols are made real. What appears to be a most outr
form of religio-magical practice turns out to be a process of mutual appro-
priation between dominated and dominators, making the nation safe for
state fetishism.
In any event, the possibility of a genuinely autonomous culture, made not
for but by the people, seems scarcely possible. This point has been clearly and
authoritativelymadebyPierreBourdieu: Thosewhobelieveintheexistence
of a popular culture . . . must expect to nd . . . only the scattered remnants
of an old erudite culture (such as folk medicine) . . . and not the counter-
culture they call for, a culture truly raised in opposition to the dominant
culture and consciously claimed as a symbol of status or a declaration of
separate existence.
6
So now to Taiwans spirit-medium cults and an attemptwhich, in light
of the above discussion must appear radical (and/or romanticist)to stake
out arather more extreme position. Some months of eldresearchonpopular
religion in the city of Tainan in southwestern Taiwan have convinced me
that the question of popular cultural autonomy needs to be rethought. In
some cases at least, popular culture can be theorized, not between the poles
of hegemony and subversion, but outside them. We need to go back to
Bakhtin, as it were, and to reconsider the possibilities for certain types of
collective practices to create autonomous, popular cultural spaces, spaces
that are more than simply poached upon by the people, but that genuinely
belong to them. That is, neither the Frankfurt schools notion of popular
culture as imposed fromabove and passively accepted by the dominated, nor
the populist contention that such acceptance is far from passive and involves
creative processes of rereading and subversion, allows for the possibility that
the dominated might make something of their own. Owing to their roots
in a particular discourse of possession trance, such autonomy (a reasonable
word and, I think, at least more euphonious than auto-production or the
like) is intrinsic to the popular religious groups I have studied.
Autonomy of this sort has its consequences. Precisely because the truths
generated by the activities of the medium cults are empowered by cultural
resources that lie outside the mainstreampossession trances that embody
the magic of a no longer existent statethey cannot directly challenge those
produced by the dominant culture. When the devotees of the spirit-altars
confront mainstreamdiscourses on religion, they can do so only by referring
to a set of notions that is in many ways alien to the poetics of possession
itself; these notions are insteadlargely consistent withthe very conceptions of
religionthat marginalize the possessioncults. Religionis unscientic; proper
religion can be opposed, according to several criteria, to improper supersti-
tion. These ideas are broadly shared in Taiwanese society. As I shall try to
show, by accepting these notions and employing them in their own expla-
nations of and justications for their activities, the cults adherents, rather
than subverting the dominant order, assist in perpetuating it. Paradoxically,
whatever potential for resistance popular culture might possess according to
de Certeau and others, in the Taiwanese case cultural autonomy blunts such
potential rather than enhancing it.
After rst describing the procedures generally followed in spirit-medium
sances, I will turn to the poetics of spirit possession, the characteristics
of trance behavior that make autonomy possible. Further sections, based
largely on work at one temple and a case study of one womans experiences
there, will then provide a basis for a discussion of the larger issue of pop-
ular religious discourses and the more authoritative ones with which they
interact. The generation of authoritative discourses in response to popular
religion is particularly visible in print media accounts written in the wake
of religious scandals. I will examine one such case, the Song Qili affair of
1996. Finally, I will assess the discursive and social consequences ofand
the limitations onthe kind of popular cultural autonomy I have found to
characterize the medium cults.
Spirit-Medium Sances in Tainan
The following describes events that took place on the evening of 13 July
1997:
7
The spirit-medium, a slight man in his late fties with a somewhat drawn
face, walks to the altar andsits downsilently, hands claspedandheadslightly
bowed. Soon(inabout tenminutes) he will be the vehicle for the Living Bud-
dha Jigong, a drunkard, vagabond monk who is said to have lived during
the thirteenth century, and who later became the subject of both vernacular
literature and religious worship (a not uncommon pattern). Devotees mill
around, some chatting quietly with one another, others registering for con-
sultations with the deity and making the appropriate preliminary offerings
of incense before the temples images. The temple, or spirit-altar (shentan),
is called San Qing Gong (Palace of the Three Pure Ones) and is located in
Tainans eastern district. Public altars (gong tan), when the altar is opened
(kai tan) for consultations with the god, are held here three times during ev-
ery ten-day period. Anyone may come in and consult Jigong, and the sances
are normally attended by around twenty or thirty people.
An assistant (and longtime devotee) approaches the altar and repeatedly
strikes a large wooden sh and a metal bell, signaling the incipient arrival
of the god and the formal beginning of the sance. The mediums hands
and head begin to tremble, and he belches intermittently. He gestures for
the assistant to help him put on Jigongs patched robe. The medium himself
places a rosary around his neck and, on his head, Jigongs usual hat, which
is tall and rather comical, with the character fo (Buddha) written on it. He
takes up his fan in his right hand and a container of rice wine in his left.
His increasingly vigorous, rhythmic trembling and shaking motions cause
him to tap more and more loudly on the altar with the fans handle. Then,
after a smile and an exclamation of amusementha ha ha ha ha ha ha
hahe begins singing, largely wordless tunes that, he had once explained,
were from the opera of Nanjing (near the original Jigongs home region).
The singing continues (oscillating oddly owing to the continued rhythmic
trembling), interspersed with various ha-ha-has and heh-heh-hehs (in
the same rhythm) as well as occasional swigs on the wine, until he is fully in
possession trance.
Jigong gets up from the altar, still singing, and staggers about for a bit,
making dramatic gestures with his fan. The assistant gives him a long
draught of smoke from an incense burner. Then Jigong processes to a chair,
which has many nails protruding, points up, fromseat and back, and sits for
a minute or two while still singing, fanning himself, and bouncing up and
down slightly. He gets up (the nails make faint musical noises as, one by one,
they gradually release his clothing), walks to the altar to set down his wine,
and walks back to the center of the oor to speak with his rst questioners.
A man and his wife want to ask about the husbands career and the health
of their middle daughter; they both greet him with hands pressed together
in a gesture of reverence.
On any night of the week, all over Taiwan, scenes like the one just de-
scribed take place. People go to shrines and temples to consult a variety of
deities of the popular Chinese pantheon. The gods and goddesses are repre-
sented by their spirit-mediums (jitong, or tang-ki in Taiwanese), who enter
possession trances and then answer questions on a variety of topics (both
female and male tang-ki are common). Some smaller spirit-altars convene
only when one or more people need to consult the deity, while the relatively
larger ones (which may operate out of anything from a storefront shrine to
a multistory public temple) usually have regular schedules that allow for
public consultations once or twice a week.
While I have attempted no overall numerical assessment of Tainans
medium shrines, a recent survey of the cult to a single deity in Taiwan,
the Reverent Lord of Broad Compassion (Guang ze zun wang), lists nine
spirit-altars dedicated to that god in Tainan city alone, and another six in
Tainan county. The majority hold at least weekly consultations with the
Reverent Lord,
8
and the Reverent Lord is of course only one of the many
deities embodied by mediums in Tainan. These include popular deities as-
sociated with all three of Chinas textualized religious traditionsTaoism,
Buddhism, and Confucianismsuch as Lord Guan, Guandi, the deied
hero Guan Yu of the third-century Three Kingdoms era; Mazu, or Tian
Hou, the Empress of Heaven; Guan Yin, Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva
Hearer of the Worlds Sounds; the various plague gods known collectively as
Wangye or Lords; and even Bodhidharma, the rst Chinese patriarch of
Chan/Zen Buddhism, to name just a few. The large number of active spirit-
altars staffed by mediums indicates their continued centrality to Taiwanese
popular religion and popular culture generally.
As for the usual procedures at the spirit-altars, sances begin with the
medium entering the trance-possession state. An assistant then reads the
name of the questioner, usually giving other personal details, such as address
and age. Then the questioner may present his or her inquiry. The majority
of inquiries concern health, and people often come to seek the help of the
goddesses and gods when standard medical treatment has failed to bring
a cure or the usual diagnostic techniques fail to nd anything wrong. The
other main category of questions concerns matters of luck and fate. People
ask about the future in general, about business activities, or about transi-
tional events such as marriage or moving a household and their timing. If
reasons are attributed for medical or other misfortunes, they are usually
of several often overlapping types: horoscopic (bad astrological conjunctions
have causedanindividual tocollide withone or more malignastral deities),
familial (a deceased family member is unhappy and causing the misfortune
so that attention will be paid to his or her problem), or geomantic (i.e., in-
volving bad fengshui, the arrangement of domestic or other spaces). The
gods responses almost always include the writing of talismans, or fu, myste-
rious, often entirely illegible characters written with brush and ink. These
represent a concretization of the healing power of the god, and the paper
talismans most frequently are burnt and the ashes mixed with water and
ingested.
A Poetics of Possession
An examination of the discourses generated by the mediumcults must begin
with the speech of the medium. Possessed speech is often unremarkable in
terms of what it merely supercially says; what distinguishes it is, of course,
that it emanates from a person whose body has been occupied by a deity.
That process of enthusiasm, of engodment, is acted out publicly at the
beginning of every sance. Mediums never arrive at the temples altar in
a possessed state. They sit before or beside the altar and undergo, for all
present to see, the process of possession. The witnessing of the mediums
entrancement is an indispensable part of trance discourse.
The procedure through which mediums become possessed, though inar-
ticulate andsupercially incoherent, is fraught withmeaning. This meaning
is best approached by means one might loosely call semiotic. Since, as I will
claim, the process of entrancement, rather than the content of the utterances
of the possessed oracle, is most essential to trance discourse, it is insuf-
cient merely to analyze the pronouncements of the deities once they have
completely entered the bodies and begun speaking through their mediums.
Rhythm is dominant in the rst stages of most Taiwanese trance perfor-
mances, where it is almost always as much or more bodily than vocal. While
mediums all enter trance differently, the majority during at least one stage
tremble, twitch, shake, or rock, usinghands, arms, legs, head, neck, or the en-
tire body. The movements become more violent as the trance deepens, then
they subside to some degree when identication with the deity is complete.
All the bodily motions seem to be regulated by a master rhythm, usually
the twitch of hand or arm, with which other motions or vocalizations are
then harmonized. Rhythmic trembling and shaking is more often than not
the principal marker of entry into trance, climaxed by larger bodily motions
and postures and punctuated with (usually unintelligible) speech and other
sounds.
Glossolaliaspeaking in tongues, as it wereis also highly relevant. The
vocal performances of one female mediumin Tainan county were especially
striking. (She is customarily possessedby a minor female deity calledImmor-
tal Maid Shi [Shi Xiangu] but sometimes also serves as the vehicle for the
Bodhisattva Guan Yin.) As she nears the possession state, she alternates
very loud, low-pitched, and rather masculine exclamations, somewhere
between belches and yellsHWAAAAHP! or YAIYAIYAH!with
rapid, higher-pitchednoises, suchas huaa-soho or yai-saha. Into this mix
are then added gradually longer and longer, entirely unintelligible (both to
myself and to other bystanders) declarations in a very high pitched, rapid,
lilting voice. Her vocal range is truly striking (those who have listened to au-
diotapes have sometimes assumed that more than one person was speaking),
and her unearthly utterances are haunting, even disturbing, despiteor
perhaps in part because oftheir incomprehensibility.
The necessity of entrancement behavior to the semiotic effectiveness of
the sance is further conrmed by the mediums frequent reference back to
that initial procedure. After settling into their trances to conduct divination
or other rites, most Taiwanese mediums continually cite the entrance-
ment process by means of small but continuous tremblings or occasional
more noticeable shakes and twitches, belches or yawns, outbursts of gods
language, or the like. It is as if the audience has to be periodically reminded
of the source of the mediums utterances.
There are certain convergences between Taiwanese trance performances
andother forms of behavior that have beenmore thoroughlyanalyzedbyEu-
ropean writers that help to shed some light on the former. Trance discourse
closely resembles other texts and performances that have been variously
labeled poetic, disruptive, spectacular, and (therefore) popular.
Poetry and possession are not as distant as one might think; one need only
consider the ancient Greekconception of poetic composition as possession by
the Muse.
9
Poetic and ecstatic forms of expression share similarities of both
form and content. Poetry highlights aspects of words that are unconnected
to denoted meaning but central to the sound of poetry, such as rhyme, alliter-
ation, and above all, rhythm. Julia Kristeva has similarly highlighted other
characteristics of poetic language that also are central to trance discourse,
in particular glossolalia and related vocalizations, which she nds audible
in both the rst echolalias of infants and the rhythms, intonations, [and]
glossolalias in psychotic discourse. Indeed, poetic speech always borders
on psychosis. Poetic language is thus the expressive aspect of the physicality
of speech and is rooted in the body and in unconscious drives.
10
I would not like to place too much weight on the links Kristeva makes
between poetic and either infantile or psychotic speech. In Taiwanese society
itself, communities and their religious leaders often require some time to
decide whether anindividuals trance behavior is evidence of a divine calling,
demonic possession, or simplymental illness, as Marjorie Wolf has detailed.
11
Part of what I have just called glossolalias (the rapid, high-pitched speech)
were explained to me by the spirit-altars adherents as gods language (shen
yu), intelligible to the divinities present, but not to humans. Whether such
speech is culturalized as divine or psychotic is not the central issue.
Instead, beyond the formal resemblances, I would like to point out the
similarities of social effect that can be attributed to poetry and possession. As
for poetic language, it is by nature subversive. According to Kristeva, Poetic
language, in its most disruptive form (unreadable for meaning, dangerous
for the subject) shows the constraints of a civilizationdominatedby transcen-
dental rationality. Consequently it is a means of overriding this constraint.
Thus there is an intrinsic connection between literature and the breaking
up of social concord, and between poetic language and the disruptive forces
of Bakhtinian carnival.
12
It is, of course, that same potential for resistance, for creating truths in
opposition to those of the dominant culturefor making space for popular
culture that does not ultimately have to be given back, guerrilla-like, to the
power blocthat I wouldlike toattribute tothe spirit-altars of the mediums.
Like Kristevas poetry, the mediums performance begins as unreadable for
meaning, as well as dangerous for the subject in its continual suggestion
of the threat of loss of mental stability (or of the mediums very personal-
ity, or soul). But the sance then continues as oracular pronouncement, as
advice and instruction made clearly intelligible either by the medium alone
or with the assistance of an interpreter. The poet, too, must compromise, of
course, by enunciat[ing] rhythm, . . . socializ[ing] it, . . . channel[ing] it into
linguistic structure, in order to create the writers universe.
13
The sance
establishes its universe througha true cosmogony: the creationof the ordered
oracle from the chaos of entrancement.
Also notable are the rather odd convergences between the Freudian and
Lacanian Kristeva and the authors of Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze and Flix
Guattari. The Taiwanese spirit-medium is rather like Deleuze and Guat-
taris schizo. The medium/schizo retreats into the body without organs,
which in order to resist using words composed of articulated phonetic
units . . . utters only gasps and cries that are sheer unarticulated blocks of
sound (compare Kristevas glossolalias). The energy that passes through
that organless body is divine, and the rst things to be distributed on
[the schizos] body without organs are races, cultures, and their gods. For
Deleuze and Guattari, and Kristeva as well, in psychosis/possession the
unconsciousthe undifferentiated otherbreaks out to break down the
established order.
Finally, the schizophrenic, or the spirit-medium, I would claim, is the
universal producer.
14
Who produces the mediums trance? Not the culture
industry. In this instance the means of production, as it were, belong to the
mediumcults themselves, establishing territory that can be held, not yielded
to the dominant classes. The cultural space created at the spirit-altar via the
mediums trance provides more than the metaphorical rented apartment;
instead, it is a place of their own.
Meiling
People inTainangotospirit-altars more oftentomake inquiries about illness
and healing than for any other reason. The tensions between the ethos of the
medium cults and modernist, scientistic notions is nowhere clearer than in
the arena of medicine. Ayoung womans case history will provide a basis for
an account of how this conict is frequently understood and played out.
In April 1997 a twenty-seven-year-old woman resident of Tainan city,
whomI will call Chen Meiling, was due to have a minor eye operation. Prior
to the operation, however, she had a ght with her husband, whomI will call
Mr. Li. The husband took both his personal effects and their two children
back to his parents home in Tainan county. Meiling later telephoned him,
but he refused to speak to her. She then took eight tranquilizers, drank
some alcohol, and telephoned her elder sister. (All of this information was
reported by the sister.) Worried, the sister went to Meilings home in Tainan
city. Meiling failed to answer the door, and the sister called the police and
had them break in.
Meilingwas takentoahospital emergencyroom, where the doctor claimed
that she had no serious problem: Mei shenme. However, the sister felt that
Meilings manner hadchanged, that she was insome way not her former self,
andsobrought her toconsult LordGuan(Guandijun) at the Prefecture of the
Southern Heaven (Nantianfu), a large public temple in the eastern district of
Tainan where I did my most intensive workon the mediumsances. Meiling
would attend sances about once a week from April until early July, when
her treatment reached a climax. She began by participating in the regular
Wednesday night sessions, for both diagnosis and treatment of her problem,
which was described to me simply as a mental problem or nervous disorder
( jingshen wenti or shenjing wenti). Meiling frequently received treatment
in the form of talismans written by the possessed medium. These were
used for general purposes and at other times for more specic symptoms,
such as nightmares. On other occasions Meiling would stand before the
gods palanquin, or divination chair, while it shook up and down several
times, then walk beneath it, a common apotropaic, healing and purifying
procedure.
15
Most of Lord Guans energies, however, were devoted to diagnosis
specically, identifying the spirits responsible for Meilings maladyand to
serving as an intermediary in order to reach an accommodation with those
forces. Many of Meilings symptoms were acted out, and interpreted by the
god and by Meilings family and the rest of the sance community, as spirit-
possession. Both at home and at the temple she especially frequently spoke as
a three-year-old child. Over the course of successive temple sances as well as
two house callssances at Meilings home in the city and at the home of
her husbands family in Tainan countyLord Guan developed an elaborate
diagnosis involving the histories of both the agnates and the afnes.
Onthe husbands side the problems were several. Meilings father-in-laws
uncle (shu gong) had disrupted the usual pattern of agnatic succession (dao
fang). By dying unmarried he lacked heirs who could make offerings to him
as an ancestor. During a sance at the Li family house, Lord Guan declared
that this initial problem, combined with certain geomantic issuesthe mis-
placement of an electric pole and the presence of a brick wall surrounding
the familys front yardhad invited the entrance into the family compound
of a host of Killers of the Yin-realm( yin sha), or wandering, non-kin, malec
spirits. In turn, this engendered the possession by one of these spirits, a three-
year-old child. During a sance at Meilings parents apartment, responses
to Lord Guans inquiries determined that her mother had carried a female
fetus that had died through miscarriage. As is usual, the girl continued
to mature as a ghost in the other world. All of these spiritsthe heirless Li
agnate, the outsider ghosts (especially the three-year-old), and the girl ghost
in Meilings familywere unhappy, no doubt because of insufcient ritual
attention from the living and consequent sufferings in the afterworld. Thus
they had fastened on Meiling, causing her maladies in order to make people
pay attention to their plights.
The ultimate solution to these problems took the form not of violently
exorcising the problematic ghosts but of helping and propitiating them.
After a one-month cooling-off period prescribed by Lord Guan, during
which Meiling continued to come on Wednesdays for checkups but little
else was done, a Taoist priest was engaged. He performed a salvation ritual
called an Attack on the Fortress (da cheng) in Tainans Palace of the Eastern
Peak (Dong yue dian), a temple with a special relationship to the underworld
and the administration of the shades. The ritual was held for the benet of
the heirless uncle and the three-year-old, on the husbands side, and the girl
ghost in Meilings family. The priest liberated the troubled souls from the
Fortress of Those Who Have Died Unjustly (wang si cheng) in purgatory
and conducted them to the Western Paradise. Later on the same day, the
medium, the divination chair crew, and other temple personnel returned to
the husbands home in the countryside, where an altar and a long table with
numerous food and wine offerings were set up and a massive pile of paper
spirit money was burned to requite and send off the nonfamilial wandering
ghosts.
There are many observations that could be made about this case, and the
psycho-physiological factors that bothprovide means for the afictedopenly
to express repressed thoughts and feelings (especially for women)
16
and that
oftenmake the healingefforts of shamans andmediums effective
17
have been
discussed elsewhere. It is not difcult to see how the treatment provided
by Nantianfu worked in analogous ways. Meiling got a way to articulate
her needs and desires, through identication with possessing spirits whose
problems were like her own (abandonment, outsiderhood), and she got her
family circle to acknowledge those needs andtake specic measures to satisfy
them.
Instead, I would like to focus on a different, and for my purposes more
pertinent, question: What does cooperation in the treatment of Meiling and
others like her mean for the larger temple community? Participation in
medium sances not only can help assist the directly aficted; it also can
support the creation, if not of on-the-ground autonomous communities,
then of autonomous discoursesforms of knowledge that might oppose
those of the dominant, secular, modernist culture and are available to all
participants.
A Sociology of the Sance
Not only the poetics but also the sociology of the medium sance ensures
the production of intelligible, and even didactic, discourse. The medium is
joined by the spirit-altars core of regular participants, its inner circle, in the
labor to create comprehensible statements that will solve the questioners
problems (or provide moral and spiritual guidance for the group at large).
At many spirit-altars the work of the interpreter, or table-head (zhuotou),
is essential, as the speech of the medium can be difcult or impossible for
inexperienced bystanders to understand, or simply too laconic to apply con-
cretely without the interpreters elaborations. Similarly, the Chinese charac-
ters traced on the table by the divination chair are entirely indecipherable for
those who have not been specially trained and do not have unusual talent.
The process of divination is often assisted by a rather large crew. In ad-
dition to the table-head, there is normally a separate individual designated
as secretary, who records questioners names, personal particulars, inquiries,
and the gods dicta. The most elaborate setup with which I am familiar was
employed at Nantianfu. Frequently Nantianfu used two interpreters and al-
ways two secretaries, one who kept the aforementionedrecords andone who
assisted with the paperwork connected with the creation of Lord Guans tal-
ismans. The use at each sance of the four-man divination chair, in addition
to (or sometimes in substitution for) the medium, demanded the presence of
numerous members of the palanquincrew, since it was necessary to alternate
duty to prevent the labor from becoming too tiring for any one man (and to
give more men the chance to serve and have contact with Guandi). Others
in the inner circle, especially women, who could not carry the palanquin,
helped to create the celestial prescriptions (tian fang) of incense ash and
paper spirit money that were a specialty of the temple; still others rendered
talismans into drinkable potions of ash and water. Additional members of
the core group often simply clustered around the table at which the medium
was stationed and were free to offer opinions and advice. (Outsiders or or-
dinary questioners were seated on the other side of the room and were often
shooed away if a crowd of them inadvertently gathered.)
Thus, any givensance at Nantianfunormally involvedaltogether a group
of fteen to twenty or more individuals who assisted with the session. The
speech of the medium begins from stationary silence, commences activity in
rhythmic shaking, and climaxes in often cryptic oracular speech (and, one
could add, in illegible writing in the form of talismans). The socialization of
possessed speechits rendering into usable formis accomplished by the
cooperation of the collective of temple regulars: divination by committee, as
it were. Moreover, at public temples like Nantianfu, the management and
operation of the temple is in the hands of the faithful themselves, who elect
a management committee, its chairman, and other ofcers. At Nantianfu,
at least, the crew that regularly assisted with sances was largely identical to
the core management organization.
Bourdieu notes the transformation that takes place when formerly sup-
pressed individual experience is reected and thereby legitimated in the
public discourse of the heretical group: Private experiences undergo
nothing less than a change of state when they recognize themselves in the
public objectivity of an already constituted discourse, the objective sign of
recognition of their right to be spoken and to be spoken publicly. Objec-
tive crisis, of whichthe mediums trance is certainly a variety, is what brings
the undiscussed into discussion, the unformulated into formulation, [and] in
breaking the immediate t between the subjective structures and the objec-
tive structures, destroys self-evidence practically.
18
Possession trance opens
up a space for the generation of a new discursive eld that involves all three
of the parties to the sance: the medium, the patient, and the spirit-altars
community.
What Science Cant Explain
The most obvious and immediate use of the discourses generated by the
medium sances concerns medicine. To be treated by a deity through his or
her mediumis to remainindependent of the mainstream, Western-style, and
state-supported medical establishment and the cultural nexus of power that
legitimates and is legitimated by it. This is emphatically not to say, however,
that those who seekout spiritual remedies to medical problems have entirely
rejectedWestern-style medicine or the various scientic andother discourses
with which it is connected. Nowadays, and judging fromother studies,
19
for
at least a few decades, those who go to the gods for diagnosis and treatment
normally have tried and failed with conventional therapies or are receiving
both forms of treatment simultaneously.
In fact, both for clarity of exposition and, perhaps, for the sake of drama
(or antidrama), I have refrained from mentioning that while Meiling was
regularly attending sances at Nantianfu, she was also regularly visiting
a psychiatrist; one diagnosis had been depression ( youyu zheng). Inter-
estingly, Lord Guans talking cure seems more to resemble traditional
psychoanalysis than what Meiling was getting from Tainans municipal
hospital. Her sister described the treatment as eating medicine and get-
ting injections (chi yao da zhen). Her doctor had also recommended elec-
trotherapy and suggested that she be admitted to a hospital as an inpa-
tient. I would speculate that Lord Guans ministrations at least provided
a counterweight that enabled her family to resist long-term hospitaliza-
tion.
Meilings sister told me that she felt it was unwise to rely solely on Lord
Guans help, that it was better to employ both religious and modern medical
forms of healing. This is typical of a variety of formulations people use
to explain how dealing with problems by consulting a medium or other
religious practitioner might come into play after or along with the pursuit
of secular methods. For example, it is quite common in Tainan for couples
having difculty conceiving a child to go to a spirit-medium or diviner for
a diagnosis of their problem. That specialist will then often make a further
referral, sending the couple to a ritual-master (fashi) who can perform a
ritual to correct the situation in the temple of the Lady by the Riverside (Lin
shui furen miao), who deals particularly with the problems of women and
children, as well as those connected with conception. This rite is only carried
out, however (and several ritual-masters have conrmed this), if the couple
has consulteda medical doctor to conrmthat there are no organic disorders,
of either partner, preventing conception. Only when the doctor is unable to
detect anything is the problem then ritually treatable as one connected with
the womans celestial ower bed, where a plant bearing white and red
owers represents her fertility and the male and female children she will
bear.
This reects an essential distinction in the etiology of disease and other
maladies, the difference between that which has form ( you xing) and
the formless (wu xing). Doctors deal with the former, and when causes
in the visible world cannot be identied or when treatment that assumes
visible causes is not successful, only then does the search for origins in the
invisible world begin. If, as in Meilings case, people are uncertain as to
the nature of the cause, or if maladies are deemed to have both visible and
invisible sources, then both types of therapies may be employed simultane-
ously.
Sance participants and temple regulars often referred to the paranormal
in their justications of their activities. There are things that science simply
cant explain was a constantly recurring theme in such discussions. What
science could not explain was the formless, the realm of gods, ghosts, and
other supernatural forces, those things in which Chinese ritual practitioners
have been specialists for millennia. Noting the limitations of science was
inevitably a preface to one or more anecdotes of miraculous events and
puzzlingevidence. The stories of the unusual supernatural experiences of the
individuals themselves, coreligionists, friends, and so forth were sometimes
joined with accounts such as that of the successful predictions of Ronald
Reagans astrologer, culled presumably from popular periodicals, or from
the burgeoning genre of television programs devoted to such topics. It seems
likely that this fascination with the paranormal, as well as its expression in
the lowbrow popular media, represents a new transnational phenomenon
of global religion and popular culture. Large-format magazines with names
that include not only conventional evocations of the supernatural, like Spirit-
Marvels [Lingyi], but also imported notions, like Sixth Sense [Di-liu gan],
recall less the traditional Chinese literature of the strange (e.g., zhi guai
and chuan qi) than they do the National Enquirer, and they include both
locally produced materials and reports clearly culled from their foreign
counterparts.
A Politics of Popular Religion
I will return to the issue of science and popular religion below, but rst I
would like to address the role of the Taiwanese state in the production of
discourses concerning religion. However, my concern is not with the direct
confrontation of the state with popular religion/civil society, but with the
state as one actor among others, in particular by means of its judiciary. After
the Nationalists retook Taiwan from the Japanese in the wake of World
War II, occasional, feeble attempts were made to keep popular religion in
check, to limit popular enthusiasm and in particular to limit the expendi-
ture of wealth on popular religious activities. These measures were almost
completely ineffectual and were entirely abandoned by the 1980s.
20
The
Taiwanese government, by giving up on direct, overarching regulation of
popular religionand by not attempting in a thoroughgoing manner to
impose its own meanings on religious objects and practices, as had the im-
perial statehas allowed far greater latitude for other segments in society
to appropriate religious institutions and practices for their own purposes.
Nonetheless, the activities of the Taiwanese state continue to inuence
popular religion signicantly, not through attempts at overt control over
religious activities or interpretations but, rather, through the prosecution of
religious institutions and gures. Allegations of nancial malfeasance allow
the state to bring in judicial mechanisms and carry out such suppression on
its own terms. The question ceases to be a religious one; it becomes a secular,
legal issue of fraud. What I aminterested in, though, is not the simple matter
of state suppression of the relatively few popular religious practitioners who
have been indicted. Court cases involving popular religion have an inuence
far beyond the persons directly involved. Trials that attract public notice and
media attention spawn the production of all kinds of discussions of religion
in the media and among people at large. Thus, in order to convey a sense of
the larger discursive eld within which the adherents of the spirit-medium
cults struggle, I will examine below one of the most important cases of
purported religious fraud yet to reach the courts.
Song Qili
The Song Qili scandal broke during the fall of 1996, when Song was forty-
seven and some nine years after he had become active as a religious gure.
Song himself claimed publicly to possess no supernatural powers but only to
reveal the innate power of the original body (benti) every individual had.
Realization of ones true nature did, however, allow one to manifest that
body throughout the universe. Song produced numerous photographs (ulti-
mately admitted by the photographer to have been doctored) that allegedly
documented this ability to divide ones form (fen xing), often showing a
larger-than-life image of Song hovering over his physical body. Daily view-
ingwas claimedto bringenlightenment. Accordingto one source, the photos
were sold for about US$3,700 apiece. Audiences with Song are said to have
required $74,000 to arrange, at which time one would be expected further to
make donations of $370,000.
21
Other members of the Song Qili Image Mani-
festation Association ascribed to Song abilities ranging fromhealing the sick
to saving the dead. When Songs bubble ultimately burst, Xie Changting, a
well-known politician, and other prominent political gures were seriously
compromisedandpolitically damagedby their intimate andsupportive rela-
tionships with Song. Song himself was indicted for fraud, and others among
his associates were jailed as well. On 30 October 1997 Song was sentenced
to the maximum of seven years imprisonment, while his photographer re-
ceived two years.
The Song Qili affair was one of the biggest news items of the year and
sparked a plethora of press accounts. The most interesting, for my purpose,
are those marked out in some way as authoritativeas editorials that rep-
resent the viewpoints of major newspapers; as statements or opinion pieces
by government ofcials or, especially, scholars; or as other representations
of educated strata (authors may, for instance, exhibit their knowledge of
Chinese and/or Western intellectual traditions). Such accounts more often
than not take the case at hand as a springboard for broader commentary,
in particular concerning the role of religion in society and the distinction
between (good) religion and (bad) superstition.
Consider, for instance, an article that appeared in the China Times (Zhong-
guo shibao) almost immediately after the Song Qili scandal broke. It reported
the remarks of Qu Haiyuan, head of the Preparatory Ofce of the Social Sci-
ences Research Institute of Academia Sinica. Qu remarked,
Already in Taiwanese society there is an enormous number of adherents
of popular beliefs, so that it is difcult for the government to regulate
[popular religion] with laws. Recently the social and political situation has
been unstable, and with the addition of the individual psychology of pray-
ing for blessings and seeking wealth, the trend toward popular belief has
increasingly attracted a great number of the masses. . . . Most regrettable
is that more and more of the media play up supernatural matters, giv-
ing assistance to this atmosphere of superstition in society. Moreover, that
politicians take the lead is another important factor encouraging religious
degeneration.
22
Thus it is not criminality with which Qu is concerned but simply the wide
diffusion of popular belief (minjian xinyang). Popular belief is clearly
equated with superstition (mixin) and, if not with religion itself, with
religious degeneration (zongjiao bianzhi).
Another theme that runs throughout the press accounts of the Song Qili
affair extends Qus dislike of mixing religion and politics to more general
notions of what religion in a modern nation should concern. An editorial
titled Seeking Personal Advantage and Superstitiously Believing in Mir-
acles Disorders Ones Mind and Harms Oneself raised Xie Changtings
unfortunate example. It then continued,
But, nowadays, not a fewpeople in politics and commerce enjoy the trend
of seeking help fromthe gods and divination. This is enough to showthat
the Song Qili case is merely the tip of the iceberg as far as this problem
is concerned. What deserves reection is that while everyoneincluding
public guresof course has freedomof belief, andsome canclearly draw
the boundary between spiritual life and practical life, still the activities of
many public gures . . . do not go beyond the level of personal benet:
asking about their ofcial careers and trying to get promotions. . . .
When people in the world seek the Way, they often do not stop at culti-
vating the mind but also look for miraculous conrmations. Going along
in this way, bedazzlement by miracles nally surpasses the cultivation of
the mind.
Again expressing the idea that politicians should be exemplars in this
regard, the editorial concludes with the same notion that it is the failure of so
many political gures to separate religion frompractical life that encourages
the deluded fascination with the supernatural that made the Song Qili affair
possible.
23
Religion, this piece implies very clearly, is perfectly good if, rst,
it concerns only individual moral self-improvement and, second, if it is kept
well insulated from the world of daily affairs in general and politics in
particular.
The last source I wouldlike toconsider is a lengthy reectiononthe nature
of religion published as one of several articles in a major newsmagazines
report on Songs case. Its author, Nanfang Shuo, refers to a number of West-
ern intellectuals, from Goethe to Max Weber to Walter Burkert. Nanfang
Shuo also does not shy from broad generalizations. The piece begins, Hu-
mans are insecure animals who are tossedabout betweensecularization and
sacralization. Thus we have religion. The author then introduces Webers
notion of the rationalization of social life and the ensuing disenchantment of
the world, while at the same time noting that the appearance of newreligious
groups and the revival of existing ones seemto indicate a re-enchantment.
Religion, the article holds, should partake of the rationalization that has
dominated the political and socioeconomic realms of modern life: In the
sphere of belief, religion, under pressure fromsecularization, cast off its orig-
inal mystery and increasingly tended toward religious individualization. It
became a kind of spiritual belief.
By bucking this trend, Taiwanese religion remains mired in an atavism
of the worst kind, votive religion (xuyuanshi zongjiao): Too many people
see belief as a kind of medium of exchange, using offerings in exchange
for protection. Thoughts of self-benet overcome those of beneting
others. . . . The divine and the transcendent value represented by the divine
lose their meaning.
As one might by now expect, Nanfang Shuo then turns from religious
degeneration to political decadence. Politicians similarly just see politics as
a matter of winning elections and gaining power. Taiwanese politics lacks
any transcendent public values or sense of responsibility, and Taiwans
religious degradation is just like that of our government. . . . The Song Qili
phenomenon is not a bit worth marveling at. He is nothing more than a
skilled black magician putting on an extremely postmodern farce in our
society, where the values system of votive religion ourishes.
24
Thus the
Song Qili affair gives this articles author a chance to indict what he takes to
be the widely shared values of an entire society, as expressed particularly in
religion.
That Songs activities were perceived, in accounts like those cited above,
as little different from those of other forms of popular Taiwanese religion
is also plain from other sources. Just one example comes from the com-
ments of a prosecutor made when one of Songs immediate disciples, while
under examination, offered to demonstrate the art of making an object im-
movable by mental concentration alone. The prosecutor refused to allow
him to do so, saying that that was merely the skill of spirit-mediums.
The photo of this man accompanying the same article identied him as
Song Qilis table-head, the term commonly used for a spirit-mediums
interpreter.
25
Thus the Song Qili affair shows how the state can continue to play a role
in the production of discourses on religion without actively attempting to
regulate religious activity in general. Once a religious gure or organization
can be prosecuted in the courts, ensuing media accounts ensure that religion
will become a matter of public discussion. Moreover, as we have seen, such
reports and accompanying opinion piecesmarked in various ways with
the aura of authoratativenessgo well beyond reporting the facts of the
case and devote much space to discussing what religion should and should
not be.
The most important observationthat needs to be made about the notionof
proper religion expressed in the above statements concerns the relationship
between religion and daily life. Religion that involves praying for bless-
ings and seeking wealth is superstition. Spiritual life and practical life
shouldbe clearly distinguished; the contaminationof the spiritual by the ma-
terial is reected in the pursuit of miracles, tangible conrmations of what is,
purportedly, entirely intangiblea kind of spiritual belief. Chinese pop-
ular religion is perhaps above all based on the establishment of relationships
of exchange with deities, using offerings of incense, food, and other material
substances both to request and to requite supernatural help in connection
with practical problems. (In the medium cults as well, one cannot simply
ask ones question but must rst offer, at least, incense to the various deities
represented in the shrine.) To deprecate the same as votive religion is not
only to strike at the basis for popular practice; it is also to insist on a radical,
and indeed modernist, distinction between otherworldly and this-worldly
concerns.
Popular Responses
In the wake of the Song Qili scandal, spirit-mediums and other practi-
tioners interviewed in my eld research were especially adamant that they
not be tarred with the brush of superstition. Here we only have the gods
true pneumas (zheng qi); people may bring their superstitions, but we dont
encourage them, the medium at Nantianfu told me. Discussions of su-
perstition at the spirit-altars clearly reected concern about the most basic
form of the mixing of the spiritual and the material: monetary gains for
the provision of religious services, which had provided the basis for Songs
prosecution. The legitimacy of a particular spirit-medium altarits free-
dom from superstitious activitiesis often asserted in relation to money:
accepting only voluntary donations (as at Nantianfu), charging only a rel-
atively small amount for each consultation (e.g., as little as about US$4 or
perhaps as much as about $11), or the absence or rarity of recommending
further (and more expensive) curative rituals. The notion that bad religion
(or superstition) is in part dened by its venality and exploitativeness is
shared by both sides.
More signicantly, in seeking to explain what they do by invoking the
distinction between form and the formless, as discussed above, spirit-altar
adherents replicate the same dualismexpressedby critics of popular religion.
The realm of religion is that of the intangible; practical affairs lie outside
that realm. At least some devotees of the mediumcults in fact superscribe
to borrow Prasenjit Duaras termmeanings on their own activities that
are highly consistent with the views of elites.
26
Despite the fact that he fre-
quently carried the divination chair at Nantianfu, one man stated that if
one is healthy, one is numinous (ling), and if unhealthy, then not numi-
nous; events depended on ones actions; only the ignorant believe in divina-
tion. Another man, who frequently acted as interpreter during Nantianfus
sances, claimed that the use in sances of the palanquin for apotropaic pur-
poses is merely a kind of skillful means (fangbian). Exorcism is not the
issue; it is simply that pressure on the minds of questioners is reduced, and
they can be encouraged to perform good acts. What happens to someone,
he said, depends on his or her mind. Those who suggest interpretations
like this reinscribe the same spirit/matter binarism that is inherent in the
critiques of Song Qili I discussed above. The whole procedure of medium-
istic divination and cure becomes nothing but an empty show for those of
lesser understanding; religion again is made out to be something entirely
spiritual.
Acceptance by the medium cults adherents of the distinction between
the scientic and the nonscientic leads to similar consequences. Following
the apparent assertion of a realm of knowledge independent of scientistic
culture, sance participants often appeared to express a contrary desire for
acceptance within that same culture. Things that science cant explain
yielded to things that science will one day be able to explain, by means of
ling xue, the study of the numinous (that is, scientic or other academic
research into the supernatural). In order to be true, or at least to be more
true, the supernatural ultimately must be validated by science. The formless
exists, at best, in the epistemic penumbra of form.
In their justications of their own practices, spirit-altar devotees accept
the same basic distinctions as their critics: between the scientic and the
nonscientic and between proper religion and superstition. The distinction
between the formless and that-which-has-form entirely parallels more au-
thoritative discourses; it involves a virtually identical dualism between the
spiritual and the material and assigns the correct concerns of religion to the
former.
In accepting this binarism, devotees of the spirit-altars do more than share
a certain notion of religion; they become complicit in a larger discourse
about the legitimacy of educational capital as a determinant for social status.
It is in this light that one may understand a thread that runs constantly
throughnews accounts of SongQilis downfall: surprise at the involvement of
intellectuals andpoliticians inhis association. Not only canSong Qili attract
a large number of believers, but among them there is no lack of people of
university lecturer rank or high-level public ofcials, remarked the China
Times.
27
A newsmagazine headed one section of an article The Highly
Educated Also Believe in Song Qili.
28
Another newspaper article, titled
Religious Belief and Superstition, stated, Among Song Qilis followers
there was no lack of those with higher educational degrees. . . . Although
their beliefs are different, compared to the previous impression that only
old ladies (lao ama) would burn incense and worship, certainly more and
more so-called high class intellectuals are taking refuge in religion. Citing
events ranging from imports of New Zealand beef to instability in the stock
market, the article went on to attribute this change to an increased feeling
of insecurity that had led to values systems starting to get mixed up.
29
The involvement of intellectuals in popular religion is always portrayed as
anomalous, deserving mention precisely because it is unexpected. Such a
fact, if portrayed as an anomaly, actually reinforces the basic correlation
between increased education and decreased interest in (especially popular)
religionreligion in which the formless is always intimately engaged with
that-which-has-form: the healing of bodily illness and the amelioration of
all manner of everyday problems.
InTaiwanese societytoday, religionfunctions muchlike art andother mat-
ters of taste did in Bourdieus France of the 1960s. Bourdieu writes that what
he calls the aesthetic disposition is characterized by the suspension and
removal of economic necessity and by objective and subjective distance from
practical urgencies, which is the basis of objective and subjective distance
from groups subjected to those determinisms.
30
The clearest example of a
disposition parallel to the Bourdieu aesthetic in Taiwanese religion was cited
above in connection with the denunciation of so-called votive religion, the
use of religion to gain help with practical necessities. Another writer warned
against seeking personal advantage through religion. These texts contin-
ually deplore the mixing of the temporal and the spiritual. They criticize
the same lack of distancing (characteristic of the lower classes) Bourdieu
refers to in the case of aesthetics.
It would be a mistake to correlate educational capital directly with other
determinants of social level in Taiwan. The constituency for the forms of
urban popular religion I studied consists not only of factory and other work-
ers but also small business entrepreneurs and even a few factory owners
and other bourgeois. However, my surveys of those who attend medium
sances, as well as other eldwork data, indicate that even the best-off tend
to be at most only moderately educated. While economic capital may differ,
relatively low educational capital is a constant among those involved in the
medium cults. Furthermore, the emergence and increasing predominance
in Taiwan of a high-technological economy that rewards educational attain-
ments, in combination with long-standing cultural values, can only mean
that people like those who attend medium sances are hardly the benecia-
ries of an ideology that privileges formal education. By interpreting their
own practices in light of elite notions of religion, they contribute to the
marginalization of those practices and to their own sociopolitical marginal-
ization.
Autonomy Reconsidered
We would appear to have come some distance from previous sections of this
essay, which portrayed possessions poetics as empowering the mediumcults
to challenge the social regime and to establish truths in opposition to domi-
nant ideologies. However, I would claim that this apparent contradiction
betweencapacity for resistance inprinciple andcomplicity infactexists not
in spite of but because of the particular form of autonomy that characterizes
the medium cults.
As I have noted, involvement inboththe formless andthe material realms,
or the lackof asharpdivisionbetweenthem, is intrinsic toTaiwanese popular
religion. That same lackis evenmore striking inthe case of spirit-possession,
the embodiment of a deity by a esh-and-blood human being. In possession,
the presence of the divine is apparent not through subtle, spiritual signs but,
rather, through the more than obvious spectacle of twitching limbs and un-
earthly speech. Such trance discourse is, as I have argued, the basis for the
more elaborated truths produced by the spirit-altars communities: divina-
tory utterances, prescriptions for healing, remedies for all manner of lifes
difcultiesthe solution of practical problems through means that are en-
tirelydistinct fromprevailingmedical or other moderntechnologies. Having
examined the discourses of more dominant groups concerning religion, one
would have to agree that these popular truths are enunciated through means
that are independent of the dominant culture. The mediumcults are not pas-
sive receptors for cultural materials produced elsewhere, nor do they take
exogenously produced culture and turn it to their own uses. In this respect
they are culturally autonomous.
When in the face of opposition, why, then, do the devotees of the cults
respond in ways that do not challenge that opposition but, instead, accede to
it? This is due precisely to the very same autonomy. The discursive world
of the medium cultsthe universe created through the poetic language of
possessionstands apart from dominant understandings of religion. The
spirit-altars cannot subvert the dominant order from within, because they
operate outside it. They generate truths that cannot be recognized as such by
the wider discursive community owing to their source; inherent inthe fusion
of form and the formless through spirit-possession is a cosmology entirely
alien to the modernist version in which formand formless belong to distinct
realms, with religion pertaining only to the latter. Thus, when attempting
to respond to their critics, spirit-altar devotees use the language of their
opponents and, in so doing, abandon the origins of the power of possession
and add weight to the very discourses that would dismiss the medium cults
as the products of mere delusion.
In complete contrast to the populists metaphor of guerrilla warfare, the
medium cults indeed establish territory that is their own. The enclaves that
are the spirit-altars take nothing from the dominant order and thus, when
under pressure, need not yield anything back. But of course they do seem
to give something back: Is not the relegation of religion to the sphere of
the purely spiritual and the acceptance of the explanatory superiority of
science a complete capitulation? A distinction needs to be made between
the medium sances, while in operation, and the subjectivities of those who
attend them. The sance creates, as I have argued, a world of its own. And,
pace Bourdieu, such a world represents far more than the remnants of a
bygone erudite culture, retained now only among folk remnants. There is
nothing more vital than a spirit-altar in session, nothing more riveting than
the spectacle of possession.
But that is not to say that those who attend the sance can remain in that
world. In order, for instance, to participate in larger debates on religion,
people cross over into the discursive sphere of the dominant, with the con-
sequences I have noted. Again as opposed to guerrilla-held territory, the
spaces created by the medium cults remain autonomous, but those who in-
habit them must be migratory; they cannot remain there. That those who
might oppose the social order often end up participating in their own subjec-
tion is of course far from new. What I have tried to show in this essay is that
such subjection does not depend on the use by the dominated of the cultural
products of the dominators. It can also come about when the dominated
themselves participate in producing their own culture.
Despite the fact that the carnival (or the sance) must end, time spent
there might still be more protable than time spent watching television. At
least I would like to think so; perhaps my conception of mass culture is still
unreconstructably Adornist. In any event, I began work on this topic with
directions that in many ways were set by the historical study of medium
cults in imperial China, in times and places where the cults were rmly
based in on-the-ground local communities and were clearly used to buttress
local forces against the outsideto serve the interests of local autonomy.
Nowadays, worshipers in Tainan do not associate the spirit-altars with spe-
cic, boundedlocalities, suchas urbanneighborhoods. Spirit-altar attendees,
when asked whether most who come to inquire of the deity are from the
neighborhood, normally answer along these lines: People come here from
all over. Its not a matter of where you live, but of having karmic links ( yuan)
with the god. Whatever the actual composition of the worshiping group,
people do not represent their group as a local one. Still, after attending many
hours of sances, I could not help but be struck by how, even when the
spirit-altars community was deterritorialized and despatialized, the sances
created their own worlds. In these spaces exorcisms were carried out, heal-
ing took place, and people entrusted their life problems to a deity resident
in a shaking, twitching human, a person whose presence dominated, even
created, this space that was sodifferent fromthe quotidian. Hence autonomy.
Subsequent examination of both the devotees own understandings of the
cults in which they participated and the religious discourses that disparage
them necessitated reconsideration. The former and the latter are in many
ways remarkably consistent. Thus this essay is rather more nuanced than
initially planned. The medium cults are autonomous, but their adherents
cannot escape dominant conceptions of religion; possession implies the con-
vergence of the spiritual and the material, but sance participants restrict the
mediums powers to the sphere of the formless. I am fully aware that it is
now acceptable in academic writing to leave contradictions unresolved, at
least sometimes. Still, it seems to me that further research should begin with
the sance attendees but outside the space of the spirit-altar, when people
have a choice about attending a sance or watching television. What do they
retain when they leave the spirit-altar and return to the world outside it?
How do they integrate these two very different modes of experience? As
far as these questions are concerned, more remains to be done. If there is
mediation between the medium cults and the dominant order, it is likely
that much of that mediation is accomplished by the devotees of the spirit-
altars themselves, those who are most directly and personally involved in
migrating between one sphere and the other.
Notes
I would like to thank the many friendly and helpful people at the various temples around
Tainan where I carried out my work, in particular those at Nantianfu and San qing gong.
Many thanks are due as well tothe ChiangChing-kuoFoundationfor International Scholarly
Exchange, which generously provided the funding for much of my research in Tainan, as
well as to Wang Shan Shan, Chung Tin Yi, Huang Chien Ming, and Lu Pei Pei for their
diligent and able assistance.
1 Michael Taussig, The Magic of the State (New York: Routledge, 1997), esp. 184188.
2 One notable exceptionis P. StevenSangren, History and Magical Power ina Chinese Community
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987), 130131 and chap. 8.
3 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment As Mass
Deception, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and
Herder, 1972), 120167.
4 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), xxi.
5 John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 1989).
6 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 395.
7 This study is based on eldwork in Tainan carried out in the summer of 1996, the rst half
of 1997, and again in the summers of 1998 and 1999. Altogether, in addition to the various
written sources cited, the data for this study were gathered during attendance at over fty
medium sances (as well as related interviews and more casual conversations), principally
at six spirit-altars, during these periods. While I was generally able to converse with people
in Mandarin Chinese, I frequently relied on assistants to make transcripts or summaries
(in Chinese, either on the spot and/or from tape recordings) of events that were most often
conducted in Taiwanese.
8 Chen Meiqing, Taiwan de Guangze zunwang xinyang [Beliefs concerning the Reverent
Lordof BroadCompassioninTaiwan], 2vols. (unpublishedmanuscript inauthors possession,
1997).
9 See Gilbert Rouget, Music and Trance: A Theory of the Relations between Music and Possession,
trans. Brunhilde Biebuyck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), chap. 5.
10 Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1980), 2832, 125, 133134.
11 Marjorie Wolf, A Thrice-Told Tale: Feminism, Postmodernism, and Ethnographic Responsibility
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992).
12 Kristeva, Desire in Language, 65, 137140.
13 Ibid., 29, 134135.
14 Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1983), esp. 116, 85.
15 For a discussion of the divination chair, as David Jordan has called it, see his Gods, Ghosts,
and Ancestors: Folk Religion in a Taiwanese Town (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
Californa Press, 1972), 6467.
16 Carmen Blacker, The Catalpa Bow (London: Allen and Unwin, 1975); I. M. Lewis, Ecstatic
Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit-Possession, 2d ed. (London: Routledge, 1989); Ned
Davis, Society and the Supernatural in Sung China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
forthcoming).
17 Claude Lvi-Strauss, The Sorcerer and His Magic and The Effectiveness of Symbols, in
Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobsen and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York:
Basic Books, 1963), 167185, 186205; Arthur Kleinman, Patients and Healers in the Context of
Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980); Zhang Xun, Jibing
yu wenhua [Illness and culture] (Taibei: Daoxiang, 1989).
18 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1977), 168170; emphases in original.
19 See, e.g., Jordan, Gods, Ghosts, and Ancestors, 139.
20 Robert P. Weller, Matricidal Magistrates and Gambling Gods: Weak States and Strong
Spirits in China, in Unruly Gods: Divinity and Society in China, ed. Meir Shahar and Robert
P. Weller (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996), 250268, esp. 263.
21 Qiu Minghui, Song Qili miren de yuyan li you wuge moshu yaosu [In Song Qilis language
of bewitchment there are ve essential black-magical elements], Xin xinwen [The journalist],
2026 October 1996, 4041.
22 Xuezhe yu zhengtan renshi wu daitou zhuzhang waifeng [Scholar calls for politicians not
to take the lead in promoting unhealthy trends], Zhongguo shibao, 13 October 1996.
23 Zhuiqiu sili mixin shenji luanle benxin haile ziji [Seeking personal advantage and super-
stitiously believing in miracles disorders ones mind and harms oneself], Zhongguo shibao, 14
October 1996.
24 Nanfang Shuo, Gaoming de mofa shi wanle yi-chang houxiandai de huangdanxiu [A
skilled black magician puts on a postmodern farce], Xin xinwen, 2026 October 1996, 5256.
25 Zuofa dingshen wan ru jitong: Song Qili da dizi Zheng Zhendong shouya jinjian [Per-
forming the technique of immobilizing bodies like a spirit-medium, Song Qilis great disciple
Zheng Zhendong is detained and interrogated], Zhongguo shibao, 14 October 1996.
26 Prasenjit Duara, Superscribing Symbols: The Myth of Guandi, Chinese God of War,
Journal of Asian Studies 47, no. 4 (November 1988), 778795.
27 Benzun poxiang: jiekai Songqili shenmi miansha [The original venerable makes a fool of
himself: Unveiling Song Qilis mystery], Zhongguo shibao, 13 October 1996.
28 Du Shengcong et al., Zhexie ren shuo: Weishenme yao yapo women de xinyang? [These
people say: Why do youwant to oppress our faith?], Xin xinwen, 2026 October 1996, 3839.
29 Zongjiao xinyang yu mixin [Religious belief and superstition], Lianhe bao [United daily
news], 4 January 1998.
30 Bourdieu, Distinction, 54.

A Poetics and Politics of Repression

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A Poetics and Politics of Repression

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A Poetics and Politics of Possession:

Taiwanese Spirit-Medium Cults and Autonomous Popular Cultural Space

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