Taiwanese Pilgrimage to China: Ritual, Complicity, Community

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Taiwanese Pilgrimage to China

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Taiwanese Pilgrimage to China Ritual, Complicity, Community DJ W. Hatfield

TAIWANESE PILGRIMAGE TO CHINA

Copyright © DJ W. Hatfield, 2010. Some photographs © Kevin Tung-Cheng Chen, used with permission Other photographs © DJ W. Hatfield Artwork Video Arcade and Lukang New Mazu Temple (1) © Chen Lai-Hsing, used with permission All rights reserved. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–61603–5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hatfield, D. J. W. Taiwanese pilgrimage to China : ritual, complicity, community / D.J.W. Hatfield. p. cm. ISBN 978–0–230–61603–5 (alk. paper) 1. Taiwanese—China—Fujian Sheng—Migrations. 2. Taiwanese— China—Fujian Sheng—Rites and ceremonies. 3. Taiwanese—China— Fujian Sheng—Social conditions. 4. Pilgrims and pilgrimages— China—Fujian Sheng . 5. Fujian Sheng (China)—Religious life and customs. 6. Fujian Sheng (China)—Social life and customs. I. Title. DS799.42.H38 2009 306.498190951—dc22

2009016321

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: January 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

Contents

List of Figures

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Note on Transliterations

xi

Introduction: Complication and Deferral

1

1 Heat and Noise

23

2

Fabrication and Commitment

47

Vignette: Remembering a Movement

81

3 Reluctance and Conversion

85

4 Objects and Institutions

115

Interlude: Enjoyment and Sincerity

143

5

Itineraries and Structures

151

6

Techniques and Forgeries

183

7 Curiosity and Commitment

213

Notes

243

Glossary

251

Bibliography

255

Index

267


Figures

A

2.1 6.1

6.2 7.1 7.2

“The Loving Care of the Mother Country,” Propaganda Poster, Fujian, 1976. Image Courtesy Stefan Landsberger Collection, International Institute of Social History Amsterdam. http://www.iig.ni/landsberger Images in Series, Lukang Tianhou Temple, 2009. Pilgrims Pass Their leng Pennants over the Incense Censer at Quanzhou Hubi Kiong. Quanzhou, 1993. Photograph by Author. Goddess of Peace across the Straits. Meizhou, 1992. Photograph by Author. Chen Lai-hsing, “Video Arcade,” Oil on Canvas. Taiwan, 1990. Used with permission. Chen Lai-hsing, “Lukang New Mazu Temple (1),” Oil on canvas. Taiwan, 1990. Used with permission.

2 53

189 196 224 225


Acknowledgments

When I began the research that found its way into this book, I did not know that I would become indebted to such a large crowd of hosts, colleagues, friends, and interlocutors. I would like to acknowledge the Committee for Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China (CSCPRC/NAS), who provided generous funding and institutional support for fieldwork in Fujian, and the support of the East Asian Studies Center of the University of Chicago and the Chiang ChingKuo Foundation, without whom I would not have finished the manuscript. To Zhu Tianshun, Chen Guoqiang, Li Weisi, Huang Bingyan, Zheng Guodong, the Quanzhou Taoist Culture Research Association, Jiang Weidan, and temple management committees throughout Fujian and Taiwan, I give my thanks for working with me even when inconvenient. In Chicago, James W. Fernandez, Paul Friedrich, and Gregory Lee worked with me through the dissertation. Prasenjit Duara and Jean Comaroff also provided much guidance and constructive criticism. Rob Albro, Chang Ku-ming, Juliette Chung, John Crespi, Matthew Engelke, Claire Hong, Lin Kai-shyh, Vijayanthi Rao, Teri Silvio, John Tresch, Wang Horng-luen, Johanna Schoss, Wu Rwei-jen, and Marco Zivkovic rounded out a group at Chicago whose conversation continues to challenge and enlighten. As an associate in research at Rice University, I met Jim Faubion, who remains an invaluable mentor. Several graduate students at Rice also enriched my life in Houston: Jae Chung and Lamia Karim deserve special notice. My colleagues at William and Mary, particularly William Fisher, Martin Gallivan, Danielle Moretti-Langholtz, Ron Schechter, and Brad Weiss, responded carefully to my work and gave practical advice. Several students at William and Mary, including Autumn Barrett, Michael Berman, Iris Eu, and Anna Schatz, participated in seminars and tested my ideas. Scott Owen at the Daily Grind supplied coffee and conversation. The Department of Mathematics at Wellesley College offered technical support and office space during spring and summer breaks. Since I moved to Boston, my colleagues at Berklee College of Music, particularly Camille Colatosti, Peter Gardener,

x

Acknowledgments

Michael Heyman, Sheila Katz, Teodros Kiros, Lori Landay, Haidee Lorrey, and Mark Simos, as well as Janet Chawalibog and Mike Mason in the Academic Affairs Office, have offered much encouragement and a stimulating environment in which to work. Thanks to Chee-Ping Ho for technical wizardry. Chapter 2 of this book benefited from discussion at the anthropology colloquium at Cornell University; I would like to thank Dominic Boyer, Elana Chipman, and Steven Sangren for their continued engagement with my work. Robert Weller, Michael Puett, James Watson, and other participants in the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies Workshop on Chinese Religions listened to my discussion of crowd time and asked questions that pushed me toward greater clarity. Sealing Cheng, Julie Chu, Alaina Harmon, William McLain, and Rob Oppenheim read chapters of the manuscript and gave helpful advice. My editor at Palgrave, Brigitte Shull, and her assistant, Lee Norton, provided much help with the manuscript in its progress toward the book. Thanks are also due to an anonymous reviewer for Palgrave, whose suggestions were always to the point and useful. Kevin Tung-Cheng Chen and Chen Lai-hsing graciously permitted me to reproduce their work as illustrations. Along one’s pilgrimage, it is rare and wonderful to discover someone who knows one’s voice. Kiri Miller kept me honest and often guided me away from the Slough of Despond. Stanley Chang’s prodigal generosity and love have supported me during a pilgrimage that required long hours and longer absences. Thank you, Stanley, for your patience during both. My parents, Donna and Jim Hatfield, encouraged my interests in Taiwan and reminded me that all pilgrimages take one home. Finally, I offer my gratitude to Cheng Jun-kuo, Jackson Lim, Kong Hsien-sen, Shina Shih, Huang Cheng-tai, Huang Chung-mo, Shi Fayuan, Xie Shaowei, and the Shih family in Lokkang, as well as to Li Ming-tse, Lin Chung-hsien, Chen Mei-ling, and Sung Tse-lai. Your friendship, hospitality, and stories made the work a joy.

Note on Transliterations

Throughout the manuscript, I have employed the Hanyu Pinyin system for transliterations of Mandarin language terms, excluding proper nouns. For place names and personal names, I used either the conventional spelling in English (hence, Taipei and not Taibei) or the desired spelling when known. When referring to institutions and place names during the Japanese colonial period Taiwan (1895–1945), I employed the Japanese reading (e.g., Taichu First High School). For the names of Taiwanese people, I have adopted the Taiwanese convention of placing a hyphen between given names even when names are given in the Hanyu Pinyin system. Terms in Taiwanese Hoklo appear in the Kaolo Romanization, with Mandarin language equivalents. A glossary of terms with corresponding Chinese characters is provided as an appendix to this volume.

Statement on Privacy and Disclosure In keeping with current anthropological practice, I have employed pseudonyms when citing or quoting from interviews and field observations, except in cases where the statements of my consultants are on the public record.


Introduction Complication and Deferral

Complicit Gazes On a clear day in Amoy, the primary metropolis of the Minnan region of southeast Fujian, China, the monumental slogans posted on the Quemoy Islands were visible yet just beyond the edge of legibility. Through the coin-operated binoculars available at a few popular scenic vantages, which occupy former military posts, one could see the national flag and nearly read the failing ambitions of the Nationalist Party (KMT) in exile on Taiwan. At the contested limits of two opposed states, people in Taiwan and Fujian have long looked across the Taiwan Straits with a mixture of wonder and discomfort. In this context of desire matched with political entrenchment, a shared discourse about culture began to form within a network of Taiwanese pilgrimages to Minnan in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In this book, I examine how these pilgrimages became embedded in a variety of attempts to reconfigure local notions of history and public space. I argue that as Taiwanese pilgrims and their Chinese hosts translated values produced in ritual contexts into the terms of economic and political reform, they became complicit in the composition of divergent histories that required the participation of their counterparts to remain self-evident. A few images of cross-Straits relationships during the martial law and Maoist periods will give a sense of how the context in which Taiwanese people took pilgrimages to Fujian differs from the immediately preceding period. A friend in her late twenties with whom I worked in one of the karaoke dance halls that were springing up around Amoy during the early 1990s once told me about childhood in a seaside town near Quanzhou. During the hot summers, she and her sisters would often

2


sleep on the roof of their family house. It was comfortable, she said, once one became accustomed to the searchlights. I assumed that she meant the Chinese coastal defense; in fact, she meant those of Quemoy, which was in view of her family home. At first the surveillance of my friend’s story seems concentrated. The KMT military was responsible for the searchlights to which everyone in my friend’s town had become acclimated. However, this military mobilization extended, at least in theory, to the entire populace on both sides of the Straits, as evident in Maoist propaganda posters. For example, a propaganda poster produced in Fujian in 1976 (see figure A) depicted a group of maritime men and women releasing revolutionary literature into the Straits in waterproof packets. Vibrant colors and a sense of bustle and energy fill the image, suggesting crowds engaged in collective action. On Taiwan, KMT injunctions, found everywhere from cinema tickets to cigarette packs, called for citizens to recover the mainland, report spies, and remain vigilant. With the end of martial law in 1987, public health warnings and advertisements have replaced these ideological messages. And while it was possible for martial law Taiwanese to

Figure A “The Loving Care of the Mother Country,” Propaganda Poster, Fujian, 1976. Image courtesy Stefan Landsberger Collection, International Institute of Social History Amsterdam. http://www.iig.ni/lansberger.

Complication and Deferral

3

imagine China as mysterious, lost, and forbidden, in the period following martial law, China has emerged as a newly present Other. A cultural gaze, like so many tourists looking through binoculars, has joined the military one. Although mundane, gazes across the Straits mediated different experiences of economic liberalization in Fujian and democratization on Taiwan. In the early 1990s, as the binoculars became established points on a tourist itinerary, these gazes surveyed new possibilities. They organized new relationships across the Straits on the one hand and new relationships to the self on the other. That is, they began to ground an emerging ethics of locality, an ethical system in which places are the substance through which people perform ethical work upon themselves. If the just-beyond-view of the other side of the Straits pointed to the political context of this ethics, it also challenged those looking through the binoculars to create some form of commitment that they could then disguise as ineluctable, a cultural factor. Complicity is the central term of this book, which works toward an historical ontology (Hacking 2002) of popular belief (minjian xinyang): the set of objects and practices surrounding ritual, including Taiwanese pilgrimages to Fujian. Through an investigation of how minjian xinyang came to be, I will examine how Taiwanese pilgrims and their Chinese hosts created a common project, a practice in which they composed novel objects and situated these to ground new possibilities of place, person, and history. By complicity, I mean practices of recognizing a common project in the context of inextricable differences. As an interpretive model, complicity allows us to capture the work through which people came to recognize Taiwanese pilgrimages as (not) culture, the within sight but just beyond legibility of cross-Straits relationships.

Routinization of Failure Large-scale pilgrimage networks across the Straits, which began to form in the late 1980s and 1990s, spawned an entire discourse concerning shared culture of which the grounding object was minjian xinyang. These networks have had to negotiate the different contexts of economic reform in China and democratization on Taiwan while maintaining a specificity beyond them. The collective history glossed within the term minjian xinyang was thus entangled with and naturalized narratives of reform and opening (gaige kaifang) in China, democratization and indigenization (minzhuhua, bentuhua) on Taiwan, and civil interchange (minjian jiaoliu) between them.

4


On Taiwan, pilgrimages were embedded in what one might call the Nationalist routinization of failure, institutional forms in which the KMT attempted to absorb territorial loss and diplomatic lapse within a narrative of national recovery. By turns a Dutch, Spanish, and Manchu colonial possession, Taiwan was incorporated into the Japanese empire between 1895 and 1945. The island’s “return” to Nationalist China was of signal importance to the production of China as a nation freeing itself from the semicolonial and colonial relationships of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Retrocession and the end of the unequal treaties were necessary if the Republic of China were to perform its roles in institutions of international representation, including the United Nations Security Council. With the loss of the civil war in 1949, Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist government fled to Taiwan and established the temporary capital of the Republic of China in Taipei. The KMT continued to fill the China slot in the United Nations. As a result, the party was compelled to create institutions representing China on Taiwan, in addition to pursuing an ongoing process of decolonization.1 These institutions included a number of legislative, pedagogical, and cultural fictions, notably stewardship of two millennia of Chinese art treasures; a frozen national assembly; and streets named for Chinese cities, Confucian virtues, and revolutionary values. Mass media systematically avoided reference to the island as Taiwan in favor of the phrase “Base for Recovery [of the Mainland]” (fuxing jidi). School textbooks gave short shrift to the island’s history, and agents of the state would fine those disloyal or deficient enough to speak anything but the national language (guoyu; Mandarin Chinese) in public spaces. Although it was connected to American strategic interests in East Asia, the KMT administration on Taiwan pursued a nationalist (with a small n) agenda of linguistic standardization, popular mobilization for the purposes of completing the revolutionary work of party founder Sun Yat-sen, and rational economic development. KMT institutions representing China on Taiwan faced increasing pressure from the early 1970s onward, as other states and the United Nations desired to normalize relationships with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In this period, which began with the Chiang Chingkuo premiership and presidency (1969–1988) and continued through the Lee Teng-hui presidency (1988–2000), loss of diplomatic recognition and of faith in mainland recovery led to an increased attention to Taiwanese practices formerly devalued by institutions of national representation. Taiwanese language and popular ritual now offered themselves as indices of a vital Chinese culture localized on Taiwan or the


5

basis of a Taiwanese culture worthy of recognition within a new set of national institutions. One might disagree with my description of KMT institutions as engaged in the routinization of failure. Certainly the Republic of China on Taiwan has been a success. KMT planners engineered both land reform and a move from import-substitution industries toward an export-oriented economy that led to prosperity, a “miracle” with imitators in China and in South Africa (Hart 2002). Taiwan also democratized without widespread chaos and economic collapse. The policies that eventuated in these salutary outcomes, however, were directed at ends that were sensible not only within an objective economic calculus. They were responses to the KMT’s ongoing failures to recover and represent China and one arena in which these failures became coherent and visible. In keeping with the above objection, we could view the monumental slogans and miniature exhortations on cigarette boxes as mere ideology and irrelevant for our discussion of Taiwanese pilgrimages. We would be mistaken. Attempts to fix Taiwanese popular ritual practices as culture were intelligible only within a world constituted in part by such slogans, the world of a failing project of representing China. As these failures became more thoroughgoing, nativist (bentu) literature and culture developed in open opposition to KMT policy, but often in complicity with KMT strategies to produce knowledge of, and legislate against, popular ritual, local drama, and vernacular language (Johnson 1994, Chun 1995, 1996). Thus, for the Taiwanese pilgrims or tourists who visited Fujian in the late 1980s and early 1990s, China was neither simply the set of political and cultural institutions through which the KMT oligarchy had represented China on Taiwan during the mid-twentieth century nor the belligerent neighbor that China would become by century’s end. The context of educational institutions, a military, a legislature, household registrations, and identity cards that still valued mainland origins over native status all tempt us to interpret pilgrimage as a bid to place the experiences of Taiwanese people within a framework of Chinese origins that alone could give these experiences value. That is how I framed my research on Taiwanese pilgrimage when I first proposed it. These considerations did inform Taiwanese pilgrimages. I would add, however, that for the temple management committees and voluntary religious associations that would organize pilgrimages, the KMT failure to secure Chinese culture on Taiwan was of equal importance. Within these institutions and more generally the Taiwanese media, China was the object of controversy throughout the 1990s and continues to be today. These

6


controversies with their absolute positions or attempts at dialectical syntheses, such as the Oceanic China hypothesis (CommonWeath 1992), disguise how popular ritual practices and their associated sites became visible, not as impediments to national modernity, but as resources for new projects of being. Although the KMT project of national recovery was failing, institutions representing China on Taiwan still disciplined movement and channeled experience during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Today, the national anthem and flag still contain KMT symbols; the street in front of almost every train station on the island is Chiang Kai-shek Road. Until recently, one could ignore the fact that university entrance and public service exams required knowledge of the Three Principles of the People only at one’s peril. Could one also fail to see the monumental slogans in downtown Taipei? Hear without hearing reference to Taiwan as the Base for Mainland Recovery? Where some Taiwanese have transvalued these forms, they have often reduced them to one colonial history among others. This process of making the KMT party state not just the past but a specifically colonial one has required engagement with China. The development of pilgrimage networks to China was one part of this process of reduction in which Taiwanese people created historical truths through which they could commit themselves to a common future.

Diffused Allegories Across the Straits, Minnan had been in a forward position of the civil war, and from 1950 to 1980, central planners left the region economically marginal. With post-Mao economic reforms beginning in Fujian in 1981, Minnan was slated for rapid development. Planners selected the first of the special economic zones (SEZ), Shenzhen, for its proximity to Hong Kong; however, Amoy, which became an SEZ in 1981, had the advantage of extensive relationships with Taiwan and Overseas Chinese communities, which until the advent of reform had been political black marks rather than economic resources. In the turnaround that marked construction of SEZs, the southeast coast of China underwent a period of rapid economic restructuring, funded through Overseas Chinese investment. By the early 1990s, the postsocialist economy of gaige kaifang, reform and openness, had begun to reconfigure public space and to encourage a diffusion of formerly concentrated allegories of socialism. Images of Mao circulated in a variety of camp and nostalgic forms, often in tandem with revamped preliberation era religious images. Overseas


7

Chinese societies became models for a modern Chinese consumer economy, as the prevalence of Taiwanese and Hong Kong popular music, Singaporean soap operas, and Taiwanese-style ice tea bars all demonstrate. Intervening in the space of these new images and commodities, local party apparatuses attempted to borrow the efficacy of some of these forms within their projects of reform and of “socialist spiritual civilization” (shehui zhuyi jingshen wenming; Anagnost 1997, Farquhar 2002). Particularly in Quanzhou, an ancient city of Minnan containing many vestiges of its former role in maritime trade, this diffusion of socialist allegories was embedded in a set of temporalizing strategies that grounded reform in an essential past even as they relativized the claims of Maoism. The city’s history of openness antedated economic reform in Minnan. The contemporary presence of Taiwanese pilgrims, figured against the background of Quanzhou’s antiquities, said as much. In contrast, Maoism appeared as a past whose claims on the future were only partial. 2 Maoism has not been erased as much as it has been reduced, its allegories diffused (Debord 1995), and its time calibrated with those of the market and civilization.3 Far from disappearing, the party has remained to organize these partial figures into a whole, “filling in ‘what is missing’ to cover over those aporetic divides between China’s problematic present and past and its imagined future” (Anagnost 1997: 79). Not surprisingly, the reductive, or metaleptic, gestures that relativize the claims of Maoism have been uneven, informing some spatial practices and not others. During the early 1990s, patrons of temple reconstructions in Fujian often described their realization of the value of minjian xinyang as unexpected. In their accounts, the “substantial meaning” (shishi yiyi) of pilgrimage was not motivated. Rather, it surprised observers as a culture that appeared once the historical features and causal conditions of minjian xinyang had been enumerated. This unenumerable, surprising cultural factor was what metaleptic gestures, with their relentless reductions, made possible. The counter-contextualization of metaleptic reduction and diffusion, this cultural factor was also a product of complicity among differently configured spatial practices, those in the intersection of which minjian xinyang formed. When Taiwanese pilgrims began to arrive in Fujian, local folklore societies and historical associations had already begun to consolidate in the wake of post-Mao reforms. These para-state groups lacked the funds to reconstruct historic sites, as did a restive populace that began to reappropriate sites that earlier had been targets of iconoclastic violence. These groups and others engaged Taiwanese pilgrims. Taiwanese pilgrims were

8


necessary to their projects as donors; but, more importantly, the arrival of Taiwanese pilgrims served an authenticating function. Taiwanese pilgrimages offered legitimacy to projects beyond the pale of socialist spiritual civilization as defined by the national party-state. The research of folklore societies and other para-state organizations voided the category of feudal superstition as they produced knowledge about popular ritual, thus discovering its enduring (and civilizing) value. Although officially defined as minjian, popular or voluntary, organizations, these groups recruited academics, party members, and retired government officials. As are all minjian organizations in China, those administering minjian xinyang were subject to guidance from a bureaucratic agency. The sphere of culture had to remain autonomous from the state to provide the self-evidence of sentiments that drew investment and that could provide arguments for unification, yet it was actively managed by a variety of state and para-state actors. Rather than representing a terrain that society has claimed against the state, the composition of minjian xinyang in post-Mao China has intensified state-society relationships (White et al. 1996). At the very least, the normalization of minjian xinyang as culture allowed certain subjects to form that were complementary to the ongoing incorporation of China into the global economy. To understand how these shifts in governmentality have occurred, we need to avoid an agonistic account pitting religious publics against the state and develop a method to examine how minjian xinyang has become an autonomous object. For minjian xinyang to appear autonomous required its normalization through a number of state and para-state agencies. It had to become visible as a problem for a set of related units each of which could, in bureaucratic parlance, “neither promote nor condemn it.” The institutions that crystallized around administering such problems reworked the postsocialist state. They also reworked public space. Observers of the postsocialist transition in China have referred to the context of these shifts as the replacement of history of revolution for that of modernization (Litzinger 2000: 104–105; see also Anagnost 1997) or even the replacement of heroic narratives for those of ordinariness (Tang 1996, 2000). Minjian xinyang, like other novel objects of the post-Mao period, served to ground these ordinary narratives and modernizing histories. It was the object of practices calibrated with new values, the anchor of new forms of being Chinese. For the state, minjian xinyang was a resource for the development of modern management practices and a test case for the more daring reform that Deng’s Southern Talks of 1992 encouraged. For some Chinese people, minjian xinyang was a practice in which


9

one could make claims on newly opened public space. For others, it was also a diagnostic object that provoked productive tensions concerning their cultural status. In each venue, minjian xinyang precipitated signs of kaifang in the past and in the self, making extraordinary changes in political-economic organization appear unexceptional and necessary.4

The Reality of minjian xinyang Of the new forms of interchange across the Straits during the late twentieth century, pilgrimage lent itself to spectacular reportage in the media and was one of the most popular. In the context of political entrenchment that marked cross-Straits relationships, pilgrims and those involved in pilgrimage as administrators, tour guides, intellectuals, and reporters produced a set of objects, a body of talk, and an organization of institutions parallel to the state. These all developed from a redefinition of pilgrimages and pilgrimage sites as belonging to “folk culture.” Connected thus to culture, minjian xinyang became one arena in which revived Overseas Chinese connections and a new consumer society underwent normalization. In anthropological treatments as well as journalistic ones, minjian xinyang has gathered around itself the language of restoration and renewal, as if its advocates and detractors had not composed it in the context of a particular juncture in cross-Straits relationships. Although amenable to research and improvement, minjian xinyang appears an object in the world external and indifferent to intention. This positive quality should strike us as the product of much work. More to the point, the task of an historical ontology of “belief” is to demonstrate how this transformation of minjian xinyang into a positive object occurred. This task involves more than an account of construction. It is also an account of how minjian xinyang afforded new possibilities and problems for being (Hacking 2002), an account of how minjian xinyang connected to novel subjects. It is important that we grasp minjian xinyang’s reality as well as its novelty. In spite of their distinct and often opposed arguments about pilgrimage, participants in temple reconstruction and other activities associated with minjian xinyang came to recognize minjian xinyang as the focus of a common practice. Those engaged with pilgrimage may have disagreed on the ultimate ends of pilgrimage (and of belief generally). They often found questions concerning the implications of the shared culture that pilgrimage disclosed insoluble. But all my deconstructive impulses and critical reflexes notwithstanding, they were convinced by

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the reality of minjian xinyang. They were also sure that certain knowledge and correct responses to minjian xinyang were possible. I call this recognition of a common practice amid difference and in spite of the insolubility of its implications complicity.

A Word from the Office of Theory Certain knowledge, such as that crystallized in the object minjian xinyang, is, of course, not irrelevant to ethics. In addition to serving as a necessary background against which any claims or decisions can be made (Wittgenstein 1979), it calibrates our actions, assertions, commitments, and projections with an environment that has variable but largely predictable qualities through space-time (Berger and Luckman 1966). In anthropology and the social sciences generally, problems of certain knowledge have a history that is beyond the scope of this monograph. However, I would like to approach one facet of this history as it appears in the critique of ideology to clarify my approach to complicity. According to one of the ancestors of the social sciences, Vico, certain knowledge of social life was possible by virtue of its constructed quality: Because we have invented society, he argued, we should be able to understand it better than we can nature. Three centuries later, it now appears that our knowledge is most certain in those cases where its objects are autonomous (thus, not constructed). Yet from the vantage of the social sciences—and this is the crucial problem—places of opacity in our knowledge of society are those where agency or intention seems misattributed to constructions.5 In a Marxian framework, these places of opacity are the result of ideology or alienation. They follow from a misrecognition of the products of one’s agency as transcendent and prior to it. Durkheim, also, launched his sociological method from the manner in which members of a society experience collective representations as constraints, which permitted him to treat social facts as things. For modernist social science generally, freedom has largely meant a critical unveiling of these places of obscurity. A concomitant of this approach is that the reality of the social sciences has been understood either as the interests, power, or productive processes behind representations or as the conventional frames of reference (that is, meanings) that inform action. Both approaches would suggest that Taiwanese pilgrims and their Fujianese hosts were either cynics operating beneath or dupes taken in by minjian xinyang. Neither approach is sufficient to understand the collective history that minjian


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xinyang denotes, however, because such a task is not one of unveiling but of understanding the particular possibilities for being human that the reality of minjian xinyang grounded. Those involved in the networks of inventing culture through pilgrimage are able to accuse each other of false consciousness, solipsism, bad faith, cynicism, or stupidity well enough on their own. Their efforts are one subject of ethnography and not its end. In contrast, my approach to the reality of minjian xinyang as the product of complicity describes how their partial forms of critique are motivated. Precisely because minjian xinyang was real, it granted certainty to moral sources in a social field marked by the disintegration of previous norms. Because it was also a construction, the product of a practice, it was amenable to constant revision and problematization as those engaged with it attempted to discover what components of the object were substantial and which contingent, thus shifting the hierarchy of values implied by that practice. The point is that an adequate account of minjian xinyang will show the effects of its being (not) constructed for the set of practices in which it is relevant. Minjian xinyang was, to rely on a concept introduced by Latour (1999: 274), a “factish,” a thing that because well constructed is autonomous and inclines us toward right actions.

Complicity Throughout this work, I show that minjian xinyang was an object that developed through complicity. Complicity has two facets: first, a condition of complication; second, an ethics of deferral. As a complication, pilgrimage folded together—that is, enrolled, aggregated, or complicated—multiple objects, discourses, and types of labor. As an ethics, objects produced in pilgrimage required those engaged with pilgrimage to attenuate or defer certain intentions and ends from the practices that composed minjian xinyang. Thus, complicity compelled recognition of a common project, or practice, in the context of inextricable differences. Through complicity, pilgrimages could generate truth. The existence of pilgrimage before, and beyond, the intentions and interests of any single recognized actor who might make statements about it afforded disinterested knowing. Those engaged with Taiwanese pilgrimages abstracted disinterest, or the possibility of an objective knowledge of minjian xinyang, from the specific crowds that composed particular pilgrimages. The result of this work of purification (Latour 1993), minjian xinyang equally depended on another (often obviated) type of work, one

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of enrollment or interessement (Callon and Law 1982) in which a wider network of human and nonhuman, individual and institutional actants were incorporated into minjian xinyang’s collective. The work of purification exiled intentions from the object, giving minjian xinyang the character of a positive knowledge necessary to maintain engagement and commitment within the practices of pilgrimage and those of knowing it. Meanwhile, complication strengthened minjian xinyang as a fixture of several fields of practice, including bureaucracy, ritual, economic management, and planning. Thus, we could describe minjian xinyang as a “boundary object” (Fujimura 1992, Roth and McGinn 1998, Star and Greismer 1989) that permitted mobilization of complementary types of labor, for example, that of pilgrims, local officials, architects, graphic designers, and scholars. It also admitted transfer across various frames of reference or localities with little deformation.6 In this manner, those engaged in minjian xinyang transformed pilgrimages from peculiar objects into standard practices of “believing” or “enjoying” publics. They no less made minjian xinyang an object contained in the mutual intersection of believing publics, tourists, politicians, and historians. Minjian xinyang folded together material objects such as incense ash, images, votive tablets, postage stamps, and temples. Where one might think of a pilgrim as a human agent distinct from the crowd of objects and words that surround her, a method of examining complicity sees her as a hybrid of incense ash from a specific “daughter” temple, an itinerary, a uniform, means of conveyance, statements about the meaning of pilgrimage, and a human being. These objects channel her activity into a certain form; and, if actors engaged in pilgrimage disaggregate her from this association as the focus of problems or of knowledge, the kind of human possibility she embodies requires shifting from, and coordination with, these objects. In other words, minjian xinyang is one of many “explicit formulations in which we can constitute ourselves. . . . fragments of knowledge in which a person is constituted as a certain type of being” (Hacking 2002: 23, 24). Like other formulations of this sort, minjian xinyang has a history. Although invented and contingent, it is nonetheless real. To examine how Taiwanese pilgrims and their Chinese hosts realized minjian xinyang, I follow the lead of scholars in actor network theory (ANT) who have attempted to displace the language of “subjects and objects” for that of aggregations, associations, subject positions, and object positions.7 According to ANT, not only do objects have histories, but reality—say of microbes, trains, trauma, or minjian xinyang—is the result of many


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“trials of strength” as various actants jostle to enroll others into their own compositions (Latour 1993, 1996a, 1996b). Seen in this light, we have to step back from talk of minjian xinyang in the language of reality or representation. As Latour (2000b: 257) notes of microbes, “We never say ‘it exists’ or ‘it does not exist,’ but ‘this is the collective history that is enveloped by the expression.’ ” In other words, to understand how minjian xinyang came to disclose truths of history, shared culture, and personhood to the pilgrims, promoters, or pundits transfixed by Taiwanese pilgrimage during the late 1980s and early 1990s, we need to investigate a history of enrollments, examining how disparate actors brought several differently named collectives into the networks in which minjian xinyang formed. Some of these networks, such as of those of incense and images, may appear simply to be those of Taiwanese ritual; however, we need to resist this tendency to grant minjian xinyang atemporal status if the “collective history enveloped by the expression” is to appear. As a form of complication, complicity is a description of practices in which various people, objects, and projects are folded together into complex patterns, some “meshworks” or horizontal associations, others “strata” or hierarchical channels (Delanda 2000, Deleuze and Guattari 1987). To take a concrete example, let us consider Taiwanese ritual practices as a complication. This is not too difficult, because descriptions of pilgrimage in Taiwanese Hoklo highlight a nonhuman actant: The standard word for pilgrimage, chinhiuN (m: jinxiang) means literally “to advance incense”; by extension, elements of the material culture of pilgrimage are marked hybrids of hiuN, such as hiuN-khi, incense pennant, or hiuN-tiao, incense notice. Pilgrims, for their part are hiuN-khe, incense guests. In this respect, my assertion that a pilgrim is a hybrid of incense ash, an incense pennant, and a human being follows a local description of pilgrim practices. Not only are pilgrims those who have enrolled incense to become a particular kind of subject mediated by incense, they are themselves enrolled in the work of composing a larger assemblage. Although Taiwanese people refer to hiuNkhe in the plural, descriptions of pilgrims as a collectivity (or even a moral community) gather the incense of an incense guest crowd into a single censer. As such, the pilgrims are collectively loo kha, those “beneath the censer” or “the feet of the censer” of a particular temple. Minjian xinyang, popular belief, folded into pilgrimage another set of object positions, possible ways that notions of the “popular” and “belief” could be defined and realized. The realization of minjian xinyang through the mediation of incense, temple architecture, and incense guests, moreover, meant that those promoting minjian xinyang had to

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enroll these differently configured collectivities into their projects. Like the example of an experimental aircraft described by John Law (2002), what we observe when producing a history of this project is not a single object or singularity (that is, the airplane) but an entire series of “object positions”: a weapons system, an ingenious fueling and servicing solution, navigational devices, fears of nuclear conflict, an allegory of masculine empowerment, and a problem of rationalizing aircraft production and military procurement.8 These positions are not takes on, or interpretations of, the object. As Law (2002) suggests, ability to see these multiple object positions as a matter of perspective indicates that some agent has aggregated multiple object positions, coordinating them into a singularity. On the other hand, the object positions of the singularity “airplane” or “minjian xinyang” are not necessarily multiple self-standing objects. They have formed from, or complicated into, the singularity, the concept of popular belief. The best way of understanding these objects is not an analysis of their constitutive object positions, although that is an important step. Instead, we need to turn our attention to an important feature of these objects, their “fractional coherence.” To follow Law, we could say that as a fractionally coherent object, minjian xinyang “balances between plurality and singularity. It is more than one but less than many” (Law 2002: 3, emphasis in source). In a related form of work, complicit actors often disaggregate some realities as the subject, say, of a pilgrim crowd, or themselves as spokespeople. We see some of that work in my example of incense assemblages above. Aggregating pilgrims as lookha corresponds with the work of disaggregating a deity and often a loochu, master of the censer, as a representative. Local notables and merchants on temple committees actively coordinate the dispositions of pilgrim crowds, mostly middleaged female heads of households, in order to stand as legitimate authority figures in their home districts (and beyond). For these spokespersons, disaggregation provides a warrant; “power . . . can be exercised as control over production only when appropriate subjects (the state, other collectivities, politically empowered individuals) are disaggregated to exercise it” (Sangren 2002: 150). Enrollment also poses a threat: the object may become too monstrous to maintain as a single object unless one were to subject it to practices of deferral or subtraction. This threat was an always-present background of minjian xinyang. Itineraries, relationships among temples, and connections to political-economic reform threatened to unravel as enrolled parties attempted to bolt. The coverage, or coordination, is fractional. Like


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a Sierpinski carpet, it covers all, but has gaps where interfering positions and nonenrolled reality appear (Law 2002, see also Riles 2001).9 Yet this glimmer of reality beneath coordination is necessary to demonstrate the vitality of the object. In fact, in the case of discourses of folklore or shared culture, determining this surprise of the real is the task of those who glean minjian xinyang for significance.10 These problems of enrollment and disaggregation point out why we need to keep the negative connotations of complicity within our purview. How have processes of enrollment and disaggregation surrounding minjian xinyang intensified power relationships? Where do they admit forms of critical freedom and for whom? How do strategies of disaggregation permit arguments about responsibility and other forms of ethical critique?11 My use of the term complicity is meant to keep our anxieties about enrollment, including our own, as a focus of investigation. Although I have discussed complication as a single facet of complicity, not all techniques of complicity are equivalent.12 Moreover, complication often maintains difference rather than erasing it. The economic and religious networks that engaged people on both sides of the Straits complicated each other, yet they presented distinct possibilities of being human. Differences in their methods of enrollment and different possibilities of translation across them abetted some forms of complicity and precluded others. The work of each network was uneven, and each network permitted several places of juncture and disjuncture. These places of articulation, such as the junctures between political failures and ritual life, the juncture between economic liberalization and the promotion of pilgrimage, have a central place in what I am calling complicity. Rather than assuming cultural continuity, economic rationality, or political cynicism as causes, I wish to establish how these probable causes of minjian xinyang came to be and how they were established (as truths or hypotheses) through time.

An Ethics of Deferral In addition to complication, complicity also denotes an ethics of deferral. Ethics, as I employ the term here, refers not so much to a code of conduct as to a folding back upon, or critical relationship to, the self (Deleuze 1988; Foucault 1990, 1997). This critical relationship is doubly mediated: first, through bodies of knowledge through which certain problems and possibilities disclosed by the self become articulable and intelligible; second, through material objects within the self or proximate to it that give these problems or possibilities a compelling reality. These objects

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may constitute what Foucault (1990) defined as ethical substance, or the part of the self that is the focus of ethical work. Minjian xinyang was such an object for the people engaged in pilgrimages, planning temple reconstructions, or arguing about the provenance or propriety of ritual forms. Like childhood trauma as discussed by Ian Hacking, minjian xinyang disclosed “general facts and testable truths about the human condition” (Hacking 2002: 24). Of course, ethics is more than a type of knowledge. To understand how pilgrimage formed part of an ethics of deferral, we can turn to Alasdair MacIntyre’s (1984) discussion of practices—among which we could include pilgrimage, collecting temple epigraphy, playing chess, or writing ethnography—and virtues. MacIntyre defines a practice as an organization of objects, people, space-time, and activity that situates certain goods as internal and others as external. Each practice has a particular set of internal goods, or virtues, whose cultivation alone defines one as a virtuous or vicious practitioner. One may cultivate goods external to the practice, but the cultivation of these goods alone is ultimately deleterious both to the practitioner and to the community of practice in which these goods have value. As I define it here, complicity makes certain ends or goods of a practice external; or, if you like, it requires practitioners to bracket out intentions and motives as “subjective” features, which are barred from the construction of the objects of a given practice. When complicit, practitioners externalize some goods—often highly cherished ones or even ultimate ends—to maintain the possibilities, problems, and pleasures that this practice affords. Complicity is how the objects of a practice become certain, how we can recognize those objects as grounding an ethics while remaining aware of possible distinctness and divergence among practitioners. Complicity is an ethical condition. It does not present the more familiar figure of publics organized through formal procedures. That complicity suggests an ethics of deferral and not a practice denuded of value is clear from the internal goods that practitioners continue to cultivate. Complicit actors may cultivate sincerity, a responsible approach to history, and a sense of anxiety surrounding their commitments during the course of engaging in pilgrimage. These goods are common, and who has them is often the subject of debate among practitioners. While complicit actors cultivate these internal goods and form as subjects in relationship to them, however, they bracket out an entire set of convictions concerning ultimate ends. For Taiwanese pilgrims and their Chinese hosts, an explicit articulation of these ends within the framework of


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pilgrimage would have been disastrous, given the context of political entrenchment and the reliance of both groups on the other to ground what are ultimately opposed claims. Where questions of independence, unification, democracy, desire for capital, and development entered the framework, these questions appeared as external to the practice or at most as perspectives, mere opinions about it. To do otherwise was to risk accusations of ideology, cynicism, or manipulation, in short, the negative connotations of complicity. Practices and their objects change through time. Thus, this book is also a discussion of what happens when objects that once grounded an ethical formation erode and of situations in which the objects remain durable but the ethical formations that they formerly grounded, the possibilities and problems that they realized for people, no longer appear self-evident. Perhaps these possibilities have become trivial. They may fail to convince, or they may no longer be appropriate responses to the object. These conditions are not merely a matter of maintenance, because some formations, such as the Nationalist production of Chinese subjects on Taiwan, unraveled during a period in which they were the explicit subjects of productive work. One might argue that the failure of these objects is often an awareness of the work necessary to maintain them. When the objects that make us act correctly are social facts no longer, or when the bracketed out or sublimated positions that inform the collective history of these objects become all too apparent, people begin to accuse each other of ideology, cynicism, or manipulation. Or they may no longer find the practice interesting or engaging. These failures may occur when the subject (or ethical substance) that these objects instantiate appears too invented or too arbitrary. Yet it also happens when we find these objects beyond our knowledge or efficacious action. If the objects of our knowledge can be too constructed, they can also be far too positive.

My Complicity Some of the networks that I formed in the field were the result of relationships that I first developed in Lukang, a small town on Taiwan’s west coast, while studying Mandarin at Tunghai University in nearby Taichung during the mid-1980s. Throughout my research on Taiwanese pilgrimage, my location in Lukang has persisted. As I designed fieldwork for this project, I was aware of the island’s previous status as surrogate China for ethnographers as well as the Nationalists. I wanted neither the burden of representing China nor the task of discovering it anew in

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comparative ethnography. In an attempt to understand the production of historical truth (if not to “rescue history from the nation” [Duara 1995]), I have taken the conditions of political entrenchment and popular engagement across the Straits of Taiwan seriously, allowing these conditions to inform the configuration of my fieldwork. Research for this project was multisited by design, using movement among sites to investigate the emergence of pilgrimage networks, analyze strategies of promotion, and examine the recognition of a shared project amid much debate. I became engaged in pilgrimage networks, taking pilgrimages and becoming closely involved in their production, working with committees interested in the reappropriation and reconstruction of religious sites in Fujian, and attending conferences on the meaning of folk belief, as well as living in cities undergoing transformation into historical or heritage sites. My fieldwork required recurrent travel, in which I contributed to the maintenance of networks among sites as an unofficial courier of video, documents, gossip, and scholarly judgment. Throughout this book, I account for the paths I took and for the translation of my project into other people’s terms. When analyzed, these translations illuminate complicit practices of inventing culture. In an article on complicity as a figure in field relationships, George Marcus (1997) reflects on the ethnographer’s “vulnerability of finding himself on the side of the village against the state and its agents” as well as his status as “someone officially there through the auspices of the state” (Marcus 1997: 89). Marcus argues that instead of merely employing the former type of complicity to generate rapport, anthropologists should consider both kinds of complicity as productive and, indeed, place the latter form of complicity under focus in critical ethnographic practice.13 During my fieldwork, I could hardly do otherwise. Not only was I officially associated with the Amoy University Taiwan Research Center when performing fieldwork in China, but my fieldwork also involved tracing the bureaucratic networks in which minjian xinyang emerged as a normative framework. By necessity, I was an active participant in these networks as both an interlocutor and a collaborator. Simultaneously, Chinese ritual practitioners, cross-Straits businessmen, and media outlets realized that my value resided in my relationships to both the North American academic world and the Taiwanese temple committee members, with whom they often associated me. In a field where scholars of minjian xinyang were new to folklore if native to Fujian, I appeared to be native to networks of investigating and producing culture. On Taiwan, I was similarly a point in a network connected to centers of political and


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economic power on which Taiwan depended. My Taiwanese interlocutors were quick to note that as a scholar I had no head for either business or politics. This attempt on the part of my Taiwanese interlocutors to fix my position within an enunciatory community (Fortun 2001) of scholars also underscored their role in transforming the ethnographer into a particular type of subject, a process of translating my project in which I was complicit. My research on pilgrimage networks moved among sites of intense participation and collaboration, which I call focal sites, and related sites where I used material analyses and interviews to investigate pilgrimage networks. At focal sites, I was by turns an active collaborator performing research on popular ritual practice, someone to help with routine tasks, a photographer, and even a tour guide. My choice of related sites often followed networks in which I had been enmeshed through my participation at focal sites. For example, my relationship to the Wu Zhenren Research Association in Amoy grew from relationships at one of my focal sites in Fujian, Quanzhou, and led me to a small temple dedicated to Wu Zhenren on Gulang Islet, which was then struggling to achieve recognition as an historic site. My contacts to related sites developed through a combination of letters of introduction from scholars at Amoy University and other introductions from members of the Quanzhou City Taoist Culture Research Association or Lukang Mazu Temple’s board of trustees. On the one hand, my relationships to the focal sites greatly limited my work. People within pilgrimage networks always encountered me as a quasirepresentative of Lukang, a set of scholars at Amoy University, or a faction of folklorists and popular religious practitioners in Quanzhou; moreover, my identity was not of my own choosing, but a negotiated product of complicity itself. The claims of focal sites configured my engagement with related sites in ways that were occasionally hard to manage. However, as the project coalesced, I realized that including an account of my complicity was not merely self-indulgence. In this sense, I have followed Kirsten Hastrup’s suggestion that as ethnographers “we should realize, and creatively exploit, our intricate implication in the world” (Hastrup 1995: 71).

A Crowded Text This book moves across texts, images, and pilgrim crowds to demonstrate how minjian xinyang posed ethical problems that reverberated across pilgrimage networks and beyond. In each chapter, I examine a

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pattern of junctures or points of complicity between ritual and other practices. This pattern of complicity, juncture, and nesting also informs the written form of this book, which develops through tracing the complicated networks and flows of Taiwanese pilgrimages. Chapter 1, “Heat and Noise,” introduces the concept of naojiat, a term that literally means “noisy hot” and that I have glossed as “crowd time.” Naojiat describes the bustling noise and heat of crowds as productive, generating collectivities and, in many cases, posing certain subjects as their spokespeople. A form of enjoyment and a means of social reproduction, naojiat is metacommunicative, multiplicitous, and morally ambivalent. Naojiat sets up several dilemmas that will follow us throughout our discussion of pilgrimage. As I show, these dilemmas animate popular ritual practices and conceptions of public life. Chapter 2 provides a biography of intertemple disputes in Taiwan during the mid-1980s to late 1980s. These disputes followed the logic of popular ritual practice, in which historical legitimacy and immediate efficacy are two interlocking modes of legitimation. However, the inflation of history in these disputes was itself a product of KMT attempts to mobilize the populace. As the state attempted to give popular practices meaning, it offered a new field of competition among religious centers, one that would eventually expand to spectacular pilgrimages to China. After a brief vignette evoking the context of temple reconstruction, chapters 3 and 4 cross the Straits of Taiwan to examine the composition of knowledge and institutions of minjian xinyang in Fujian from the late 1970s through the early 1990s. “Reluctance and Conversion” situates the work of local intellectuals, many of whom were disgraced during previous years of iconoclastic violence, as patrons of nascent temple reconstruction movements. These reluctant patrons developed their practices within the newly emerging sphere of literary and scientific community in Minnan, but they also maintained ambivalent relationships with the worshippers who were early proponents of reconstruction. Most patrons could narrate their personal Road to Damascus in which they recognized both the substantial meaning of popular ritual practice and the responsibilities that were their response to this meaning. In examining how patrons became spokespeople for religious sites and their publics, I demonstrate how the enrollment of popular ritual practice within minjian xinyang interrupts dominant narratives of gaige kaifang. If we often use language of recovery or continuity to describe the emergence of ritual networks in postsocialist China, it might have to do with qualities of minjian xinyang and its institutions. In chapter 4, I look at the formation of para-state agencies that managed minjian xinyang.


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Often coming together with the arrival of Taiwanese pilgrims, these agencies tended to hold opposed definitions of minjian xinyang and its substantial meaning. These opposed definitions, or object positions, of minjian xinyang corresponded to different modes through which managers and practitioners could become responsible, cultured subjects. Each object position situated pilgrimage within different frameworks of time, locality, and significance. In addition to belief, enjoyment was another possible way in which pilgrimage sites connected to subjectivity. In the interlude “Enjoyment and Sincerity,” I briefly examine believing and enjoying subjects. Both belief and enjoyment were the focus of pedagogical work and knowledge production. Between belief and enjoyment, alter-publics continued to surprise, escaping the intentional system of believing or enjoying modes, the appropriate forms of cultured life. Chapters 5 and 6 describe translations that minjian xinyang underwent as its institutions precipitated permanent structures. In chapter 5, I show how itineraries, architecture, and postage stamps formed in, and furthered, controversies concerning the meaning of Mazu Culture. In chapter 6, I rely on a composite pilgrimage to examine techniques of complicity that worked in tandem with structures. These techniques aimed to fix the reality of intertemple relationships and attempted to make these realities the source of demands. Ultimately, the force of these demands, which argued from recognition of cultural affinity, could not overcome a sense that these affinities seemed forced. Pilgrims began to suspect that the structures of complicity represented a politics rather than a deferral of political claims. “Curiosity and Commitment,” chapter 7, gives an account of pilgrimage and memory in the lives of a few Taiwanese pilgrims, asking how an ethics of deferral is embedded in contemporary Taiwanese self-understandings. I conclude this crowded monograph with a set of questions that poses the value of naojiat, crowd time, for a critique of identity in anthropological theory but also for Taiwanese people who today continue to suffer both an excess and a lack of nationality.


1 Heat and Noise

Crowds and Chronotopes Ask someone who speaks Hoklo what she means by naojiat (m: renao), a word that literally translates into English as “noisy-hot,” and she will probably say that it has something to do with emotion. Usually the word describes bustling, spectacular crowds. Few could specify the exact number: perhaps 20, perhaps 100, maybe fewer. Naojiat is more than the presence of a large group of people. In a population-dense region such as Taiwan or southern Fujian, one often encounters crowds, and most do not equal naojiat. Naojiat is the product of the crowd multiplied by something. To most people, that something is a feeling associated with festivals, religious processions, karaoke bars, gambling dens, gatherings of friends and family, spectacular lawsuits, arguments on the street, or even trips to the market. Naojiat is a common enough word. Although people usually gloss it as a feeling, it describes an entire genre of actions in which crowds serve as a medium. Relationships among the sounds, sights, and gestures of noisy-hot crowds provide material for understanding and reworking human relationships. Less obviously, naojiat crowds form networks among domains of activity that people consider outward facing and public and others more often realized as private. Like other forms of mediation, naojiat creates “conceptual and intuitive links between domains of social experience” (Fox 2004: 34). To suggest its importance when people in Greater Minnan explore and communicate what it means to form a public, I prefer to translate naojiat as “crowd time.” Naojiat is a very common word. Living between Taiwan and Fujian, I frequently used it in conversation. Still, I only began to understand

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naojiat when I asked A-Sian, one of my friends in Lukang, about relationships between his neighborhood temple and Kongsian Kiong, a more prestigious temple across town. A-Sian told me a story about agonistic relationships, crowds, and a flying palanquin: Once, several years ago, there was a flood. In response, Longsan Si’s Koanyim [m: Guanyin] toured the entire central and southern region of Taiwan. This was back when my father was in his teens. Every temple in the 36 corners of town clamored for the assistant palanquin position. Koanyim would grant the honor, but only to the palanquin bearers who could pass the bolted wall surrounding the temple courtyard. At that time, Kongsian Kiong’s palanquin bearers were all young men proficient in martial arts. Four of them could also dance [i.e., serve as a medium for] deities. The day of the contest arrived. Each team pelted the wall until their shoulders and thighs were torn. Amid the tumult of shouts, gongs, and firecrackers, arrived Kongsian Kiong’s team, the four mediums in full spirits. With one leap, the palanquin took flight, drawing the bearers over the seven-foot wall. Kongsian Kiong’s team took the assistant palanquin position. To this day, people still esteem the temple as efficacious.

In this narrative, A-Sian underscores the emotional and physical lightness usually associated with noisy-hot crowds. The narrative maintains its force through depiction of noise, violent competition, and tension across space. All are elements of naojiat. The procession mediates between disaster and redress, suggesting a relationship between the figure of the deity and a larger social network, beyond competition, that acts as a subject during times of commonly felt crisis (Sangren 1987, 2000). The lightest team best embodied collective (and divine) response to disaster. The crowd of heavier teams, the failed leaps, blood, and shouts, thus contributes to Kongsian Kiong’s lightness even if Kongsian Kiong alone would represent Lukang’s 36 corners. With this irony in mind, I write this chapter under the sign of the levitating palanquin. In response to my heavy questions, my associates in the field would argue whether particular situations were naojiat or not: “Why is a mahjongg game naojiat, but usually not a political speech?” “What is it about rush hour buses that makes them only crowded?” “How could you consider a freeway accident and its aftermath naojiat?” Some were very conflicted about the relationship between their personal moral code and naojiat’s amoral ethic. None but an ethnographer would waste time disputing the feeling that leads people to call a given situation naojiat. “It’s noisy-hot when you feel your pulse quickened” or “when you feel interested in what’s happening.” In simplest terms, “If you are in a crowd,

Heat and Noise

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and it puts you in a good mood, then it’s naojiat.” My friends would then tell me to lighten up. For most people, noisy-hot crowds bring a lightening of spirits and an increase in appetite, exemplified by festivity surrounding religious festivals and weddings. Indeed, one of the major goals of organizing these scenes of social reproduction is to “put on a good show.” The more crowded the space, the louder the music and bustle, the flashier the costumes, the more polished the performances of theater troupes, acrobats, or palanquin bearers, the wider the spread of banquet tables, the more naojiat. Taiwanese people often talk of naojiat as a value to which crowds or individual people can add and that representatives of a community may compose (tao naojiat, m: cou renao). Those who compose festive spectacles accrue value within the community. As they mobilize others in noisy-hot events, they distinguish themselves from the crowd to become spokespersons or principals. Naojiat grounds their self-representations as benefactors, those who understand “human sentiment,” or the demands of reciprocity (jincheng, m: renqing). Because the value of benefactors depends on their ability to enroll the labor of women and junior men, naojiat places into focus problems of responsibility and alienation. However, naojiat is always produced in, and emergent from, gatherings and dispersals of crowds. Control over the timing of these movements reveals a central problem of agency: that of enrollment versus self-possession. And it also destabilizes sincerity in ironic figures of self-interest and spectatorship. Naojiat mediates among festive crowds and representations of “the crowd.” A value produced in festivity and religious practice, naojiat often appears in depictions of the deficiencies, strengths, and excesses of the various publics that have emerged during the course of very different processes of economic reform in Fujian and democratization on Taiwan.1 The fevers, lacks of enthusiasm, lags between economic development and scientific knowledge, and failures to develop a public sphere outside of personal relationships of kinship and locality all enter discourse under the sign of naojiat. Noisy-hot crowds have become an important object in elite strategies of representing and producing knowledge about the minjian, the folk or popular realm. During Taiwan’s democratization from the mid-1980s to the early years of this century, these strategies have intensified in relationship with another vision of a public opposed to crowds. An image of an anonymous public, intimate strangers governed by rules and procedures, dominates Taiwanese discussions of modernity. Passengers on Taipei’s metrorail

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system (MTR) can experience such a modern, well-governed public as they wait for trains in orderly lines and listen to multilingual announcements urging riders to express civil consciousness (gongde xin) and yield seats to the elderly, pregnant, or disabled. The MTR enrolls passengers into relationships of impersonal trust and transparent communication. Turnstiles and tickets, video screens and constant surveillance all afford experiences of a modernity in which all riders have equal access to clean, efficient transportation. They also have rights to equal public representation, as indexed by station announcements in their own language. In performing this ideal of a public, riders on the MTR affirm their modernity. The MTR transports them to an ideal public sphere depicted in the work of Jürgen Habermas (1989) and other theorists of the modern public sphere. If the hallmark of this public sphere is a combination of rights to representation and impersonal procedure, naojiat crowds interject another form of public. It is tempting for would-be moderns—and here I include myself—to describe naojiat as a public that opposes or supplements a modern public sphere, finding in naojiat particular cultural values that frustrate, resist, or console. But I do not want to consider naojiat an opiate of the people or a weapon of the weak. Let’s avoid that temptation and instead examine crowd time as a critical foundation for subway cars as well as levitating palanquins. To avoid this temptation, we can return to the emotional value of naojiat. Naojiat is not freestanding. It alternates with its complement: cold, or quiet and lonely, times of dispersal. The alternation between “hot” and “cold” makes time visible and provides a form in which time presents itself to purposeful human action. This link of qualities of places, time, and subjectivity suggests that naojiat is a chronotope. Like other chronotopes, naojiat is a figure “that provides the ground essential for the showing forth, the representability of events” (Bakhtin 1981: 250). Alternation between noisy-hot and quiet-cold times actualizes otherwise abstract notions of historical time through the “special increase and density and concreteness of time markers” (Bakhtin 1981: 250) that this alternation produces for those who experience and talk about noisy-hot crowds. Meanwhile, those who talk about naojiat crowds feel this realization of spatiotemporal organization in sensuous qualities of places, crowds, and sounds. This felt presence of place translates a model of space-time into models for relationships. In this chapter, I demonstrate how naojiat informs personal dilemmas and incites public actions. Itself morally ambiguous, crowd time places into question commitment and sincerity, self-control and responsibility. Naojiat mediates between a language to talk about these questions and

Heat and Noise

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material frameworks in which these questions become pressing matters of fact. In addition to its role within an ethical imagination, naojiat has become a synecdoche for popular activities. Appearing at the center of attempts to describe “local culture” or “folk religion,” naojiat gestures to a public that haunts institutions of national representation and that engages in dialogue with another public: that of standard forms and procedures. I will return to the problem of these two publics throughout this book. For now, let us encounter crowds in the variety of contexts where crowd time becomes more than merely crowded.

Rush Hour Buses One cannot describe all crowds as noisy-hot. A man in his mid-30s who often thought about naojiat as he videotaped temple festivals and weddings around Lukang told me that naojiat depends on how one organizes time. He added in more elevated language that naojiat resulted from “the composition of time and relative area of activity.” To him, naojiat depended not only on the gathering of crowds in space, but also the manner in which people compose that space through time as a place for interaction. Many places lack the composition of time my consultant found necessary. Rush-hour buses, crowded banks, or traffic jams are rarely naojiat but simply crowded. In a crowded bus, for example, people are nervous. Worried about pickpockets or apprehensive about yet another day at the office, school, or factory, people have something pressing to do, something that keeps them emotionally stifled (men) or under a feeling of constraint. People push and shove, but only to get on or off the vehicle. More telling for our question is the way people hold their bodies while on the bus. They stand facing the windows, avoiding eye contact, holding their bodies inward. The bus is typically very quiet. People feel no compulsion to strike up a conversation with others. When people enter or exit, one hardly even hears a “make way” or “excuse me.” All motion into, within, and exiting the bus happens through a denial of shared time. Some riders even slap a previously occupied set with the palm of their hand to disperse the heat left behind by the previous rider. The rush-hour bus does not constitute a place, somewhere where people can congregate. It remains only an instrument. Know the route, pay the fare, maintain anonymity. Although the relative number of people occupying a small area is large in the case of the rush-hour bus, the temporal organization for naojiat is missing. Combined with gridlock, crowds add to a sense of congestion or stifling.

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The example of crowded rush-hour buses demonstrates what must be present for a place to be naojiat. First, most naojiat activities are ones that participants consider noninstrumental and light. When the activity is instrumental, it must maintain room for surprise and personal connection. Second, naojiat involves a gathering and dispersal of a group of people at a particular site over a specific time. Third, gathering and dispersal are facilitated by and leave behind material artifacts, usually valorized as indices of crowd activity. Because of its instrumental quality, the bus provides little in the way of interest or conversation, both of which require a shared tempo. The same could be said of the crowded cafeteria, bank, or post office. The only conceivable situations in which people could find any of these spaces naojiat would be if a group of friends could fill them with lively banter or teasing shoves, attracting the attention of others; or, better yet, were a fight on the street, an accident, or even an unwitting foreigner to provide a source of common focus and debate.

Cold and Lonely Other places are the antithesis of naojiat. Cold places bereft of people, abandoned at night, may be desolate (m: xiaotiao). Perhaps they are shuttered stores. Or they may be sinister, literally ghost towns. Prickly rain, piercing wind, or a cold blue-green light occasionally traverse these cold and lonely (lengchheng; m: lengqing) places. They concentrate a store of contagious misfortune that otherwise would travel through entire networks of kin, associates, and neighbors. Places where people have committed suicide, pools or stretches of river where people have drowned, and sites of conflagrations teem with wayward spirits seeking victims to replace them. So do sites where these unfortunate spirits have been exiled. Because their misfortune is contagious and can only be converted but never dispersed, these sites may become the focus of efforts at redress, provoke gathering, and eventually become noisy-hot places. Usually such means are beyond the powers of the miserable spirits that inhabit lengchheng places, however. So lengchheng places tend to remain that way. Whether abandoned permanently or only during the evening, lengchheng places cause one to sigh when they do not provoke a shiver. Taiwanese people generally avoid them. Contrast with lengchheng and its correlates reveals an entire cultural sensorium related to the poles of heat/cold, multiplicity/monotony, and growth/decline. Naojiat has close synonyms connoting multiplicity, bursting growth, prosperity, and depth of color and feeling. This depth

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or “thickness” may be gaudy or histrionic. Like heat, “cold” (leng) can be used to describe markets and fads as well as temperature. Those concerned with my financial prospects in Lukang were anxious that anthropology was a “cold gate,” unfashionable and hence nonremunerative. Not all of naojiat’s contrasts have negative connotations. Many cold places are good ones. Buddhist monasteries are usually quiet, calm, and at a distance from markets. Such quiet places may all be described through compounds of cheng (m: jing). In contrast, naojiat is anything but peaceful or quiet. Naojiat may be crucial to certain kinds of growth or production and may at times raise one’s spirits. On the other hand, naojiat often threatens to explode into violence. Jiat, which I have translated as hot, also suggests a near homonym meaning intense, burning, or violent. Although it is a value, naojiat may also be a source of risk.

Context and Tempo On Taiwan, an encounter with a casual meeting of friends in the living room or courtyard of an acquaintance often elicits the following stereotyped conversation: A: (standing at entrance) Oh, today it’s naojiat enough around here! B: Wow, you’ve come too. Have you eaten yet? Come sit down.

In the above interchange, A’s remark serves as compliment, greeting, and query. Rather than asking directly whether he can enter, A praises the company assembled and by extension B’s hospitality. He also furthers an assumption that the company is a group of insiders among whom he can exercise informality, paired to the implicit question “Do I belong?” B’s answer is variable. Asking whether A has eaten, he invites A into the sphere of conviviality. The interchange would have been much different, however, had B merely said, “Yeah, it’s ok.” In which case, A should comment on how busy B seemed and leave. Naojiat situations provide an arena in which people evaluate the shifting contexts of social relationships. This evaluation is possible because naojiat is the product of verbal and nonverbal communication and exchange, entailing bodily dispositions of gathering and dispersal. As above, these dispositions may be comings and goings (m: laiwang) among friends. They may also be large pulses of gathering and dispersal at markets or at temple festivals. In both cases, inviting and sending off requires ritual work, some of it linguistic, but much of it materially mediated. If A were to sit down, he would soon exchange tea, betel, or

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cigarettes with those at B’s house. They would likely engage in some combination of competitive drinking or gambling before leaving, their debts to each other redistributed yet intact.2 Similarly, incense and paper money both represent and abet communication between humans and deities (Feuchtwang 1997, Huang Mei-ying 1994). Indeed, on Taiwan, the majority of ritual work, whether to reproduce relationships among friends, extend kinship, or to ensure divine favor and prosperity, focuses almost obsessively on inviting and sending off, comings and goings (Stafford 2000). A feature of gathering and dispersal is that they tend to be competitive if friendly, light while agonistic. In many shifts between histrionics and spectatorship, play and bluff, blandishments and threats, people in naojiat situations create frames in which to understand situations that strike outsiders as chaotic agglomerations little different than those of people shoving their way onto crowded buses. As in the everyday example at a friend’s threshold above, during crowd time, “the subject of discourse is the relationship between the speakers”; that is, naojiat is “metacommunicative” (Bateson 1972: 178). Recognition of a situation as noisy-hot is to hazard a pattern of relationships that include the subject. Correspondingly, those who rarely use the phrase in the stereotyped way as above often strike others as introverted or antisocial. Take for example, the teasing banter in this naojiat interview: PM: We Lukang people have made naojiat into a cliché of sorts. So actually we have a saying, don’t know whether you have heard it or not. It’s “Wow, today is really naojiat! What a . . . bore . . . .” F: I feel like that when they have those temple festivals. At times they obstruct the entire street. It annoys me. But I still go and have a look for awhile. As for me, I rarely join in naojiat, so I don’t know how to answer these questions. As for temple festivals, when I go to photograph them, sometimes I enter only to have to jump out of the way. Have to keep in shape! PM: He doesn’t like to add to naojiat. He only thinks of “cultivating” himself. AH: No, he’s never willing to participate. . . . F: It depends on the situation. Sometimes, I think of having a look, but. . . . AH: You don’t have enough belief. If you did, you would like these things more. F: Not necessarily. . . . DJ: Then how would you use the word naojiat?

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PM: He doesn’t know how to use it! F: Oh, I never use that word. Were I to use it, it wouldn’t be interesting anyway. PM: He is the kind of man who likes to “play on his own.”

PM’s puns suggest that ironic language and riposte are important qualities of naojiat. Among the ironies of this interview, I have to include the instability of the mark, or target, of the joke. F and PM seem opposed, but they were actually collaborating to put me in my place: they had suffered my obtuse questions long enough. Naojiat, crowd time, is a context in which people employ irony to reconfigure relationships to selves and others. Apart from annoyance at a pesky ethnographer, Lukang people agree that naojiat might be a bore. My associates there began to call me “Taiwanese flavored” (u tanpo e taioan bi; m: you dian taiwan wei) and mature when, instead of rushing to observe every temple festival or banquet, I would say, “Well, that’s their family affair. I won’t go.” Knowing how and when to hazard inclusion (or exclusion) requires skill.

Marketplaces One of the most naojiat places in any town is the marketplace. On Taiwan, marketplaces include vegetable markets and night markets, as well as commercial districts often known as naoqu (m), “noisy districts.” All are naojiat, except perhaps in periods of sustained economic depression. Vegetable markets are where people, generally female heads of households, make most day-to-day purchases. As opposed to night markets, they open during the early morning hours and often close by afternoon. Night markets, on the other hand, are open for late-night snacks, bargain hunting, games of chance, or casual strolls. Both types of markets tend to be situated around or near the mouths of temples. Naoqu have no necessary relationship to temples, but the existence of a bustling commercial area near a temple signals the efficacy of deities living there. The two types of markets organize time around domestic tasks and leisure. At another level, the changing offerings of these markets, whether seasonal distinctions between cool versus hot snacks in the night market or seasonal vegetables and fruits in their succession make the passage of time visible in an edible medium. Markets also serve as sites where the value of products is created in interaction with other people, through the medium of haggling and in relation to changing circumstances.

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As the market causes products to take on value, it provides metaphors for the value of different people. The market can perform this work because languages surrounding products transform a quantitative scale of value between products into qualitative terms. In the marketplace, the dominant language is one of haggling mixed with gossip. Haggling requires a sophisticated, if stereotyped, set of bluffs and ironic statements. One may deprecate the object that one wants to buy. Sellers may express that, based on clothes or other markers, a buyer can afford the object; they may also claim that based on a certain relationship, for example, “you’re a student,” “we’re friends,” they are offering a special price. All produce knowledge about relationships among people. Gossip, always common at markets, provides another medium in which this knowledge is produced and disseminated. It’s also an example of how women produce the communal reputation of community leaders, usually male, through giving or withholding face. Monetary exchange is also important in framing the market as naojiat: metaphorically, one can also call a flourishing business or stock market trading noisy-hot. However, one need not buy anything, as is the case with window-shopping. For window-shoppers, experience of the crowd gathered on the sidewalks and spilling onto the street, chance encounters with friends, the multitude of commodities arranged on the sidewalks and in windows, and the neon lights and loud music pouring from each store’s competing stereo systems marks one’s experience of naoqu as noisy-hot. As important as exchange itself is the potential for exchange or, equally, the potential for surprise. The market’s potential to be naojiat is in direct proportion to its indeterminate quality. Whether one has struck a bargain is always a matter of debate and can never be known while haggling. There is always room for reversal. Markets thus provide the framework for a specific type of communication and serve as a field for contest or debate. Many Taiwanese people applaud the supermarket, an import from North America, for its “convenience” and lack of entanglements; but it strikes people as cold.

Competitive Gatherings Noisy-hot situations are indeterminate, as underscored in haggling but also in the many games of chance found at night markets or the penchant for gambling games among friends on important holidays or at banquets. Equally important to naojiat, particularly when employed as chronotope in literary representation, is multiplicity. Naojiat connotes juxtaposition

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of many objects, languages, and people rarely allowed such contiguity. At religious festivals, the measured cadences of religious experts, frenzied utterances of spirit mediums, speeches by political figures, texts of votive tablets, couplets from divinatory poems, and the banter of the festival and its banquets all vie for attention. These different genres are not discrete but interpenetrating. They mutually inform and place into question the contexts through which any single genre may be understood. Naojiat, which enrolls all of them into a public spectacle, is a platform for ironic laughter, which “relocate[s] the levels of language” (Bakhtin 1981: 237). In other words, multiplicity involves not only juxtaposition but also coordination. Composing naojiat is a practice of “enacting conditions of singular possibility” (Law 2002: 2, 11), disaggregating a single subject from crowds drawn to the temple as performers, pilgrims, or passersby. These conditions may be those of a common focus; in most ritual or literary contexts, they secure demonstrations of divine efficacy and legitimate authority. The single focus, agent, or narrative that people compose when engaged in naojiat crowds does not require them to level down or “discharge” differences (Canetti 1984), as one might expect. Naojiat events amplify distinctions even as they briefly pull the skein of social relationships into a tight concentration. Musicians at temple festivals, for example, spare no effort to remain audible as distinct troupes, never matching rhythm, key, or timbre to match other troupes performing beside them, often simultaneously. A soundscape of densely layered lines, attracted to the space of the temple mouth but never resolving into sonic unity, extends through naojiat places. Like drinking games among friends, the register is agonistic, if one of festive competition. Saihui, a word used to describe temple festivals, literally means a competitive assembly. Tachia Zhenlan Mazu Temple’s 1988 ritual of cosmic renewal (jiao) for the temple’s reconstruction exemplifies the numerous competitive ties often present in one assembly. A commemorative account of the jiao published by the temple (Tachia 1989) includes depictions of the event as produced in a children’s painting competition, maps, photographs, and occasional literary compositions of university professors and noted novelists. Votive and congratulatory inscriptions celebrating the event came from President Lee Teng-hui, high-ranking national and party officials, the governor, the Kaohsiung city mayor, the head of the provincial assembly, members of city assemblies, and a number of local representatives, including the county head. Temples who sent congratulatory messages included several Taiwanese temples and the founding temple of Mazu in

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China, as well as that temple’s most aggressive competitor. These votives are components of literary and political languages, themselves often in conflict, that enter the festivities. As for the jiao itself, different neighborhoods of the Tachia township constructed six altars, each with its own theme. One of these altars featured a giant dragon constructed from pineapples, as well as pagodas, mythical beasts, and heroes from the popular novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms carved from a variety of fruits and vegetables. The altar also included a mountain of meat in the form of rows of sacrificed pigs and goats and an ice sculpture competition with participants from seven hotels and restaurants. One could say that the entire social world, from the everyday to the fantastic or cosmological, was presented as an offering in edible medium. Another display reconstructed an altar from a jiao held 52 years ago, continuing the theme with an exhibition of folk art, antiques, and traditional agricultural implements. Another presented a giant image of Guanyin complete with a neon halo standing on dragons and clouds, which were articulated with walls composed entirely of giant television sets provided by the Sanyo Corporation. Also present at the event were almost ten thousand images either shared from Tachia or visiting from sister temples, 20 sets of deities made from paper especially for the jiao ceremony, and a group of foreign tourists captured by the photographic staff. Events such as the jiao present one with a bewildering assembly of people and their products, a confusing mass that Taiwanese people say will “make your eyes flutter.” The event is also a spectacle of social relations. Each group, not to be outdone by the others, mobilizes an entire set of relationships to compose the best spectacle, drawing on connections with antique dealers and folk artists, karaoke and discotheque designers, television companies, and major hotels. Not an isolated occurrence, naojiat is a repetitive movement of the gathering and dispersal of multiple crowds to make “the crowd.” The rhythms of this movement give time its tangibility. Markets, often beside or at the mouth of a temple, gather people together at night or in the early morning hours. The cycle of new and full moons determines when families place offerings outside residences or businesses and when the devout visit temples. Anniversaries of the arrival of images determine the dates of large-scale processions. Every 60 years or more, a jiao celebrates architectural and cosmic restoration. Each of these different points in the calendar, moreover, involves reference to different spatial positions (DeBernardi 1992) and the inclusion of different social groups

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(Sangren 1987). In these movements of spatial reference and incorporation, naojiat activities “provide a predictable rhythm of reunion and dispersal which generates a sense of the endurance and indestructibility of community and subculture” (DeBernardi 1992: 261; see also Stafford 2000: 3). The “sense of community” produced in naojiat is equally a scene of reciprocity and riposte. The town of Lukang is conventionally divided into 12 higher, 12 middle, and 12 lower corners. In the past, ceremonies surrounding the ghost month in Lukang formed a month of competitive feasts among all 36 corners of town. Knowledge of the order of these competitive events served as a password among Lukang emigrants in Taipei and Kaohsiung, a way to locate otherwise anonymous people in a web of feuds, owed favors, and festivity. Although ghost month festivities have been curtailed owing to the influence of KMT antisuperstition campaigns, the system of 36 corners still informs popular ritual and the production of folklore in Lukang, now an important historic site. Those who coordinate major events associated with one neighborhood temple must invite representatives from temples in each of these corners. Depending on debts incurred in the past or attempts to augment the status of the corner in relation to others, the energies and expenses required to respond to such invitations can be large. Most neighborhood temples nurture martial arts or performing teams to accompany their palanquin bearers on procession; those hoping for greater effect engage performers from other towns, some famous throughout the island. Planning for these events requires great precision. Tachia’s commemorative album for its 1988 jiao includes a plethora of documents including registration forms, donation slips, work reports, parade plans, and publicity posters. For pilgrimages to China, planning includes applications for visas, police permits, letters to mainland hosts, and meticulous plans for itineraries. We might wonder why planning appeared in Tachia’s commemorative album. Planning allows organizers of these events to convert the respect placed in their leadership into popular mobilization, and finally into spectacles that, if successful, add to the respect the leaders can command. Demonstrations of divine efficacy as well as youthful bravado, the value that the movements of palanquin bearers produce also accrues to those who coordinate naojiat crowds. As temple organizers enroll crowds into reciprocal feasts and feuds among localities, they produce the conditions of their own authority. In his work on contemporary Crete, Herzfeld (1991: 66) observes that reciprocity

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erases particularity “in the name of a mutual but by no means socially egalitarian ‘respect.’ ” In Herzfeld’s terms, the respect that reciprocity generates is an “enabling condition for the mutual dependence” of classes (1991: 77). Similarly, naojiat attenuates differences of gender, age, social status, and personal interests under the sign of the particularity and fame of a locality. Backpedaling economic and gender-based expropriation, naojiat legitimates the authority of those who compose and coordinate spectacles as the benevolent, if personal, demands and prerogatives of human sentiment (renqing; Sangren 2000, see also Kipnis 1997, Yan 1996).

From Indeterminacy to Moral Ambiguity No amount of planning can cause an event to be noisy-hot. For naojiat, there must be the element of indeterminacy, or even accident. As a student monk at Nanputo temple in Amoy told me, the “naojiat potential” of a situation, whether a market, temple festival, or fight, is that the outcome is uncertain. The enjoyment of a temple festival, like the enjoyment of haggling, is that one never knows whether one will get what one wants. Indeed, the results could often be a surprise, like a joke that ends up being on you. In this regard, values produced through coordinating naojiat, whether local fame or political power, are fragile. Naojiat provides vitality but also renders one susceptible to satire. Likewise, indeterminacy is an important component of the anticipation many people associate with naojiat. The stress on the surprising or accidental gives naojiat a share of moral ambiguity. This ambiguity is embedded in the multiplicity of the festival, which is often a satirical lapse of propriety with its gaudy striptease floats and lurid martial arts teams brushing against pilgrims and worshippers. In this regard, we should not underestimate the dangers of naojiat gatherings. Competitive assemblies can break out into fights. Before 1949, the early spring pilgrimage season in Quanzhou was the occasion of spectacular feuds among opposed neighborhoods, followers of the Eastern or Western Boddhisattva factions (Fu Jingxing 1992; Wang Mingming 1995). In 1993, management officials for the Meizhou National Tourist Economy Zone engaged special public security personnel for the birthday celebration of Mazu to avoid violence between competitive groups. As one local schoolteacher in Meizhou told me, the birthday celebration has been very naojiat in recent years because groups from nearby counties in Fujian all bring a competitive spirit— and weapons—to the pilgrimage.

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Most people hasten to add that fights or accidents are an undesirable sort of naojiat, “a waste of life.” But as one woman, herself a Christian, told me in Quanzhou, “Although I do not approve of such things, it is our practice.” One man in Quanzhou, a restaurant owner who defines naojiat as a synonym for “stimulating,” deferred from such moral judgments. He claimed that the most recent naojiat event in Quanzhou was the public procession of convicts about to be executed. Everyone came out to watch. The convicts stood in pickup trucks, with chains about their necks and feet, their heads shaved. Bright red banners and loudspeakers announced their crimes. Anyone who had a building nearby rushed to the roof to watch the execution, even though it was, legally speaking, not a public execution. I was shocked when another associate in the field had invited me to watch from one such roof, claiming that the scene would be naojiat. Clearly, naojiat was morally ambivalent. Ambivalence of this sort informs popular religion as well (DeBernardi 1992, 1995; Feuchtwang 1992; Weller 1994a, 1994b). Many pilgrimage networks formed through morally ambivalent means. Lukang’s neighborhood temple system, like that of many a Taiwanese coastal town, is dominated by Ongia (m: wangye), whose ritual organizations often expanded through the release of boats laden with images and offerings into the ocean. Those who dispatched the boats often did so during times of crisis, particularly epidemics, hoping through contagious means to rid themselves of contagious misfortune. A declaration accompanying the images instructed those who found the vessel to build a temple for the images at the site where the boat ran aground. Penalties for disobeying this instruction were severe; at the very least, they included the plague those who sent the boat wished to disperse. However, those who found Ongia perceived the arrival of Ong boats as a source of good fortune (Hong and Lu 1911; So 1939: 32, 135). Installed in their new homes, the images became focal points for crowds to gather and disperse, founding new communities. Naojiat, like efficacy, is distinct from virtue in the strict sense. However, naojiat is not bereft of an ethics. Naojiat’s moral ambivalence intensifies another set of ethical problems: those associated with commitment. White Impermanence, also known as Gentleman Seven or Inconstant Uncle, for example, is an ambiguous character. In most religious processions on Taiwan, he usually appears with his companion, Black Impermanence (Gentleman Eight). Although a minor figure in most rituals, he highlights questions of trust and sincerity. Gentleman Seven serves as a runner for the King of Hell, a position in which he arrests the souls of those who have charges pressed against them

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in the nether world. A tall, gaunt figure, White Impermanence walks with a wobbling gait as he swings his arms to fan himself. His long red tongue lolls luridly out of his mouth, showing that he is a hanged ghost. Suggesting an ambivalence that is central to Chinese religious practices, the “Inconstant Uncle represents both death and luck,” both “mourning and laughter” (DeBernardi 1995: 267). This ambivalence is a product of an accidental, contagious character of misfortune parallel to naojiat. In this sense his biography parodies commitment: In life, White and Black Impermanence were sworn brothers. 3 One day they arranged to meet under a bridge. White Impermanence was late for the meeting. Although the weather threatened a squall, Black Impermanence remained below the bridge, waiting for his friend. When the storm clouds broke, Black Impermanence, caught under the bridge, drowned in the floodwaters. He is now a black, bloated figure with protruding eyes. White Impermanence arrived at the bridge only to see his friend drowned there in the water. Remembering their oath of brotherhood, he was overcome with remorse and hung himself from the bridge. Today he is tall, white faced, with his tongue hanging out of his mouth. Their loyalty moved the King of Hell, who conferred upon them a position in the terranean bureaucracy.

Drowning victim and hanging ghost, White and Black Impermanence belong to two types of ghosts that people in Greater Minnan consider especially dangerous. Both are likely to transmit misfortune to others in attempts to find a scapegoat. White and Black Impermanence parody these ghosts, for their misfortune was the result of Black Impermanence’s loyalty and White Impermanence’s tardiness.4 Their deaths are, depending on one’s viewpoint, an interruption of reciprocity or its apotheosis. We can expect accidents in an impermanent, inconstant world. Rather than belonging to a class of outsiders or strangers, these unfortunate characters are supremely familiar. In Quanzhou marionette theater, they serve as comic guides to the underworld, translating the King of Hell’s incomprehensible Mandarin into the language of the market. Their earthy failures are quintessentially human. Hoklo speakers call the masses of hungry ghosts “Good Brothers” (ho hiaNte; m: hao xiongdi). Not a euphemism, this phrase is recognition of the contagious misfortune that threatens humans as public creatures. Gentleman Seven and Gentleman Eight parody commitment and lay open the perils of even well-placed trust. Demonstration of a sincerity that permits no breach, Gentleman Seven also appears as the very image of an opposed ethics,

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that of opportunity: “with one glance, you gain riches,” says his hat. His appearance in naojiat events reminds us that naojiat, like the biography of White Impermanence, makes a problem of commitment and of opportunity in the very occasions in which people reproduce and prove their commitments in and to a public.

Participant or Observer? A stress on accident and indeterminacy makes naojiat morally ambiguous. It also adds to its danger. Occasionally, naojiat can even be used as a reprimand. Hence, when a parent asks a child, “What naojiat were you putting together?” it is equivalent to asking what kind of trouble did the child stir up. Although many people cite their motive for going to temple festivals or going on pilgrimages as wanting to “see naojiat” (khoaN naojiat; m: kan renao), others would criticize such a motive as not sufficiently “sincere.” In each case, the grammar of naojiat provides space for commentary on another’s responsibility (or avoidance of it). Paired with the moral ambiguity of naojiat is an unstable division between participants and witnesses that many Taiwanese people describe as a defining feature of naojiat situations. The above reprimands work because in addition to watching a fight, the witness could be one of those who incited it. Rather than making a sincere visit to a temple, one could attend the festival to cast a glance at the performance of others. One might arrive to watch the spectacle, but become part of the spectacle for others. One may come to participate, but others may consider one merely an audience member. Usually, one’s experience oscillates between both roles. The appearance of White Impermanence and Black Impermanence, as well as other parodic offerings of temple festivals, reminds those in the audience that one can always become implicated in another’s foibles. The possibility that one might both watch (khoaN) and contribute to (tao) naojiat underscores that naojiat is not only a source of historical consciousness but also a “frame” in which history becomes available for an ethical imagination (Burke 1984). As Kenneth Burke writes, such frames “enable people to be observers of themselves while acting” (1984: 167, emphasis in source). Although such frames imply a language for debunking others for “selling out” or “cashing in,” this criticism may operate reflexively to situate and configure social relationships: “In the motives we assign to the actions of ourselves and our neighbors, there is implicit a program of socialization. In deciding why people do as they do, we get the cues that place us with relation to them” (Burke 1984: 170).

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White and Black Impermanence provide a critical account of motivation, which amplifies some motives (loyalty, reciprocity, care). The relationship with naojiat is circular, for this sounding out of motives brings attention to the commitments that compel naojiat. This attention to commitments that compel brings us back to mood. Naojiat works through mood to render sincerity an internal good whose cultivation is often in question. People at naojiat events often place themselves in relationship to others through comparison of their performances or through sidelong glances at another’s motives. At the jiao, as well, many could debunk contributions from local businessmen, convinced that in reality these are poorly disguised attempts at converting economic capital into social standing. Pilgrims from Taiwan to Meizhou, the founding site of the Mazu cult, even ridiculed Meizhou’s image: “It looks like one of the puppets from the hand-puppet theater!” they laughed, placing the motives of their Chinese hosts into question. Without this debunking and laughter, it would not be naojiat. As such, mood is an important quality of naojiat: Mood provides a means to develop a relationship to the self in which one’s own motivation and commitments may undergo transformation. In addition to amplifying motives, naojiat may attenuate them, whether the attribution is of sincerity or, as might be more common, khoaN naojiat. The result is an assumption that people must be sincere, combined with a tacit knowledge of the naojiat that many in the crowd might be stirring up. The value of this ironic stance is its deferral, which is a source of possibility for a wider community.5 Although ironic deferral may suggest complicity among insiders, the smug understanding of those who know better than to interpret a statement literally (Booth 1974; Hutcheon 1995), the irony of naojiat is not an elitist act. Rather, this irony permits those composing naojiat to suggest that the many differences produced in competitive festivity are secondary to internal values that the public might share, albeit briefly. Thus, the naojiat crowd creates a public that extends beyond consociates directly engaged in relationships of ongoing reciprocity. Indeed, it captures anyone too close to the procession with Inconstant Uncle and his ghostly retinue. It reaches out to grab those who would consider themselves mere spectators. Irony, like misfortune, is contagious.

Making People Move In addition to ironic language, those who compose naojiat employ technologies of making people move across the boundaries dividing insiders

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and outsiders, participants and observers. These technologies, such as exchanging incense, lighting firecrackers, or carrying palanquins, are spatial practices (Lefebvre 1991), gestures that produce spaces and orient people toward them. For example, incense exchanges mark the boundaries of corporate groups and exert a centripetal tension that gathers people during naojiat occasions and through time; incense exchanges in the past call for gathering in the future. Firecrackers, whose report adds to the soundscape of naojiat events, punctuate cadences in ritual and provoke dispersal and movement. Together, incense and firecrackers produce crowds that are focused and expansive. Palanquins mediate between these two forces of gathering and dispersal and enable them. Very few people claim to have seen a palanquin lift people, as did Kongsian Kiong’s palanquin in A-Sian’s narrative. However, it is common knowledge that a palanquin moves according to the will of its divine passenger. As to their carriers, palanquins provoke loss of control over the vehicle. Because carriers are not always fixed groups, but often open to crowds of worshippers struggling to lift or touch the palanquin briefly during the climax of processions, this contagious quality of palanquins extends into naojiat crowds, intensifying the movement between participants and observers. If incense accumulated in temple censers, images of deities, and architecture are all crowd products that maintain reciprocity and respect, community boundaries, and evaluative geographies, carrying palanquins forms another sort of demonstration: that of the reality of a larger subject than individual carriers. The local term for this demonstration is leng (m: ling), meaning efficacious response. Related to a wider cultural logic of mediating inside and outside, order and chaos (Sangren 1987, DeBernardi 1992), leng appears here in movements that inscribe boundaries and relationships among communities “under the censer.” Carriers attribute intentional movement to the palanquin and hence to an efficacious deity, attenuating their own role in this process of social reproduction. For this reason, the palanquin may stand as an example of the role of alienation in social life (Sangren 2000). As we have seen, however, naojiat engages in debunking as part of its very composition. A more embodied approach, one that would attend to the palanquin’s puzzling animation, seems in order. As a palanquin bearer in Lukang, I was convinced by the palanquin’s animation, feeling the heavy vehicle lift and exert pressure that would drag me were I not to move in the prescribed gait. Experienced palanquin bearers told me that I would feel motion issuing from the palanquin, but their warnings did not make my own experience less surprising. Later,

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I realized that I felt the palanquin as animated not through suggestion, but because in physical terms it is. A large palanquin is constructed of two pliable poles placed in parallel lines, between and on which sits the carriage. Often intricately carved from camphor or cypress, the carriage is much heavier than the poles. Its weight is distributed along the four ends of the poles as if each pole were two levers. In order to keep his balance, each carrier (palanquins are usually carried by teams of eight young men) must adjust his movements to those of the other carriers through a practiced gait or through what he feels of other carriers’ movements through the palanquin poles. In these attempts to gain balance, however, oscillations sent through the poles by carriers are stored within the carriage (the center of gravity) and released out into the poles, causing more disequilibrium to which carriers must adjust. Those at the front of the palanquin often experience this disequilibrium as possession. Alfred Gell (1980: 225) has described a similar mechanism used in ritual dances among the Muria in India: The youths are not, as separate individuals, simply supporting a constant proportion of the total weight of the anga; they are in continuous, but largely involuntary interaction with one another via pushes, pulls and tilting movements initiated by the other carriers, multiplied by the inertial properties of the anga itself. . . . as the dance continues, a pattern seems to have been established, a rhythmicity which is unwilled and which seems to—which indeed does—originate in the animate mass of the anga. Before long, the anga, seeming to have taken control entirely launches off into a whirling and plunging dance of the utmost ferocity.

To Gell, the importance of devices like the anga is that they “disrupt” or “contradict” the “normal state of integration which exists between actions and their consequences in the external world” (Gell 1980: 227). Like the rites of disequilibrium Gell describes, palanquins provoke “restructurings of cognition and self-world relations” (1980: 239).6 In relationship to leng, the restructuring of self-world relations that palanquin carriers experience also changes the relationship of palanquin carriers to their selves. Palanquin carriers compete with other carriers and teams to demonstrate strengths connected to a publicly recognized and subjectively felt virility, or eng (or iong; m: yong). However, they employ eng in the pursuit of a common good, that of communal reputation. The palanquin’s animation, which disrupts the normal relationship between intention and movement, complicates relationships to the eng self. A palanquin carrier cultivates sincerity by desiring his movements to manifest divine efficacy. The day after a procession, most palanquin

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bearers stifle complaints of bruises, stiff shoulders, or aching hips. All are normal signs of physical exertion, but they index a lack of sincerity. Sincerity thus suggests eng as a manifestation of divine efficacy. Palanquin bearers feel this complication of the eng self with the sincere self as an abeyance of agency. Naojiat similarly requires complicity between contrasting, if not contradictory, motivations. Like other chronotopes, naojiat does more than represent time. It also mediates between models of time and models for action, place and person, affect and agency. The flying palanquin captures the imagination because it demonstrates how public life complicates two modes of action: active yet subjected, versus passive yet autonomous. Recall the noisy-hot scenes of religious processions. Lion dancers or palanquin bearers allow photographers to gather around, only to charge at them without notice. Groups carrying instruments reminiscent of official standards proclaiming “Silence!” and “Make way!” push through crowds with an authoritarian manner. Participants in the procession use bicycles, flags, and poles to hold the crowd within set boundaries. These actions all serve to negotiate and channel movement between the categories of performer and audience, insider and outsider. Simultaneously, however, they make a problem of agency. Palanquin bearers and lion dancers are often said to be possessed by a deity. Those who act upon the crowd are themselves subject to an outside force. In the first means of public action afforded by naojiat, the action of palanquin bearers upon the crowd (causing its collection or dispersal) is estranged—or in Marxian terms, alienated—from actors. A subject, that of the deity, substitutes for a disposition created through social interaction. Here crowd time attenuates intention under the sign of sincerity. Alternatively, one could describe the action of possessed mediums or palanquin bearers upon the crowd as the disappearance of subjectivity into cultural form. Nonetheless, through attenuation, palanquin bearers move crowds. On the other hand, ritual is colored by irony and debunking. Deities depend on worship; or, as many Taiwanese people say, “sincerity produces efficacy.” The first means of action, active but subjected, obviates the complex relationships that produce community, while the second means, passive but autonomous, makes some of these relationships visible, generally for critical purposes. Taiwanese people recognize that naojiat is an emotionally charged gathering that creates belief and reproduces a community’s collective representations.7 Their use of “watch” to designate participation in such a gathering defers belief, placing sacred motives on other people. Apart from irony’s critical possibilities,

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debunking thus suggests the possibility of disappearing into the crowd. “Watching naojiat” separates some people from the group, rendering them observers. Ironically debunking naojiat activities, those in the crowd maintain a sort of self-possession, albeit one restricted when one is the object of crowd-control techniques. Disappearing in the crowd thus screens or flattens one’s intentions while attributing intentions to others. Both of these modes (agentive, but subjected to outside control; self-possessed but moved by others) suggest possible types of commitment. The first implies sincerity, the second, enjoyment or critique. Together, they outline the contours of a dilemma. To create enduring publics requires both sincerity and critique. Complicity is a balance of the two, which removes neither their tension nor the need to maintain these motivations. Constantly posing the possibility that commitments might be flawed, that sincerity might only amount to enjoyment, naojiat provokes equally constant work at maintaining those networks in which enjoyment might yield to sincerity. Naojiat incurs more naojiat. It also casts a wary eye on commitments that offer no space for opportunity, on a cold sincerity that resembles grudges, and on cold doors that admit no debts. Although naojiat events do enroll people into crowds with a common focus, naojiat is a chronotope of the multiple conversations and contagious movements that compose crowds. Those who employ it recognize that crowds will disperse or may spin out of control. Naojiat is a source of knowledge about social life that situates public action within a field of personal problems. Moreover, crowd time is in friction with other modes of publicizing social organization. In a modern imagination, there are two publics. The first, dominant in discussions of democratization and civil society, is a public of transparent representation, decision-making, and communication. In this public, the systematic obstacles to and distortions of rational, open discourse have been removed, and the public is a domain where people debate and resolve questions of common concern. In this public—call it Habermas’s coffee shop public—people confront each other apart from the inflection of their voices with difference or personal biographies. It is a space in which a “parity of ‘common humanity’ ” (Habermas 1991: 36) has been reached. The appeal of the coffee shop public is that it is timeless and egalitarian. Although thus denuded of a particular spatiotemporal context, the coffee shop is also a chronotope. In its various guises, it has informed a normative depiction of democracy, at least in its founding documents and self-representations.

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Given this stress on transparency and formal procedure, it is easy to forget that the coffee shop might also be a scene of consumption, reciprocity, and riposte. In this sense, Bakhtin’s Rabelaisian public (Bakhtin 1984) is more than a complement of Habermas’s coffee shop public; it may also be an account of its critical conditions. To Bakhtin (1984: 9), the festive laughter, grotesqueries, and market language of carnival as exemplified in Rabelais opened into a “second life of the people,” which could embrace a more complete humanity. In this image of the public, no discourse exists apart from the grain of the voice (Barthes 1977) and no words communicate apart from the “agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgments and accents” through which utterances grope toward their targets (Bakhtin 1981: 276). From this vantage, “our partial nonidentity with the object of address in public speech” (Warner 2002: 78) suggests that our participation in publics entails a subject position that is both estranged and intimate, abstracted yet embodied. Naojiat captures the tensions of this position, demonstrating that the coffee shop public forms through, not in spite of, the mediation of ironic embodiment and agonistic enrollment. The public of formal procedures and transparency has become dominant in prescriptions for public life in the Taiwanese media and among many Taiwanese people. Yet, naojiat as “culture” continues to be essential for the representation of a vital public sphere in Taiwan, as it has since the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the rhythms and cadences of popular festivity began to replace failing institutions of national representation. Vibrant, voluntary, and seemingly spontaneous, although helped along by promoters whose networks include state organizations, noisy-hot crowds produce public images of the people without which democratic polities would appear incomplete. Earlier antisuperstition campaigns made this public visible through contrast, a depiction of waste and misplaced energies. With post-totalitarian transformations of place and public involvement, state investment in naojiat as a defining locus of the popular has become more diffuse, enabling and at times promoting larger spectacles.8 Anxieties accompanying naojiat have also become more extensive. Recent elections in Lukang, for example, commenced with oaths at local temples and continued with processions through voting districts. Trucks equipped with loudspeakers and drums, flags in party colors, and an eye for festive pageantry informed much of the buildup to election day, which itself heralded new processions thanking voters. All very naojiat, but to some observers a reflection of the immaturity of Taiwan’s

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democratic institutions, which remained to them overly personalized and locally embedded. Activists have also employed naojiat activities to promote public consciousness among the populace. As a result, during the 1990s, people in Lukang feared that the inflation of naojiat events in their town, which accompanied the town’s promotion as a representation of Taiwanese culture, had eroded the relationships that naojiat events formerly caused to cohere. In making a problem of agency and enrollment, naojiat reminds us that there can be no public without the enrollment of heterogeneous agents and complementary forms of labor. Rather than a sublimation of difference, it calls for negotiation; and it cautions us that we will not act efficaciously in the world without the mediation of others. Naojiat reminds us of the bracketing out of intention, the complicity necessary if we are ever to build community. For that reason, flying palanquins are good to think, and not just for Taiwanese people.

2 Fabrication and Commitment

Problems of Commitment “Taiwan’s played out” (Taiwan wandanle). In 1998, A-Sian, an artisan in Lukang, had that to say about Taiwan, punning on a phrase that means “finished” or “at a loss.” Although the island country had weathered the 1997 crisis, it was, or was soon to be, played out. “Everyone says, ‘This year, we’ll wan (play) electronic components and next the stock market; maybe the year after, wan a mainland investment. Maybe we’ll wan a restaurant.’ In Taiwan everyone is wan–ing. Taiwan is wandanle.” I laughed. A-Sian wanted me to laugh. But his point was serious. The very strategies of flexibility that had made the island an economic success seemed a threat, as if they might unravel Taiwan’s constitution. Wan, in Taiwanese Hoklo chhit-tho, is perhaps the antithesis of commitment. A sense that commitments are difficult to secure appears in several Taiwanese cultural domains. Popular music offers its gangster figures, who complain that people bo gikhi (m: mei yiqi), or do not have the sense of right that they once had. The televised Pili puppetry series captures this anxiety geographically with the disappearance of the Central Plains as a central referent, replaced by a wulin (martial world) of shadowy, shifting organizations (Silvio 2007). In A-Sian’s hometown, Lukang, this anxiety seems more immediate as tourism and commercial speculation have transformed the system of interlocal temples that fixed local relationships. The explosion of Taiwanese pilgrimages to China during the late 1980s and early 1990s also foregrounds problems of commitment, as a set of acrimonious disputes among rival temples, each accusing the others of fabricating history (bianzao lishi), reconfigured Taiwan’s Mazu cult.

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In this chapter, I juxtapose a description of intertemple competitions in Taiwan with an outline of political-economic shifts to demonstrate the relationship between patterns of intertemple competition and changing forms of popular mobilization. During the late 1980s, as intertemple controversies expanded into spectacular pilgrimages to Chinese sites, the internal logic of popular ritual became entangled with the fallout of Taiwan’s “miracle” economy and failing KMT institutions of national representation. I argue that the logic of Taiwanese religious practice, particularly tensions between historical antiquity and contemporary efficacy, between the need to enroll others in noisy-hot spectacles and the tendency of enrolled others to bolt, mediated problems of truth and commitment intensely felt on late martial law Taiwan. Intertemple controversy provided an arena in which anxieties that Taiwan was played out, played out.

The Biography of a Dispute To gain a sense of these disputes’ rhetoric, we need to backtrack to two events at the onset of the “Taiwan miracle.” In 1967, the Taiwanese folklorist and social historian Lee Hsien-chang published a provocative essay on the destruction of Ponkang, one of Taiwan’s most important historical Mazu sites.1 Lee’s article claimed that the original temple at Ponkang was not the present Peikang Chaotian Temple. Rather, a flood destroyed the original site during the mid-Qing dynasty, after which locals moved the Ponkang Foundation Mother image and salvageable relics to another site, Hsinkang. Lee’s article spurred a debate between Peikang and Hsinkang that continued into the 1990s, engaging academics, politicians, and businessmen as well as worshippers and temple committees. In the same year, Chiang Ching-kuo (premier 1967–1977; president 1978–1988), Chiang Kai-shek’s son and future president of the Republic of China, made the first of several visits to Peikang. The arguments and the visits were consistent with the logic of Taiwanese popular religious practices but also demonstrate a set of complications that were to transform their meaning. Lee’s article shocked readers with an attack on the authenticity of one of Taiwan’s most central Mazu sites, long renowned as an object of annual pilgrimages (So 1939: 321–328; Masuda 1935). Yet Lee’s environmental history was reasonable. Until recently, the rivers that rush in torrents from the Central Mountain Range into the western plains meandered. Lee’s story of rerouted rivers and relocated temples was plausible.


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Lee also demonstrated an engagement with folklore that would begin to displace the mishmash of utopian modernism and antiquarianism that had defined previous KMT cultural policy. Lee claimed figures in the Chinese folklore movement of the nineteen teens and twenties as his ancestors (Tsai Hsiang-hui 1990a: 96) and, in keeping with this heritage, cited pilgrim crowds and oral histories as evidence for his claims. This investment heralded shifts in popular mobilization that would become more prominent with the advent of democratization. In his argument, Lee depended on what I will call differentiating statements exemplified by differences between settlers from Zhangzhou (in Hsinkang) and Quanzhou (in Peikang), a flood that fragmented a settlement, and a set of three separate images. These differences break a continuous narrative of the Ponkang Foundation Mother residing at Peikang. In response, Peikang’s partisans produced unifying statements. They underscored the relationship between the Ponkang Foundation Mother and initial Chinese settlement of Taiwan, regardless of prefectural origin. They also emphasized the line of Buddhist monks who managed the temple, keeping the Ponkang Taiwan Foundation Mother under their care from the early Qing to the present. The fabled flood was just that, a fable. Peikang also debunked Lee’s motives. According to Peikang’s temple committee, Lee had asked Peikang Chaotian Temple to fund his research on Mazu. Rejected, he collected legends from Hsinkang. Fabricating history on a grudge, he stirred up an unfortunate argument between two sites whose relationships should resemble “hands and feet,” in other words, siblings (Tsai Hsiang-hui 1990a: ii; 4–5, back cover; Chen Jia-lu 1990). Not merely an ad hominem argument, Peikang’s rejoinder reduces Lee’s differentiating arguments to a lack of commitment. In these disputes, the fabric of history affords an ethical substrate for interlocal relationships; truths issue from commitment. Peikang desired to enroll a public, tightening the fabric of history so that its weave seemed incontrovertible. In contrast, Lee and Hsinkang’s partisans strove to revamp the fabric of history to admit commitments excluded by what they considered Peikang’s fabrications. Hsinkang and Peikang wrangled through the 1980s, as evidenced by Tsai Hsiang-hui’s True Face of Ponkang History, published in 1990, more than 20 years after Lee’s incendiary article. The summer and fall of 1987 added rancor to these disputes as the thousand-year anniversary of Mazu’s apotheosis approached. 2 Concerns that the provincial government had favored Peikang at the expense of other centers led to heated exchanges in the media and at least one lawsuit. As smaller Mazu

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sites “discovered” that Peikang’s centrality in pilgrimage networks was a product of the Japanese colonial period (1895–1945) and the following decades of martial law, Peikang’s attempt to enroll all of Taiwan’s Mazu temples faltered. These temples, such as Tachia Zhenlan Gong, were among the first to assert direct relationships to the founding site of the Mazu cult in China. Lee’s arguments incited controversy because history and tradition play an important role in Taiwanese religious practices. Most Taiwanese people consider temples with the oldest, most authentic images of a deity among the most efficacious. Pilgrimage, if conducted according to the most appropriate and traditional procedures, will reinvigorate relationships to the incense censer of the site at which the deity first demonstrated efficacy. This stress on proximity to the origins of a cult compels temple managers to argue about history, if only to increase their incense fires (and revenue). Meanwhile, historical verification has a circular and contradictory relationship with immediate efficacy. Temples that gather crowds, incense, and wealth are evidently the most efficacious and likely maintain the strongest historical connections. As Stafford (2000: 3) observes in his investigation of separation and reunion in Chinese societies, these movements “contribute to the sense that . . . people have of themselves as subjects of history.” However, naojiat crowds do not always indicate historical depth. Historical verification requires temple managers and worshippers to create indexical relationships between crowds and the rhythm of separation and reunion, without which the subjects of history, whether communities or deities, will not appear. Is it possible that historical verification, arguably one of the most important fields of popular religious practice, itself has a biography? The year 1967, when Lee published his article and Chiang first visited Peikang, was also the year that launched the KMT Movement for Chinese Cultural Renaissance (zhonghua wenhua fuxing tuixing yundong), a turn in which the “activist revolutionary character of Nationalist ideology began to be supplanted by a conservative rhetoric tied to the survival of Chinese tradition-at-large” (Chun 1994: 35). Through scholarly attention and official intervention, this movement encouraged a conscious shift of popular religious practices to an historical field. The form in which popular religious practices became normal, that is, no longer proscribed as wasteful and regressive superstition, provided resources for temples in competitions over precedence. 3 Although historical verification derives from the logic of popular religious practices, it does have a history.


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Disputes and Their Rhetoric In the logic of popular religious practices, the value of temples is a function of the size of their territory, their depth in history, and the extent of their relationships of shared incense with other temples. As such, arguments among temples hinge on what Nancy Munn (1992: 9), in her discussion of Melanesian kula exchanges, has called the “relative capacity to extend or expand . . . intersubjective spacetime—a spacetime of self-other relationships formed in and through acts and practices.” In keeping with this measure of value, efficacy (leng) is more than the ability to intervene in events. It is a demonstrated ability to intervene combined with the potential to gather a large network of worshippers. As is the case for Taiwanese popular religious sites generally, among Mazu temples, this disposition is realized through incense, which is both the residue of previous acts of worship and the potential to establish and sustain relationships through time (Sangren 1987, 2000; Feuchtwang 1992; DeBernardi 1992). Moreover, popular religious practices in Taiwan produce value through two modes of extension: filial forms of space-time that stress continuity and nested hierarchies versus contagious modes that focus on exchange and horizontal networks. The potential to sustain relationships through time depends on the combination and conversion of filial and contagious forms. Incense mediates both. Pilgrimage, a term that covers an entire language of sharing, advancing, separating, and participating in incense and fires, thus provides a set of material practices that renders intersubjective space-time both visible and partible. Pilgrimage makes locality an ethical substance.4 Like other ethical systems, the ethics of locality produced in Taiwanese pilgrimage poses a set of problems specific to its practices. Taiwanese pilgrimage makes a problem of the relationship between crowds and historical truths. As discussed in chapter 1, noisy-hot (naojiat) events question the motivation of those composing crowds: are they there out of sincerity or for enjoyment? Is it truth, or is it play? Because incense and images mediate and realize commitment, these objects serve as visibilities in intertemple disputes. Nonetheless, “commitment” is not the only object position of images or incense. They mediate personal projects, domestic desires, and governmental interventions. When transposed to other fields, however, the objects of popular religious practice index this problem beyond the ritual arena. For example, if the populace is unresponsive to governmental projects of cultural reconstruction but engaged with the practice of welcoming

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Mazu images, government agents may choose to suppress the practice or dispose the populace toward its projects through a translation of cultural reconstruction into the terms of popular religious practices. The latter negotiation translates governmental rationality through the objects of popular religious practice but also normalizes popular religion within a “positive and productive ideology of truth (about the Chinese self)” (Chun 1995: 31). That Taiwanese temples can translate their disputes into the terms of governmental rationality and back into religious terms, as when Peikang achieves recognition as a tourist site and uses this recognition to prove its precedence in the religious field, provides fertile ground for complicity.

Images and the Ethical Contours of Truth Images serve as key figures in these disputes. Recognition of a pilgrimage center, say Lukang, depends ultimately on the efficacy and authenticity of an image, for example, Lukang’s Meizhou Foundation Mother, also known as Second Mother. Proof of the efficacy of an image relies on historical documentation. It also requires the enrollment of crowds through incense and a large collection of nearly identical images, simulacra of the Foundation Mother. Rarely unique, images have similarities and differences that make historical fabrications possible. Because images belong to a series, one can use them to introduce complex combinations of unifying and differentiating statements, claims of generational precedence, geographical origin, and efficacy. In this manner, image naming, theft, and transfer practices present forms in which people can create and evaluate relationships among localities (see Figure 2.1). Like incense or pilgrim crowds, images are visibilities with which disputants weave historical fabrics, the warp to the weft of statements. Given their complex, heterogeneous, and constructed quality, we might want to consider images second-order visibilities. Neither purely linguistic nor wholly material, second-order visibilities appear in historical arguments as problems of verification and motivation. Their components afford further statements and pose certain interventions as solutions to the problem at hand, whether the problem be an historical question or one of engaging a public. This tendency of images to condense various sources of value into a single form has, in fact, led scholars of popular religious practices on Taiwan to argue that images are fetishes, the alienated form of a gendered labor of managing households and coordinating social relationships.5


Figure 2.1

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Images in series, Lukang Tianhou Temple, 2009.

Yet images are only relatively fetishized. Practitioners recognize the constructed quality of images. When I worked at an image carver’s shop in Lukang, for example, I often watched people rock the base of an image to test its stability, a material quality of well-constructed images. Most Taiwanese people could tell you how sculptures become images and how they become efficacious. Following a ceremony of “enlightening” or “opening the eyes” (khai kong; m: kai guang), one awakens and recharges

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images through contact with incense at sites notable for efficacy. For such an infusion of power to occur requires the aggregation of many specific requests, often from the domestic sphere, into the collected incense ash at a temple, where people can then parcel out the ash again as shares of generalized divine power. If asked about the most efficacious images, many Taiwanese people will point to the material residue of worship on the image’s incense-smoked face and say that the image is efficacious simply because many people worship. Thus, power results from the progressive enrollment of people across shifts in scale, from domestic, to local, to regional and transregional circuits. Given this constructive work that transects associations of humans and nonhumans, crowds and crowd products, we may well consider images to be “factishes” that “make [people] act rightly” (Latour 1999: 274). In other words, images render ethical postulates autonomous, providing a “convenient friction” (Price 2003) in cases where sincerity alone would not be enough to disclose truth. Moreover, especially efficacious images, like Foundation Mothers, nearly vanish underneath the collection of golden votive pennants, damask robes, and other forms of investment: all indices of lenggiam (m: lingyan; efficacious response). Although each adds to the composition of the image as a second-order visibility, this progressive enrollment of people, crowds, material, and energy subjects the components of an image to blackboxing, a form of technical and ethical shorthand, a process of objectification in which only the external form of the image remains visible and not its internal composition or functioning. In other words, well-constructed images obviate the social networks and labor necessary to their production, which is one reason we are tempted to call the relationship between image and worshipper one of an alienated self-consciousness. However, blackboxing does not remove social relationships more than it renders them partible and subject to transfer.6 In this sense, images serve as visual historical precipitates through which people continue the work of historical fabrication. Images remain whole, but they also admit types of decomposition. The work of either blackboxing (and hence unifying) or figuring (and hence differentiating) certain social relationships explains why images help people to pose problems of commitment. Through images, people can take relationships for granted, excise them, or make them subject to scrutiny. Likewise, statements about images prescribe an entire state of affairs. In these disputes, truth is an ethical problem. The truth of historical fabrication is not only induced through referential tacking between visibilities and statements but also through the enrollment of other truthproducing people and practices.


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In the rhetoric of intertemple disputes, enrollment underpins historical argument. It also weakens historical claims. When the partisans of Peikang accuse Tachia or Hsinkang of fabricating history, they say that their rivals have forgotten ancestors (wang zu) or forgotten their roots (wang ben). These terms suggest that their targets have neglected truths that should situate them in relationship to the self and to others. Images are guarantors of true relationships in such disputes. They coalesce a history of migration that reproduces identity through pilgrimage. Thus, both Peikang and Tachia preface their arguments in terms of a religious commitment to Mazu. Especially when they appear all too eager to promote their own historical fabrications, enrolling bureaucrats, scholars, and worshippers alike, temple committee members express a reluctance to engage in controversy. This reluctance generally takes the form of a unifying statement such as “after all, there is only one Mazu.”

The Specter of Superstition The argument that there is only one Meizhou Mazu, the historical figure Lin Mo-niang, may describe the spirit that all temples should cultivate. It has no real value to popular religious practices, however, because it evens out an intersubjective space-time that needs to be differential for gathering and dispersal to continue. Unifying statements alone are sterile. Differentiating statements, on the other hand, are susceptible to accusations of wang zu, as when Tachia abruptly shifted the focus of its pilgrimage from Peikang to Hsinkang, or to superstition, as when claims about the value of a single image, such as Lukang’s Meizhou Foundation Mother, seem exaggerated. The trick of historical arguments is to be able to make both types of statements. Fears of a failure to balance unifying and differentiating statements properly often appear in talk about superstition (mixin), which is another way of describing improper commitments, as I discovered in the following discussion with the chief of operations at one major Mazu temple: I meet Mr. Wang in a modern looking, air-conditioned office with an automatic glass door printed with the word “Welcome.” He tells me that my questions on ling narratives are limited, because such narratives are a form of historical expression. However, he notes that there is a need not to involve the temple in mixin. I ask how he defines mixin as opposed to belief (xinyang). He uses a gesture of circling his face, then pointing to his heart and head, and says that belief comes from an upright heart

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Taiwanese Pilgrimage to China (zheng xin). It gives one power to overcome problems and protect one from misfortune, but it is most concerned with the development of moral qualities and the ability to work for social justice. Superstition, on the other hand, cannot even be called belief, because the mind is confused (mi). He flutters his hand over his face and smiles. To be superstitious means that one just asks Mazu for things and makes deals, worshipping trees, stones, or just about any kind of thing that will make a deal. Wang calls these deals improper (bu yi, bu zheng), mentioning the example of illegal lotteries. “One asks for a winning number. That’s mixin. Or if you were preparing for exams, and asked to pass, begging the deity to aid you even though you hadn’t studied.”

Mr. Wang uses two measures to differentiate between superstition and belief. The first is an internal uprightness of one’s heart. The second is an external body of practices through which one takes ritual to serve either social or narrow purposes. Further, Wang expresses the relationship between an internal quality of heart and external practices in the gesture of circling his face (suggesting roundness and completion) versus fluttering (which connotes confusion or loss). Accordingly, xinyang should enroll worshippers but not at the cost of fragmenting ritual into a set of narrow (self-serving) desires.7 In another interview, I had asked Wang about the means through which temples attract worshippers, thus creating the naojiat spectacles necessary to authenticate a temple’s efficacy. Wang tried to differentiate between ling, superstition, and history proper: Actually I feel that your questions about the drawing power of temples make a few incorrect (bu tuodang) assumptions. You have confused two separate levels. Ling narratives are from an individual who asks something, or who in his own life receives a favor from the deity. Then it is called lenggiam (m: lingyan; literally, experience of efficacy). But for the most part, when we talk of history, we mean a group phenomenon. Well, we know that most believers have had lenggiam, so they come to worship. But we do not, and perhaps could not, collect these and publish them as advertisements for the temple.

Accusations of mixin index a failure of commitment. Mr. Wang directed his protests that his temple could not publish lenggiam toward my own inappropriate assumptions. In Lukang, temple committee members and worshippers also asked me to bring my reflections and findings (xinde) in line with proper religious principles. Certainly, many temples fabricated history, they would say, but there were also people with sincere hearts directed toward Mazu and other deities.


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A correct understanding of lenggiam required sincerity on the part of the observer. Through such statements, Wang and others cautioned me to make proper commitments, much as they might distinguish those who seek prosperity and fame within proper limits from those that do not. Correctly realized, lenggiam produce commitments and sincerity, as well as index a deity’s efficacy. The former production is equally important as the latter. In other words, while lenggiam demonstrate divine agency, they also generate sincerity across the wide range of human relationships defined by a temple’s intersubjective space-time. Leng narratives do not focus exclusively on the person who experienced the goddess’s intervention. They also point back to a crowd of worshippers. Producing images of sincerity through this crowd is one goal of a unifying discourse. For example, Peikang’s introductory pamphlet juxtaposes an image of the late President Chiang Ching-kuo bowing before an incense censer with a 1973 photograph of crowds surrounding his military vehicle in the temple plaza. The crowd creates a visible field in which imagined efficacious responses proliferate. On this field, the figure of the temple’s monumental architecture and historical relics becomes visible as the basis for statements concerning authenticity and hence value. Peikang Mazu becomes representative of the entire history of ethnic Chinese settlement on Taiwan. The crowd briefly surfaces as a figure on which Peikang Mazu’s efficacy or Chiang’s credentials as a democratic president depend, receding as Peikang Mazu and Chiang become figures gathering the disposed energies of the crowd as their own. Chiang’s visit authenticates Peikang, for even a Christian president could benefit from Peikang Mazu’s intervention. It also makes the crowd of worshippers visible as a constituency. Chiang’s visit suggests two translations: the first, from personal accounts of efficacy (not collected and veering on the superstitious) to statements concerning the extension of a temple’s networks; the second, between crowds and statements about public history. For these translations to occur requires sincerity, for Taiwanese people will tell you that crowds often escape capture. After all, how many people in the crowd surrounding Chiang were there only to see the naojiat? That the specter of superstition raises its head in this recurrent shifting of figure and ground suggests that enrollment of specific experiences of leng into the image of crowds responding to Peikang Mazu’s benevolence or Chiang’s virtue is fragile. The alternative, a unifying discourse that reduces Mazu to a single, historical exemplar of ethnic virtues, could not produce the expansive disposition that both Peikang’s committee and

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Chiang require to make historical statements. Language is not enough to fix these dispositions as relatively unified and beyond superstition. Nor is incense. These questions lead us back to images.

Second Mothers, or a Case of Stolen Images As secondary visibilities, images enroll crowds, incense, and lenggiam. Enrollment often results in relationships analogous to kinship. A subsidiary image “shared” from one particularly efficacious site to another site logically becomes the daughter of the mother image at the site from which the image comes. Subsequently, ritual describes an entire generational hierarchy of temples, in which sites remain subservient to higher generation and elder sister temples and legitimately present incense only to their own mother sites. The actual kin terms that people use to discuss relationships to images complicate this filial model. When Lukang’s Mazu embarks on processions, for example, people in Lukang refer to the procession as “Father’s Sister (A-Ko; m: guma) going out.” Other temple communities often refer to their image with a term that refers either to one’s maternal grandmother or mother-in-law (A-Po; m: popo). Although such uses are consistent with Mazu’s gender, they suggest that relationships among temple sites are not ones of biological reproduction through a patriline, but are those of linked uterine families (Wolf 1972) divided by marriage or, alternately, that the relationships are those created through affinal links. Images, like women, come from the outside of a community and create new relationships that are sometimes opposed to patriarchal principles. In practice, those engaged in pilgrimage do not observe generational hierarchies as much as they manipulate them. Minor sites that solicit images from temples at or close to the apex of generational hierarchies face accusations of forgetting ancestors and hence of a lack of commitment to ethical principles governing religious practice. All the same, the transfer of an image from Meizhou, the founding site of the Mazu cult, to any temple does make that temple proximal to Meizhou in the generational hierarchy. The presence of images and incense ash from several sites at most temples further complicates generational hierarchies, giving intertemple relationships a thickness akin to the incense-stained faces of particularly efficacious images. To elaborate, let’s return to Lukang’s Meizhou Foundation Mother. Around town, people often call this image Second Mother. The name provokes many interpretive problems, for “second” could mean one of


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three relationships. First, Lukang Tianhou Temple is the second oldest, if most notable, of three Mazu temples in town. Second, Lukang Tianhou Temple houses three important Mazu images, of which the Mazu Foundation Mother is the second to arrive in Lukang. Third, this image is arguably the second image in the entire Mazu cult. Most Lukangers claim that the first image at Lukang Tianhou Temple was a small but efficacious image from Quanzhou (this image, which came with early immigrants across the Straits to Taiwan, is known as Chunah Ma, or “Boat Mother”). Such a claim accords with the selfidentification of Lukang’s majority population as Quanzhou people. The Second Mother arrived relatively later. According to legend, the Second Mother, or Meizhou Foundation Mother, was carved from the casket of Lin Mo-niang, as Mazu was known in her earthly life. The Qing admiral Shi Lang carried the image aboard his ship during his expedition against the Zheng Family, which then ruled Taiwan. Following Shi’s capture of the island in 1683, Shi’s nephew asked for the image to stay in Lukang, where it has remained to this day. Does the term Second Mother refer to the second Mazu image to reach Lukang, in which case the image might not be nearly as authentic, or the second Mazu image of the entire cult? In order to make the second, more authenticating claim, those who argue for Lukang’s precedence must connect oral histories to the documented evidence of Shi Lang. Once Second Mother refers not to the second image to reach Lukang, but to The Second Mother, one can place the image in a relatively more recent history. Of the six images carved from Lin Mo-niang’s casket, three remained in Meizhou, one was taken to Ningpo, one to Southeast Asia, and one to Lukang. After a jump of a few centuries, the authenticating history continues, to demonstrate Lukang’s unique position. As an article in China Times Weekly commented in 1987 at the height of the intertemple disputes: According to Lukang Tianhou Temple’s account, since the Red Guards destroyed the Ancestral Temple at Meizhou during the Great Cultural Revolution, of those original six images, only the “Second Mother” of Lukang survives. From either a religious or a cultural standpoint, this image is exceptionally valuable. Thus Tianhou Temple does not lightly take it out to show people. Moreover, believers from every locale consider it an honor to worship the “Meizhou Ma.” (Jiang and Zhang 1987: 52)

This narrative interpolates Lukang’s Foundation Mother within both national and KMT narratives. Shi Lang’s “reunification” of the island figures in the narrative, but so does the Cultural Revolution (GPCR),

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consistent with KMT claims that the Republic of China (on Taiwan), as the custodian of Chinese Culture, legitimately represents China. It echoes the language of the Movement for Chinese Cultural Renaissance launched in opposition to the GPCR. The article thus creates a new object position for the Foundation Mother in which ritual authority mediates claims of political legitimacy (both fatong). Although this complication augments the value of Tianhou Temple, Lukangers relish another narrative among insiders. In this story, Shi Lang ignored his nephew’s entreaty and repatriated the Second Mother. In response, Lukang’s merchants conspired with a master image carver to lift the Second Mother on a subsequent pilgrimage. The image carver created an image that was identical to the Second Mother except in one respect: a copy, it could never enter a special cave into which only the authentic six images would fit. After the climax of the pilgrimage, when the box for carrying coals from the ancestral temple was sealed for the voyage, the merchants took the Second Mother into their own palanquin, leaving behind the image carver’s simulacrum. When temple officials at Meizhou tried to return the image to the Cave of Apotheosis, they discovered the theft; but the merchants had already taken to their swift ships. To Lukang people, the theft explains their practice of calling the Meizhou Foundation Mother A-Ko (and of never taking the image to Meizhou on pilgrimages—the Meizhou Temple might want her back). Image theft reverses generational hierarchies, placing an image higher in the hierarchy at a site that would otherwise remain lower. A narrative that circumvents national history, this story concerns a set of contested commitments, those that govern insider status versus incorporation in a larger political entity. It also places the image at the center of anxieties regarding generational precedence. Although the dimensions of the image could fix hierarchies, for only an authentic image could fit into the Cave of Apotheosis, such attempts are susceptible to the merchants’ counter-program, the switch that shifts hierarchies (hence it is essential that the switch go almost but not completely undetected). Image theft does not require a cabala of clever merchants. Sometimes, it only wants a confused peddler. In 1987, controversy surrounded Lukang’s Meizhou Foundation Mother when a minor temple in Yunlin County employed the stolen image motif to argue that the Foundation Mother was not at Lukang after all. An itinerant peddler fumbling in the dark temple had stolen the image and conveyed it to its present site, where the goddess chose to dwell.8 They had not planned to reveal this truth, said Puzi’s committee head in 1987, but with the disputes centering on


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the relative authenticity of temples in relation to 1000th anniversary ceremonies, they had no choice but to reveal the secret: Puzi’s Rattle Drum Mother was actually the Second Mother (Jiang and Zhang 1987: 52). When faced with such arguments, those who depend on second-order visibilities like the Second Mother need to employ other truth-producing practices. Those engaged in intertemple disputes thus support historical research, particularly on relics, to supplement the image. In his argument against Puzi, Li Pi-hsien, a noted local historian who collaborated with scholars from Academia Sinica on Tianhou Temple’s temple history, referred to two stelae at Puzi. One visible in a prominent part of the temple is relatively recent. It claims that the peddler took the Foundation Mother to Lukang on Mazu’s instructions. The second, hidden away but authentic, clearly describes Puzi as a daughter temple of Lukang. The prominent stele cannot be corroborated with popular practices in which Lukang serves as a nodal site in Puzi’s ritual activities, including annual pilgrimages. To those engaged in the dispute, these qualities were also visible in the image itself. “If you’d go to Puzi,” one of Lukang’s committee members told me, “you’d see what kind of thing Puzi’s ‘Foundation Mother’ is.” A common motif of intertemple disputes, this play of hidden and revealed relics often accompanies reference to present-day or historical crowds. In their disputes, Peikang and Lukang also traded barbs over hidden stelae. Mr. Wang of Peikang told me that Lukang Tianhou Temple had covered over a stele that demonstrated Tianhou Temple’s subservience to Hsingan Temple, the oldest Mazu temple in Lukang, albeit one of slight importance, even locally. To this claim Mr. Chen, a member of Lukang’s committee, responded that if there were such a stele, wouldn’t the statements in the stele be accompanied by the visibility of relationships of shared incense between the two temples? In his argument against Peikang, Chen asks what Peikang’s fabricated claim might disguise. He claims that Peikang refused to bring to light evidence that Peikang had made pilgrimages to Lukang until the early twentieth century. One of Peikang’s main images is also called “Second Mother.” Li Pi-hsien argued that, in this case, second referred to an image that the Lukang sugar merchant’s guild brought to Peikang. This charge implied that Peikang’s image was shared from Lukang, a charge verified through Peikang’s erstwhile pilgrimages to Lukang, subject of the hidden stele. In response, Peikang argued that a resident monk, Shupi, took their image from Meizhou’s Chaotian Pavilion in 1694. Not only did Lukang have no relationship to the image, but as shared from two different sites in the ancestral temple, they also belong to two separate

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systems, as expressed in the Taoist quality of Lukang’s rituals versus Peikang’s Buddhist leanings. The desire to clarify by bringing hidden relics to light also informs Lukang’s decision to unveil a set of photographs dating from a 1922 pilgrimage to Meizhou. Concerning these photographs, a member of the Lukang temple committee related: Before, we did not want to display it openly, but because [in 1987] there were so many people fabricating history, we decided to take it out. Now this photo was taken during the Japanese colonial period. When we showed it, many people were surprised. How could we have such an old photograph, and one that demonstrated our direct link to Meizhou?

Apart from garnering public interest, the photographs orchestrated an entire rhetoric of relics. The Cave of the Apotheosis features in one of the Lukang photographs. Lukang committee members insisted that this photograph of the one site that could authenticate pretenders to Meizhou Foundation Mother status proved Lukang’s privileged relationship to Meizhou. Should other temples have a genuine, direct link of shared incense to Meizhou, they must possess similar records.9 In contrast to these differentiating arguments, temple commissioners at Sungshan, a minor center in Taipei with little at stake in these disputes, engaged in a unifying discourse. Sungshan’s commissioners make their claims upon “religious principles,” accusing all attempts to produce value statements from relics as fabrication. “In the end, aren’t all Mazu Meizhou Ma? Could they be Meiguo Ma?” asked one temple commissioner in a 1993 interview, punning with the Mandarin Chinese name for “America,” Meiguo. When I asked about image names, such as Black faced Mother (Oo Bin Ma), Meizhou Mother, Warm Hill Mother (Unleng Ma), First Mother (Tai Ma), Quemoy Tongan Mother (Gunthang Ma), or Boat Mother (Chunah Ma), he responded that these differences had nothing to do with Mazu’s basic identity. Retelling Mazu’s hagiography, he branded disputes between major centers as “commercial” and a “shameful distraction from the real purpose of religion.” To this commissioner, the real purpose of religion was articulated in the temple’s work as a charitable foundation, indicating a form of normalized religious practice based on a privatized, voluntary character of religious endeavour. Sungshan Cihui Temple’s videotape of the temple’s pilgrimage to Meizhou clarified the political implications of this form of religious life. The videotape begins with a voice-over of a quote from President Chiang Kai-shek exhorting citizens to sacrifice for society, the


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people, and the nation (Sungshan, n.d.). Mazu crystallized civic virtue in a religious medium. Thus, the disputes interweave two contradictory definitions of religious practice. The former, instantiated in arguments concerning the Meizhou Foundation Mother, positively values intertemple hierarchies, exhorting people, as the proverb has it, not to take a drink of water without considering the source (yinshui siyuan). The latter considers temples outside of generational hierarchies but invokes the historical figure, or spirit, of Mazu as a unifying element. The operation of these two contradictory principles transposes one form of normalized religious practice (private, voluntary) into the terms of intertemple disputes. One can always use the former to find a lack of commitment among one’s opponents. On the other hand, normalization of religious practice as a form of popular mobilization and tourist spectacle, exemplified by Chiang’s visits to Peikang, demonstrates how the problem of securing commitment, an acute feature of the cultural politics of late martial law era Taiwan, has resounded across secular and religious idioms. To understand this complication, we will turn to one of Peikang’s relics, the Filial Son’s Nail.

The Democratic Dictator and the Filial Son’s Nail Chiang Ching-kuo, premier, and later president, of the Republic of China, venerated the Filial Son’s Nail during his celebrated visits to Peikang. As a Christian, President Chiang stood at attention before Mazu but never presented incense. Both media and informal accounts of Chiang’s visits stress his particular reverence for the Filial Son’s Nail. To Mr. Ching-kuo, as he is affectionately called on Taiwan, the nail was as important as the Foundation Mother herself. Chiang’s visits to Peikang were remarkable and remain important in the construction of his image as a democratizing leader. After Chiang’s death in 1988, one commentator contrasted Chiang’s October 20, 1979 visit, following two major typhoons, with his usual demeanor. The visit was one of the only times that the vivacious president stood silently, as opposed to his usual practice of shaking hands, waving, and asking after the health of the citizenry (Wu Hsien-chung 1988). Chiang had asked Governor Lin Yang-kang to express gratitude to Mazu on the occasion. Lin insisted that Chiang’s request was “not ‘superstition’ but an expression of Mr. Ching-kuo’s love of the people” (Wu Hsien-chung 1988; see also “Wei Min”). In 1990, President Lee presented Peikang Chaotian Temple with a votive that alluded to an inscription that Chiang gave to

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the temple in 1973. This votive allowed Lee to claim a similar “love of the people” for which Chiang Ching-kuo is remembered, the better to burnish his own credentials. Chiang’s visits to Peikang and New Year’s addresses add emotional substance to the democratizing gestures that he made toward the end of his life. Chiang’s veneration of the Filial Son’s Nail enrolls popular religious practices within the KMT narrative of national recovery. In this fashion, Chiang’s attention to the relic is consistent with the late martial law project of reconstructing Chinese tradition through Taiwanese popular practices. Visibility of the nail alternates with visibility of pilgrim crowds, as if the nail could also translate crowds into this movement for cultural renaissance. The narrative of the Filial Son’s Nail provides strong evidence for the hopeful power of sincerity. In Peikang’s temple history, Tsai Hsiang-hui (1990b: 182) relates that the filial son, surnamed Hsiao, was a native of Quanzhou. His father emigrated to Taiwan in hopes of improving the family’s fortunes. After he had been gone several years without sending word back home, the son accompanied his mother across the Straits, only to be shipwrecked. Now separated from both parents, the son followed the fisherman who rescued him to Chaotian Temple. Hsiao kneeled before Mazu and prayed, “If you will safely reunite me with my parents, let me drive this iron nail into the stone steps before your altar.” His sincerity moved heaven, and “this nail, although easily bent, was driven firmly into the granite” (Tsai Hsiang-Hui 1990b: 182). Eventually, Hsiao was reunited with both of his parents. Chiang Ching-kuo was particularly fond of this narrative, and during the 1970s and 1980s ordered that it be included in compulsory military training retreats for university students. Although the narrative is ostensibly an allegory of filial piety, its malleability to the KMT project of mainland recovery is evident in the filial son’s longing for the lost father/land. Like Chiang’s task, the filial son’s test is an impossible one. However, the sincerity that moves heaven is available to Nationalists as well as the filial son, as long as they maintain commitment to their task. The iron nail driven into granite makes Chiang’s commitments to mainland recovery visible, even as it translates them into virtues that are properly transhistorical. Simultaneously, the nail invests popular religious practices with meaning within the nationalist narrative. In a sense, the Filial Son’s Nail causes popular religious practices and the KMT narrative of mainland recovery to stand both inside and outside the other. Yet Chiang Ching-kuo’s investment in the Filial Son’s Nail reflects the routinization of failure over which he presided. As the nail mediates


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that failure, we might say that it actually translates national recovery from territorial reconquest to cultural renaissance; it is an actor in the routinization of failure. The year 1973, when the first published reports of Chiang’s reverence for the nail appear, was a year of great anxiety and transition on Taiwan. Chiang Ching-kuo had been appointed to the premiership just months before. His father, Chiang Kai-shek, was still president, but had retired from daily affairs of state. Crises in the international economy, particularly the decline in the value of the dollar, caused a short-lived run on currency exchanges. It also provoked serious appraisal of the republic’s ability to continue at high levels of economic growth given its dependence on an export market focused largely on the United States. In addition, the island’s growing industrialization led to labor crises in the agricultural sector as a large percentage of the population, particularly youths, abandoned the countryside. Added to the instability in currency markets, which would plague Taiwan’s economy during the next few years, were political woes. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) had replaced the Republic of China (ROC) in the United Nations in 1971 and began to step up efforts to isolate Taiwan internationally. The United States would not recognize the PRC until December 1978, more than three years after Chiang Kai-shek’s death. However, 1973 did witness important initial moves toward normalization of U.S.–Chinese relations, such as the establishment of quasiconsular agencies. In response, ROC Vice President Yan visited the United States to mobilize the Overseas Chinese lobby there. In addition to routine denunciations of the Communist Party’s new alliances, the Taiwanese press published assurances from various factions in the U.S. government that Taiwan’s international relations would remain stable (Lai 1973, “Zhong-Mei,” “Mei Dui”). In spite of these problems, some observers already recognized the island as a model for the developing world. Targets for the Sixth Four Year Plan were ambitious, suggesting that the Republic of China would “within the next four years leap from the ranks of developing nations into those of the developed ones” (“Diliu”). Both development (kaifa) and culture (wenhua) were fields of governmental endeavor constructed in explicit opposition to the Maoist Impostors (mao wei) on the other side of the Straits. In his Administrative Report to the Legislative Yuan in early 1973, Chiang Ching-kuo attempted to translate the stagnant civil war into policy goals focused on the island. For Chiang, development would favor the accumulation of national strength needed to recover the mainland, but the failures

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of Maoism were cultural as well as developmental. The KMT would triumph, he claimed, because the Maoists’ methods were “un-Chinese, and the Chinese people can certainly not accept them” (“Chiang Yuanzhang”: 3). Now that the civil war was being waged through diplomatic means, development would demonstrate that the Republic of China was a worthy economic partner. Culture, meanwhile, would demonstrate that the Republic of China maintained the essence of Chinese culture within a modern nation-state. Both development and culture were thus new forms of resisting the “communist bandits” (gong fei) who had recently made so many inroads (“Chiang Yuanzhang”). Chiang must have been aware that culture had already been the target of considerable revolutionary energies just across the Straits. KMT programs of Chinese cultural renaissance (wenhua fuxing) responded to the Maoist Cultural Revolution, demonstrating to the ROC’s remaining allies the KMT’s responsible management of the Chinese cultural patrimony. Internally, cultural renaissance aimed to counter products of development that the KMT considered unhealthy, such as the vulgarity and decline in public order attendant on industrialization and the exodus of young people from the countryside. The Commission for the Movement to Promote Chinese Cultural Renaissance, an organ of KMT cultural policy at the provincial level, sponsored essay contests, calligraphy exhibitions, a series of books on Chinese philosophy, translations of Needham’s work on Chinese science, and publications of treatises on civil manners. Internally and externally, wenhua fuxing would be the KMT’s own cultural revolution. Wenhua fuxing was also a rubric in which popular religious practices became an object of scrutiny. Authors of treatises on popular religious practices in the movement found the waste and materialist objectives of ritual appalling. They also discovered models of the Eight Virtues and Four Excellences of Confucianism in the figures of popular devotion (see Chen Ta-tung 1971; Li Yi-yuan 1978). Initially, mobilization of popular religious practices in the wenhua fuxing movement was embedded in nationalist historiography. In The Relationship of Taiwanese Folk Belief and Chinese Cultural Renaissance published in 1971, Chen Ta-tung invoked an ethnonationalist narrative as he denounced the “decadent” Qing dynasty. The Manchus, wrote Chen (1971: 266), brought poisonous customs and decadent values to China. Although initially restricted to sycophantic officials, these values soon infiltrated popular consciousness, leading to national enervation. In the field of popular religion, decadent values entered as local gentry attempted to secure titles for local deities. If it


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were not for Taiwanese people who preserved ethnic virtues as they venerated objects of popular devotion, these virtues would have been lost to Manchu misgovernment and Japanese colonialism. Now in the time of national emergency, Chen noted, quoting President Chiang Kaishek, the most pressing problem is “spiritual mobilization—renewal of the people’s heart and mind” (Chen Ta-tung 1971: 266). Popular religious practices could be tools of spiritual renewal if properly managed. Chen recommended that those engaged in the renaissance movement remove superstitious and self-serving elements such as mythologies and narratives of efficacious response from popular practices. Once shorn of these “outer garments” (Chen Ta-tung 1971: 272) popular religious practices would instruct the common people and “broadcast the glory of our national culture” (Chen Ta-tung 1971: 267). Like street signs named for Chinese cities and ethnic virtues in most Taiwanese towns and cities, temples would point toward loyalty, filial piety, frugality, and righteousness (zhong, xiao, jie, yi). The wenhua fuxing movement encouraged historical research as temples worked with activists to authenticate temple structures and images. During the expansion of popular religious practice that accompanied growing prosperity on the island, new temple structures added shrines to pan-Chinese deities, built libraries, and endowed hospitals within the rubric of a movement that was nationalist and modernizing even as it turned to folklore. In keeping with wenhua fuxing, pilgrimage sites would claim that popular religious practices promoted a love of homeland among an otherwise anomic population or that the “function of pilgrimage could not be replaced by any modern form of welfare” (Tachia Zhenlan Gong n.d: 20). Chiang’s passion for the Filial Son’s Nail was consistent with the valorization of popular religious practice within this movement for national redemption; however, Chiang’s visits also reconfigure wenhua fuxing as another type of popular engagement. This feature of his visits to Peikang becomes apparent when we consider the role of crowds in media accounts. Newspaper reports of the visits consistently attach Chiang Ching-kuo to economic development, the expansion of temple activities to charitable and tourist functions, and the emergence of a civil society apart from the state. These juxtapositions provide one set of subject positions for Mr. Ching-kuo, which we could call Chiang the Modernizer. Chiang’s visits to Peikang Chaotian Temple typically accompanied inspection tours to the countryside. In March 1973, he visited Peikang following the “highly successful” elections of township heads and county and city assembly members (“Chiang Jie”; “Chiang

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Shenru”). Both China Times and Taiwan Hsinsheng Daily reported that Chiang visited a cooperative farm in Yunlin, which retired soldiers, farmers, and fishermen had built on reclaimed land near the ocean. Chiang asked pertinent questions about local economic development and “expressed his deep concern for the local residents’ livelihood, agreeing to implement ways to improve it” (“Chiang Jie”). At Peikang Chaotian Temple, he inspected the Filial Son’s Nail and colorful lanterns of a type usually associated with the Spring Festival. While expressing his admiration for this historical example of ethnic virtue and a contemporary display of folk art, he “warmly greeted the populace,” and as his vehicle left Peikang, “he left behind the impression that he was very close and affectionate toward the people. Everyone admired and praised him” (“Chiang Shenru”). Subsequent visits in 1974, 1978, and 1979 reiterate these themes. In 1974, reporters from the Independence Evening Post commented that “Mazu is, in the hearts of Taiwanese compatriots, the most revered of deities. [By visiting Peikang] Premier Chiang accomplishes the task of loving what the people love” (“Chiang Zuo”). The implied reader of this text is obviously a post-1949 immigrant, who would not share the local reverence for the goddess. Although the virtue described in the text is a Confucian one, it solidifies Chiang’s reputation as the leader “close to the people” (qin min). News reports substantiated these claims through Chiang’s knowledge of folklore. In 1978, Chiang inspected an oil exploration site in Yunlin County near Peikang and a charitable hospital that the Peikang temple was then constructing. After he showed knowledge of the nearby ox market, “the masses expressed their deep admiration of Premier Chiang’s knowledge of the local situation” (“Chiang Hsieh”). When during 1979 three violent typhoons nearly struck Taiwan, only to blow back into the Pacific, Chiang attributed this favorable change in winds to Mazu and instructed Lin Yang-kang, the governor of Taiwan, to pay obeisance to the goddess at Peikang in gratitude for her efficacious protection. Chiang visited the following day (Tsai Hsiang-Hui 1990b: 147). Chiang’s visits burnished Mr. Ching-kuo’s democratic credentials and intensified intertemple disputes. Chaotian Temple gives much attention to Chiang’s visits in both its temple history (Tsai Hsiang-Hui 1990) and its introductory pamphlet (Peikang Chaotian Temple n.d.). Peikang uses these images in unifying discourses that gather all Taiwanese people as Mazu worshippers, represented by the crowd gathering around President Chiang’s jeep. The image works in subtle ways for Chiang Ching-kuo, as well. It produces more than Chiang the qinmin leader. In comparison


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with an authoritarian and paternalistic qinmin leader, Chiang appears democratic, because the image produces as its complementary figure an autonomous populace that spontaneously shows its admiration for Chiang and responds to his questions concerning economic development. That these crowds collect at Peikang is crucial to this image. Unlike Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, whose National Day and birthday appearances on viewing stands near the Presidential Palace required the coordination of military units, schools, and other organizations governed nearly directly through the KMT, Mr. Ching-kuo gathers spontaneous crowds in spaces at a remove from official institutions. These autonomous spaces begin to intimate a civil society whose engagement with Chiang is voluntary, in spite of Chiang’s position at the head of the KMT party state. Such images provide narratives of democratization that highlight Chiang’s role in democratic transition. They also have a central place in Peikang’s authentication as Taiwan’s preeminent Mazu site. The translation of Peikang’s claims through Chiang Ching-kuo suggests more than the impact of the normalization of popular religious practices in Taiwan under democratic transition. It also shows the facility that practitioners have in translating state projects into the terms of popular religious logics of generational precedence and efficacy. The complicit relations that popular religious logics support shift our gaze between Chiang as democratizer and Peikang Mazu as most efficacious. Thus, Chiang’s visits do more than ritualize democratic transition through a connection to statements such as “Mr. Ching-kuo is a leader who draws close to the people and who loves the people.” They also distribute these statements across the nation in a way that renders Peikang Chaotian Temple a space of representation. Peikang Mazu makes visible and enforces a specific image of nation, national space, and national virtues. The temple becomes, in its media-disseminated image of Chiang inspecting the Filial Son’s Nail or surrounded by crowds, a symbol of the proper relationship between the governing and the governed. Chiang encourages national virtues, such as filial piety, threatened by contemporary conditions of demographic transition and political uncertainty. The narrowing of distance between Chiang and the people remakes Chiang from a figure feared through association with his previous post, the head of the secret police, to a leader whose closeness to the people would, by the time of his death, earn him the posthumous title of democratizer. Simultaneously, Peikang gains in value as the only Mazu site capable of making such an image cohere for the entire nation: Peikang enters into the spatial representations of

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nation as a landmark, both of religion and of democracy. The tightness of this complicity between Chiang’s post-totalitarian image and Peikang’s status was clearest when partisans of Hsinkang attacked the Filial Son’s Nail as a fabrication. They appeared not to be clarifying historical questions, but detracting from Chiang Ching-kuo’s memory.

Changing Statements, Changing Itineraries In 1987, the provincial government intervened in an attempt to unify Taiwan’s Mazu networks. That fall, it granted Peikang Chaotian Temple the right to represent all of Taiwan’s Mazu temples on an islandwide tour corresponding with the 1000th anniversary of the goddess’s apotheosis. Disputes surrounding Peikang’s procession began nearly as soon as Chaotian Temple announced its plans. For Peikang, the procession promoted Chaotian Temple as the center of all Mazu worship on Taiwan. Crowds drawn to the noisy-hot event would publicize Peikang’s status. Peikang’s unifying arguments, however, broadened the gap between the contagious expansion of networks through crowd (naojiat) activities and assessments of a temple’s value. Questions concerning the meaning of crowds became contentious issues, leading to shifts in historical statements and their associated evaluative geographies. These shifts upset what had been a hierarchy that both the provincial government and the late President Chiang Ching-kuo had legitimated in their own attempts to engage popular religion during a period where the KMT’s imagination of Taiwan as China began to fail. Without doubt, Mazu’s birthday is a naojiat event in Peikang and elsewhere. During this period, pilgrim crowds and large banquets proliferate throughout the west coast of the entire island, and in every town red lanterns swing in festive greeting to images returning from pilgrimages. Peikang documents the concentrated gathering of pilgrim crowds during the third lunar month to demonstrate Chaotian Temple’s status as the nodal site of Mazu worship on Taiwan. These statements also form an appeal to the public: Peikang Mazu’s believers are distributed throughout the world. Every year there are about 4 million people who come to present incense and worship. No other temple in the province can compare with the abundance of Peikang’s incense—this is a fact recognized by the public. (Tsai Hsiang-Hui 1990b: 139)


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Of the many pilgrim groups to visit Peikang, Tachia Zhenlan Temple’s group was probably the largest and most distinctive. On Tachia’s pilgrimage, thousands of pilgrims made the journey to Peikang on foot, by bicycle, and by charter bus (Guo Jin-lan 1988, Huang Mei-ying 1994). Performers, religious tourists, and the merely curious joined the pilgrimage as it wended its way through three counties over eight days. The extensive coordination of each annual pilgrimage, which the board of trustees planned each year to be larger and more “traditional” (hence the stress on pilgrims making the journey on foot), greatly added to Tachia’s value. The size of the pilgrimage and its associated crowds gave Tachia fame in Mazu circles as a major site.10 Disputes over the value of the pilgrimage eventually provoked Tachia’s defection to the network of Hsinkang, Peikang’s rival, in 1988. In its public depictions of the event, Peikang Chaotian Temple claimed the Tachia pilgrimage as “paying respect to ancestors and presenting incense,” implying that Tachia owes allegiance of a filial nature to Peikang. In the idiom of Mazu worship, Tachia described its Peikang pilgrimage as “participating in incense” (chham hiuN; m: can xiang) between sister temples. As in the case of images, incense provides an entire language for depicting and evaluating interpersonal and interlocal relationships. This language ranges from terms that describe dispositions of generational precedence, such as kua hiuN and ket hoe (m: yi xiang, ge huo; “separating off” incense or fire), to those with an egalitarian tenor, such as chham hiuN (Chang Hsuan 1992: 278; Huang Mei-ying 1994: 100–108). Protagonists of intertemple disputes differently describe identical ritual practices to fix relationships between temples, the dispositions (se; m: shi) of interlocated places. Attempts to change the language surrounding ritual practices in the present, such as Tachia’s, are also attempts to change retroactively the implication of incense accumulated from the past. The grammar of incense terms transposes unifying and differentiating discourses. In effect, junior centers can differentiate their incense at nodal temples from that of other minor centers as “shared” or “added,” thus not unified in the censer as a return on a parental investment. To augment its own position, Tachia had attempted to change the name of the annual pilgrimage from “paying respect to ancestors” to “presenting incense” or “touring the boundaries and presenting incense.” Through such attempts, Tachia wished recognition as a “younger sister” rather than a subordinate (Chang Hsuan 1992: 279–280). Eventually, Tachia’s board appealed to Peikang to clarify that Tachia was not a

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“separated branch” of Peikang Chaotian Temple (Guo Jin-lan 1988: 106–108). In other words, Tachia required that the value produced in its annual pilgrimage would accrue to itself rather than to Peikang. Peikang quickly refuted Tachia’s claims in the media, accusing Tachia of forgetting its ancestors. As Mr. Wang of Chaotian Temple told me in 1992, Peikang’s position was that whether Tachia was separated from Peikang was a matter for professional historians to prove, not Chaotian Temple’s responsibility to clear up. Besides, Tachia had in the past called the event “paying respect to ancestors.” Another of Peikang’s commissioners called Tachia’s recent attempts at revisionist history fabrications. To Tachia, Peikang’s statements about Tachia’s pilgrim crowds were equally fabricated, requiring Tachia’s commissioners to rectify relationships as part of their own practice of temple management. The statement “Tachia is separated from Peikang” was not a valid one, according to Tachia, because the pilgrimage lacked historical depth. Although the pilgrimage had only been undertaken for one hundred years, Zhenlan Temple was founded more than two hundred years ago. Had Tachia been separated from Peikang, the pilgrimage should have dated from the founding of Zhenlan Temple itself (Guo Jin-lan 1988: 37–38; 118). In Tachia, an accidental discovery heightened this sense of misdirected itineraries. Excavation required for the construction of a new temple gate unearthed a stone marked with the phrase “Boundary of Tianhou Temple.” Tachia’s commissioners immediately reported their finding to newspapers and periodicals and eventually placed the stone in a central display area in the forecourt of the temple. During my first visit to Tachia, a member of the board of trustees showed me the stone and related in animated tones its significance for Tachia Zhenlan Temple. The Tanshui gazetteer records that a Tachia Tianhou Temple was constructed in the 35th year of the Qianlong emperor (1770 CE). Given the lack of written records, said the commissioner, local historians could not connect the gazetteer’s description of the Qianlong period structure to the present Zhenlan Temple. The recent discovery of the stone verified the gazetteer and provided evidence that Tachia Zhenlan Temple succeeded an original, historically documented structure. Zhenlan Temple’s independence from Peikang would follow from this statement. As pilgrimage to Peikang only commenced one hundred years ago, a relatively short time in relation to the entire history of the temple, Zhenlan Temple could claim that its severance of ties with Peikang was legitimate. A local oral historical account (repeated in interviews at Lukang and Tachia) further indicts Peikang’s claims. According to this account,


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Zhenlan Temple’s pilgrimage to Peikang derived from the circumstances of Japanese colonial dominance. Below I relate the account as one commissioner of Zhenlan Temple told it to me:11 It happened during the beginning of the Japanese colonial period, before either of the world wars. Because the Japanese came, our original ties to Meizhou were cut off. We couldn’t go there anymore. So Peikang Chaotian Temple set up an altar to Mazu’s parents and began to ask all of the temples to go to Peikang for presenting incense and “returning to mother’s home” (hui niangjia), now that we couldn’t go to China. After several years, they were able to use these pilgrimages as evidence that our temple, and others, were separated from Peikang.

Tachia’s account suggests that Peikang’s status was fabricated, but given the lack of written records, the commissioner continued, “fabricated history becomes real, in the form of mistaken concepts.” The Tachia/Peikang dispute intensified after Tachia’s 1987 pilgrimage to Meizhou. Just as the dispute seemed to cast an intractable shadow over the 1988 spring pilgrimage to Peikang, representatives of Hsinkang Fongtian temple arrived to welcome Tachia. Tachia and Hsinkang thus formed an alliance in opposition to Peikang. Hsinkang derives revenue and greater visibility through Tachia’s pilgrimage, but has agreed to terms that forego Hsinkang’s right to make statements about Tachia’s pilgrim crowds. Allowing Tachia to call the pilgrimage a “tour of [Tachia’s own] boundaries,” Hsinkang has augmented Tachia’s ability to produce value as the originator and node of its pilgrimage path. Tachia’s new pilgrimage rituals, instituted in spring 1988, do not include ket-hoe, which would suggest that Tachia was a daughter of Hsinkang. Conspicuously absent is also a special box used to carry incense and burning coals taken from the pilgrimage site—now that the pilgrimage does not include the kethoe ritual, Tachia has no use for them—replaced with Tachia’s Meizhou Ma (separated from Meizhou in 1987), touring “Taiwan’s boundaries” (Guo Jin-lan 1988: 142; Huang Mei-ying, personal conversation).

Opening a New Arena The rhetoric of these disputes surrounding incense and ritual precedence engaged a wider context than at first might be apparent. Peikang’s tour and the responses of other Mazu temples equally relate to the national government’s failures to secure the meaning of China on Taiwan. In fact, these disputes made Mazu temples complicit with the KMT routinization of failure. By 1987, when Chiang Ching-kuo brought to an

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end 38 years of martial law, not only had faith in recovery of the mainland eroded, but the system of representing China on Taiwan had also begun to lose steam as legislators standing for their home districts across the Straits died or became too feeble to continue their duties. Official attempts to curtail opposition politicians in 1978 only provided a platform for the emerging “outside the party” (dang wai) movement. Wives of jailed opposition figures handily won in local elections. Moreover, under Chiang Ching-kuo, the Nationalist Party had already begun a limited program of indigenization, paralleled in the cultural sphere by valorization of a number of Taiwanese historical sites, including Lukang Town and Peikang Chaotian Temple. Chiang’s famous visits to Peikang were part of this turn. In its attempt to secure Chinese culture on Taiwan, KMT institutions of cultural renaissance lavished attention on temples. This attention both intensified intertemple competition and caused a nascent Taiwanese nativism (bentu zhuyi) to coalesce and grow within the party-state, as well as in spite of it. In 1987, military officers continued to supervise high schools and colleges, and downtown Taipei still sported giant characters proclaiming that the Three Principles of the People Would Reunify China. Explicit reference to Taiwanese independence or to the government across the Straits faced censorship. Newspapers no longer referred to “Maoist Imposters,” but did place “People’s Republic of China” in quotation marks. These neither disguised a growing sense that China as officially imagined was untenable nor abated an enthusiasm for Chinese products. Living in Taichung through 1987 and 1988, I became familiar with stores and night markets that offered officially proscribed goods, labels removed to deter embarrassing and needless questions about their origin. Repeal of martial law impelled what had been a surreptitious wholesale market of Chinese medicines, occasionally smuggled recordings, and art products to expand into an open, visible “mainland fever” (dalure) (Zhang Wen-ping 1987, Long Yao 1987, Liu Su-yu 1987, Chao and Lin 1987). The expansion of this new market (xinxing shichang) in mainland products indicated to some observers a lack of coherence in civil law (Liu Su-yu 1987: 50; Hsiao Hsin-huang 1988), as if postmartial law institutions had not offered solutions to questions that were previously all too clear: What was Taiwan’s relationship to China historically? What was the place of this relationship in Taiwan’s future? Travel presented one of the first places to pose these questions. In late 1987 and early 1988, the Nationalist government began to draw up guidelines for visits among family members separated in 1949. Proponents of the new legislation argued for liberalization of China


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travel as a humanitarian issue; however, it seemed an attempt to regulate an already existing market. In retrospect, it is odd that I did not consider it surprising to encounter an entire busload of Taiwanese tourists—only a few of mainland origin—in Guilin, China, when I traveled there in 1988 a few months before the Mainland Affairs Commission had ironed out the legalities of China travel. Chinese customs facilitated such visits through detachable entrance and exit booklets that allowed the Taiwanese visitors officially to have remained in Hong Kong the entire duration of their tour. The Straits Commission of the People’s Republic aggressively courted Taiwanese visitors, including goddesses. A few months before the 1000th anniversary of Mazu’s apotheosis, invitations to a celebration at Meizhou, the founding site of the Mazu cult, began to arrive at Mazu temples throughout Taiwan. The Meizhou Mazu Ancestral Temple Management Committee, a popular (minjian) organization, sent the invitations. That the Meizhou temple could coordinate such an event implied some political connection, however; most Taiwanese sites suspected the invitations to issue from a bureau engaged in Beijing’s attempt to use soft tactics to bring Taiwan into the PRC fold. Besides, in 1987, receipt of such a missive still invited trouble from the national government on the Taipei side of the Straits. Most temples reported the invitations to the appropriate authorities. Peikang Chaotian Temple organized the Foundation Mother’s tour of her territory in response to the Meizhou event. As one temple committee member at Peikang noted in a 1992 interview, Meizhou’s celebration was “a tactic of unification struggle.”12 Commitment to religious principles, in this case, required Mazu’s definition to extend no further than the Foundation Mother’s Taiwanese borders. This decision redoubled a narrative in which Taiwan remained the cultural custodian of China, the base for Chinese cultural renaissance. The provincial government’s involvement in the procession immediately led to charges of favoritism from other temples. Lukang Tianhou Temple filed a lawsuit. Tachia’s committee planned a journey to Meizhou. Their statements against Peikang’s attempt to represent, and thus enroll, all Taiwanese Mazu temples formed a unifying argument that described all Taiwanese Mazu sites as sisters. Eventually, however, this unifying statement relied on a discourse that restored the centrality of mainland sites, in spite of attempts on the part of major Mazu centers on Taiwan to argue that the most authentic and efficacious manifestations of the Mazu cult survived on Taiwan alone. This stance belied previous rituals, such as Lukang’s practice of “worshipping Meizhou from afar” (yao ji).

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In response to the Peikang tour, Lukang decided to hold a separate event to commemorate the thousand-year anniversary. Rather than going on procession to reinvigorate networks between geographically disperse temples, Lukang concentrated huge crowds in Lukang to demonstrate its nodal status throughout the island. Tianhou Temple urged all of Lukang’s separated images to return, along with pilgrimage groups and accompanying performance troupes. The gathering powerfully argued for Lukang’s status in opposition to Peikang. As Mr. Lin, then a member of Lukang’s management committee told me, the true center does not move. Lin likened Lukang to the prince in Confucius who, like the pole star remains stable, circled by the multitude of stars who bow toward him. Peikang’s tour led to a different response in Tachia. In reaction to what some members of its board of directors called Peikang’s arrogance, Tachia decided to go to Meizhou, in spite of political and other dangers. While Mr. Chang, one of Tachia’s board members, searched the office for a book on Tachia’s 1987 mainland pilgrimage published on Tachia’s behalf by the Taichung County Cultural Commission, another of the board members remarked that one only need look at the newspapers from fall 1987 to see that Tachia was not the only angry party: “It seemed as if they [the government/Peikang] were ignoring us. If they wanted a procession to celebrate the event—in opposition to the event in China, which had political as well as religious motives—they should have asked to have palanquins from all of the major Mazu temples. Otherwise, the event could not be done properly!” Upon its return from China, Tachia’s committee publicized its acquisition of an image shared from the Meizhou temple, drawing huge crowds of pilgrims and curious onlookers from throughout the island. The naojiat stirred up by the event showed that minor temples could now challenge the hegemony of major centers. Tachia’s pilgrimage thus increased the value of local sites, as well as confirming Meizhou’s status. Of course, Tachia faced charges of fabrication. An important figure in the normalization of cross-Straits relations in postmartial law Taiwan as well as a new arena for intertemple disputes, mainland pilgrimages quickly joined the Taiwanese ritual repertoire. Tachia’s pilgrimage adopted the official language of mainland visits as “visiting relations” (tanqin) and “root searching” (xungen) and, more importantly, formed one of the first publicized accounts of China as a newly present Other. Unlike the diffuse mainland fever gripping Taiwan in 1987, the pilgrimage issued from a recognizable set of commitments.13 Members of the Tachia board who embarked on the pilgrimage


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professed their adherence to sources higher than law. They were willing to suffer punishment, for the sake of Mazu. As they underscored the Chinese origin (if not identity) of Taiwanese people, they claimed a standpoint against which restriction of their pilgrimage seemed contrary to national interests (Wang Mo-lin 1987: 42). Tachia’s pilgrimage thus created what the defensive posturing of Peikang’s procession could not: a desire to renegotiate relationships with China, embodied in Tachia’s new Meizhou Mother.

The Revamping of Controversy? Although Tachia’s 1987 pilgrimage seemed unprecedented at the time, the rhetoric of intertemple disputes did encourage their expansion to a mainland arena. Arguments built on the visibility of relics falter on the knowledge that more valuable relics, those needed to authenticate visible ones, are often invisible. For Lukang and Puzi, only a pilgrimage to Meizhou, in which both images would be tested at the Cave of the Apotheosis, could prove which image is the authentic Foundation Mother. This rhetoric defers resolution, however. Most disputants knew that iconoclasts had destroyed Meizhou either during, or sometime before, the Cultural Revolution. As one newspaper account (Jiang and Zhang 1987: 54) remarked, “Maybe we can only ask the Red Guards who has the real ‘Foundation Mother!’ ” Deferral became a mode of commitment binding disputants to each other within the contested historical fabric. Value statements that depended on the visibility of crowds pointed even more strongly toward Meizhou. Minor sites could extend and coordinate networks through pilgrimage to Meizhou, displacing Taiwanese nodal sites such as Peikang. For their part, nodal centers perceived that coordination of Taiwanese events provided no further means to extend their influence. By 1987, the intensification of intertemple competition had already oversaturated existing networks. Lacking additional paths on Taiwan itself, the mainland appeared to offer the most potential. It should be no surprise then to learn that Lukang had originally planned to make its own first Meizhou pilgrimage in fall 1987 immediately preceding the islandwide gathering. The possibility of intensifying intertemple competition through extensive donation in China provided one incentive for the explosion of Taiwanese pilgrimages in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Through these pilgrimages, competition would reach yet another threshold from which new strategies would emerge. Given China’s association with Taiwan’s

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past, rival centers could pose their arguments in a fully historical idiom: crowds could be formed and made visible; relics could be restored, discovered, or hidden; and historical statements could follow. Did these statements perhaps precede visibilities? Restoring their ancestral temples in China, Taiwanese temple committees attempted to build the visibility of the past in the image of historical statements, creating evidence to suit their purposes in intertemple disputes. The potential value of pilgrimages to China later came into conflict with statements guiding restoration in Fujian, requiring yet another negotiation of Taiwanese history. With the Taiwanese involvement in pilgrimages and temple reconstruction in Fujian, charges of fabrication among Taiwanese temples became increasingly pronounced. These charges demonstrate the limitations of historical arguments and, through these limitations, some of their biography. During the period surrounding the end of martial law on Taiwan, increasing labor costs on the island and government restrictions on financial markets led to a speculative economy centered on rotating credit associations and illegal lotteries. Both dramatized problems of commitment, as both—but particularly illegal lotteries—were vulnerable to organizers absconding with shared funds. Illegal lotteries, as well as other forms of speculative wealth, were also associated with an explosively popular set of ritual objects, such as the ghostly Eighteen Lords (Weller 1994b, Weller 2001). Unlike compassionate Mazu, upright Guandi, or even the sundry Ongia popular in Taiwanese territorial cults, the Eighteen Lords and their ilk demanded little of the supplicant besides repayment. Owing no local or kinship loyalties, and having no moral scruples, these cults offered answers to all requests and featured deities of no commitments other than the most individual, commercialized, and self-interested. The Eighteen Lords did share with other objects of popular ritual reliance upon naojiat as a form of authentication. One knew that the Eighteen Lords were efficacious simply because so many people burned incense or, more precisely, cigarettes to them. On the other hand, the lack of commitment in such cults eroded historical narratives. Thus, in his attempt to provide a political-economic interpretation of the popularity of the Eighteen Lords and similar “amoral” cults, Robert Weller (1994a: 167–168) concedes that his own interpretation is merely one of a series of trials, each meant to enroll the Eighteen Lords into a fixed narrative, all failed “precipitations” of meaning. Weller’s argument focuses on the role of religious or bureaucratic institutions in precipitating meanings from a “saturated” mix of possible meanings. He concludes that amoral cults such as the Eighteen Lords


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and fundamentalist groups whose meanings are all too fixed, both of which became popular in the late 1980s, were features of the inability of the KMT (and of modern states generally) to settle fundamental questions of meaning (Weller 1994a: 168; Weller 2001). I suspect that apart from this Weberian narrative, the Eighteen Lords also indicate the ethical contours of truth-producing practices. The Eighteen Lords can produce no historical truths—say the relationship of Lukang’s Second Mother to Shi Lang’s conquest and clever merchants or the Ponkang Foundation Mother to the ethnic Chinese settlement of Taiwan—because such truths require commitment. Naojiat crowds always seem to leave an escape from the binding commitments that tighten the fabric of history. Naojiat proves an unstable medium for truth production, even if it remains the most powerful means to produce truths and values available to Taiwanese ritual practices. When Mazu temples accuse each other of fabrication, they allude to the increasing popularity of cults that threatened the possibility of orderly relations realized through presenting incense and insist on the need to sustain commitment through noisy-hot practices. Naojiat had long made commitment the focus of problems. Political-economic realities in the 1980s did not determine this problematic of popular religious practice. But now it connected to, and was constitutive of, the anxiety that Taiwan had played out. Taiwan’s played out. Chiang’s visits to Peikang could do no more than ritualize the KMT’s failure to secure the island’s place in relation to China and in the world, to situate its relationship to the lost space-time of the nation as a meaningful problem (Johnson 1994). In this regard, the provincial government’s complicity with Peikang to standardize relationships within the Mazu cult, placing Peikang at the apex, briefly attempted to displace China as source of value, a move somewhat inconsistent with the logic of Taiwanese religious practices, which highly evaluate proximity to the original locus of a cult. One senses in this gesture a failure to reformulate cross-Straits relationships. At the very least, Peikang’s tour was ambivalent. Perhaps Peikang reflects well its most illustrious patron, Chiang Ching-kuo, who spoke passable Taiwanese Hoklo but nonetheless kept the territory of Republican China (including all of Mongolia) in national maps, well after the entrance of the PRC into the United Nations. Rather than a rejection of this problematic, however, Tachia’s pilgrimage suggests a deeper complicity. Tachia’s coup made the state’s inability to settle historical questions evident but offered the state new means to mobilize the public on the grounds of the China Problem. The popular demand (minzhong yuanwang) indicated by Tachia’s pilgrimage could provide a new means to reimagine

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(relationships with) a newly present China. At least it could indicate a new venue for controversy. Take, for example, the attention that many Taiwanese people lavished on Tachia’s new Meizhou Mother. The youth and freshness of this image seemed to embody the flattened hierarchy that would follow if all Mazu sites were directly filiated from Meizhou. It also threatened a corresponding erasure of historical verities, for unlike the Black Faced Mothers of Lukang or Peikang, Tachia’s new Meizhou mother did not bear the traces of a relationship to Meizhou complicated through intervening years of pilgrimage and ritual filiation on Taiwan. One might say that Tachia’s new Meizhou image, like many claims to identity, Chinese or Taiwanese, circulating in postmartial law Taiwan, fascinated but also indicated the ethically corrosive effect of a changing social field, one major facet of which was “identity crisis.” Accusations of fabrication aside, pilgrimage became a medium in which both sets of relationships—those suggested through Lukang’s Second Mother and Tachia’s new Meizhou Mother—were amenable to critical appraisal. Here the logic of Taiwanese religious practice comes into play, for ritual intensification provides one means through which practitioners convert new states of affairs into a set of interlocal relationships, commitments across localities rendered durable in relics and held fast in the fabric of history. In effect, popular practices of fabricating histories pose the problems and afford the commitments that make these states of affairs real, that dispose them toward truth. Perhaps the expansion of intertemple competition to a Chinese arena revamped the fabric of history, but its weave remains a complicated and ever-tangled tapestry. Likewise, the anxiety that Taiwan would soon be played out remains in play.

Vignette Remembering a Movement

Song remembers the late 1960s and early 1970s as the time he followed Mr. Li through the streets of Pinghe’s county seat, where Song’s father had moved from Chaozhou. His uncles had since migrated to Thailand to find their fortunes “beyond the ocean.” Song followed Li, and Li posted big character posters with enough sharpness of brush to vindicate himself momentarily against his detractors. Every morning Li would post the big character posters, Song carrying a bucket of paste and a brush, along the streets stenciled with slogans: —“Make This Building a University of Mao Zedong Thought,” “Be for Life a Good Child of Mao Zedong,” “Listening to the Party’s Word Is Victory; Unity Is Strength,” “Long Life to Chairman Mao.” Every column of the covered sidewalks beamed with red paint. Every morning would bring students with new banners to hang across the streets; new slogans and new developments in the movement unfurled above Song’s head with searing yellows, lightdrenched blacks, colors so bright one could almost forget that this was an agricultural market town in one of the poorest provinces of China. Every afternoon was like a festival. A new era was coming, when sheaves of grain and fish would be as large as those in calendar paintings of smiling peasants, dressed in deep blue and red cottons. Every morning, the songs and chants of the students would thunder as they paraded through the streets with firecrackers, drums, and accordions. Every morning, one would see the names of prominent neighbors posted among the slogans. In the evenings, Song secretly removed some of the older posters, selling the paper to a recycler.1 The next day, he followed Li again, until the morning Li appeared in the procession, dragged along by his youthful persecutors, wearing a dunce cap, his alleged crimes splashed on in a hand not so fine as his own. As the procession passed, bits of red paper bristling with black characters caught the harsh light of the sun as they

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drifted through the shouted slogans and the roll of footsteps stamping in a revolutionary culture. That night, like almost all nights, Song probably went to see one of the eight model operas, spectacularly filmed in Technicolor. Li was beaten nearly to death. When I met Li in 1992, he was working as a caretaker for Taichiongia Temple. Four “struggle sessions” had left him with a limp. During the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (hereafter, GPCR) Taichiongia Temple had been expropriated for use as a granary (Wu Yishan n.d.). The temple mouth, however, still functioned as the site of violent spectacles. By 1992, Taichiongia Temple had been rebuilt. On Taichiongia’s birthday in the seventh lunar month, pilgrims and a festive market filled the streets around the temple. In addition to Li, two other men who had been persecuted during the years of iconoclastic violence served on the temple committee. In 1992, Song, a graduate of Amoy University, worked in the crossStraits art trade. He lived in a block of concrete apartments, where he shared a single room with his wife and young daughter. A small, round coal stove sat next to the door on the porch where Song and his neighbors gathered at nights. They would sit on square bamboo stools around a short glass-topped table drinking tea, occasionally beer. Song and his wife worked to make their small, gray room more colorful with large posters of European scenes and tastefully furnished, large interiors. On one wall, Song set a shelf on which he kept bottles of expensive brandy, usually gifts from Taiwanese or Overseas Chinese clients. Above the shelf was a hanging Buddhist icon that his current teacher, the abbot of a nearby monastery, gave Song. Nearby sat a plastic shopping bag printed with the inscription: “The temptation of times/The best lydah paper bag/ fills your life with the sense of the modern.” It was difficult to decorate the room, because the bed took up at least a quarter of the space. Like many men, Song spent most of his time in the public space he shared with his neighbors or in restaurants and karaokes around town. I met him in an art dealership across from the monastery, one of Amoy’s major tourist attractions, near Amoy University. He was discussing the commission on a set of paintings with an artist on the university faculty. About a month later, we met again at the artist’s studio. I had contracted bronchitis on a trip to Anxi and was complaining about the university loudspeaker, which guided students through their morning calisthenics at 6 a.m., Monday through Saturday. My complaints elicited both men’s memories of the GPCR. “But you have nothing to complain about,” said the professor. “These days it’s cold compared to what it used to be. Now during the GPCR, that was truly noisy-hot! There were loudspeakers and banners

Remembering a Movement

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everywhere, so many that they would be placed even where there was no space for them. And every day brought more.”

Whatever feelings one may have about the GPCR, it was naojiat. No other term seems to capture the excessive, spectacular violence of the period. If the use of the term seems counterintuitive, it is only because we have the benefit of seeing the period as an error or as an “historical aberration,” to use a term favored by Chinese historians. In Fujian during the 1990s, people often considered opposition between the present and the GPCR in terms of public and private spaces. Likewise, temple reconstructions and the extension of pilgrimage networks throughout Greater Minnan constituted both new forms of publicity and privacy, distributing these forms on either side of a “culture” that mediated between them. What kind of privacy is implied in the professor’s remarks? With his claim that reform era China was “nothing to complain about,” that it was cold, rather than noisy-hot, the professor suggests emerging and newly valorized spaces of privacy or at least a desire for such in the absence of architectural spaces that would give a private life its shape. This privacy is an object subject to various sorts of interference, as both the loudspeakers and the memory of a fully public, naojiat life during the GPCR indicate. Privacy is, as the printed bag suggests, the “temptation of the times,” a desired object, but nonetheless not representative of the withdrawal of the state more than of a transforming strategy of governmentality (Farquhar 2002). The interference that the professor’s and Song’s memories provide remind us that the GPCR and the years of “reform and openness” (gaige kaifang) that followed it cannot be understood merely as antithetical experiments in the organization of socialist political economies. In addition to opposition, we should approach the two terms as folded together, distinct but inseparable surfaces of an inclusive historical complication: a crisis of public space and public action. Such crises are implicated in the expropriation and restoration of temple structures in the Minnan region. Expropriation and restoration make evident these crises, which touched upon which sort of people, what kind of language, and what socially meaningful activities could constitute or represent the public. In the chapters that follow, I use the term public figures to refer to the assemblage of spokespersons, discourses, and practices that represent a public. Public figures refer to both the human and nonhuman forms and agents that speak for publics or in which publics become visible. To frame our understanding of the processes of temple restoration as involving a crisis of public figures may be

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to abandon purely religious questions, yet it allows us to avoid the dead end of relating expropriation and restoration to revolutionary conservatism versus pragmatic liberalization in the modern Chinese context as if we are witnessing in temple restoration a simple entrance of the people into vacant ground left by a retreating state.

3 Reluctance and Conversion

Composing Folk Belief In this chapter, I focus on the public history of minjian xinyang (folk or popular belief) in reform period China, this time from the vantage of reluctant patrons. Their stories demonstrate how minjian xinyang was not an obvious addition to the cultural field. Because the practices that came to be grouped under the term minjian xinyang had long been associated with backwardness and superstition, patrons and others employed talk of culture to rehabilitate popular ritual practices as they rehabilitated themselves as public figures. In this new formulation, culture becomes a mediating form between the public performance of the patrons’ intellectual or managerial vocation and a newly excavated realm of privacy: that of belief, cultivation, and enjoyment. Minjian xinyang, like culture, resides between the private space of personal cultivation and the minjian as a popular, public space. Patrons’ narratives imply that the formation of the minjian was neither simple nor entirely voluntary. Rather, this new cultural field was fragile, its excavation the source of many anxieties. During the mid-1980s, as liberal economic policies caused an influx of Taiwanese and Overseas Chinese capital to flow into southeast Fujian, local groups began to reappropriate temple structures. With the arrival of Overseas Chinese donors, the public status of unrecognized groups associated with temples became an administrative problem complicating relationships between the local state and the populace. It was no longer possible for state agencies to dismiss the public practices of popular ritual as mixin (superstition). With this complication, a para-state bureaucracy of patrons, scenic area administration zones, and research organizations began to emerge in the Minnan region.

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From the 1920s onward, temple structures had been appropriated for a wide variety of functions ranging from education to agricultural production. Even in the climate of Deng Shaoping’s reforms, many of these functions belonged largely to the province of the local state. Nonetheless, from the early 1980s onward, folk belief began to emerge from the category of superstition as a cultural property of specific localities and as a form of projective metalepsis (Faubion 1993) through which the past could be seen to invigorate the future of an open (kaifang) society. Reappropriation required a delicate set of maneuvers. The group responsible for reappropriation needed to provide a structure for industrial, administrative, or educational units to be displaced before gaining permission for temple restorations. To be successful, local groups would also need to provide an argument, in language not explicitly religious, concerning the potential function of the temple as a public resource. Although folk belief was emerging as a field of investigation proper to the rehabilitated discipline of folklore, problems remained: Was folk belief a legitimate public practice? How should it be administered? These problems led to arguments concerning bureaucratic assignment of temple administration units. Finding a patron would trace out many of the problems of definition and bureaucratic assignment that would later come to mark disputes within and among temple organizations. For many temple organizations in Minnan, patrons changed in accordance with ongoing shifts in activities surrounding the temple. Although minjian xinyang fell beyond the scope of religion bureaus or religious affairs departments of United Front offices, United Front offices provided patrons for groups as they organized temple committees. Relationships with United Front offices were useful, because these offices were also concerned with Overseas Chinese and Taiwanese affairs. But these relationships meant that local interests in reconstruction were subordinated to depiction of Taiwanese and Overseas Chinese pilgrims and “root searchers.” Scholarship on the emerging minjian, or popular, sphere in China often suggests the limits of popular religious networks (and voluntary associations generally) in terms of lack. According to this model, minjian xinyang cannot constitute civil society according to its definition in Western contexts because popular religious networks in China are often particularistic, that is, they are local and nonvoluntary rather than national and voluntary.1 Other scholars have examined emerging patterns of horizontal organizations in China and claimed that these represent either the commodification of socialism (Wank 1999) or the

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development of local corporatist structures integrated with the central state (White 1993, White et al. 1996). According to White, corporatism is a social strategy of coordinating “newly emergent, dispersed sources of economic power by encouraging the establishment of social organizations to act as intermediaries” (White 1993: 85). However, corporatism is also an intensive process with multiple structural outcomes. In this regard, White, Howell, and Shang warn, “The various modes of incorporation operate both to integrate and to disarticulate the operations of the Party/state. It is corporatism of a fragmented and fragmenting kind, which reflects the increasingly fragmented, pluralist nature of the Chinese state system as a whole” (White et al. 1996: 213). In approaches to popular religious practice, much scholarship has relied on terms of resurgence, renewal, or renaissance to describe the emergence of minjian xinyang in post-Mao China, often neglecting to examine the role of the state in its formation. In a study of Chinese Catholicism, for example, Lozada (2001) employs such language even as he demonstrates a variety of state and transnational processes involved in the organization of a Catholic community during the reform period. Other scholars (Farquhar 2002, Liu Kang 2003, Mueggler 2001) show that reform period institutions, such as those of popular religious practice or privacy, cannot simply be depicted as stable objects returning to the surface after years underground. For Mueggler, memories of iconoclastic violence in southwest China informed practices that grounded an “oppositional moral cosmology” (2001: 252). Memories of the GPCR work in a similar fashion in Fujian to interfere with minjian xinyang’s emergence as culture. Among the publics that attempted to maintain ritual practices through the 1960s and 1970s, fear of spiritual retribution and allegories of spectacular wealth were part of the very constitution of temple networks, interrupting attempts to give minjian xinyang substantial meaning in the post-Mao cultural field. Patrons, for their part, had uneasy relationships with the emerging publics that began temple reconstructions. Local women usually initiated reappropriation efforts. Patrons were generally men assigned their posts following retirement from positions within the local bureaucracy. Prior to their role as patrons, most had studiously avoided the places and practices that they now promoted. Patrons and the publics who gathered to reconstruct temples did share, however, memories of persecution during the decades of iconoclastic violence. For reluctant patrons, such memories provided an impetus for the repositioning of minjian xinyang from superstition to culture.

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Emergence of Alternative Publics One of the climactic moments of the GPCR in Quanzhou occurred when the mayor of the city locked the grounds of Kaiyuan Si. His act provoked a confrontation with Red Guards, who had hoped to dynamite the pagodas that dominated Quanzhou’s skyline, blocking the sun with shadowy memories of the Zayton of Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta. 2 Locals carrying clubs joined the mayor. Almost 30 years after the event, people in Quanzhou would point to the mayor’s act as an important juncture. The mayor’s act of excluding people from the grounds of the temple transformed the two Ming period stone pagodas into a public resource, one of the city’s cultural properties (wenhua caichan). Although the mayor protected the pagodas in an effort to preserve national heritage, his action as retold in Quanzhou produces a public with local characteristics. The twin pagodas do more than represent Quanzhou. They also constitute and transform publics. The pagodas, saved explicitly for the nation, collect narratives that transpose elements of the national patrimony to a public that holds its autonomy beyond the state, if entangled with it. Of similar import are the narratives, some of them too fantastic to disbelieve —for they belong to a different realm of truth—of fearful retribution brought onto iconoclasts. In 1967, iconoclasts destroyed Quanzhou Tianfei Gong’s (h: thianhoe kiong) Ming period image. Formerly, a local saying urged, “to see a beauty, go to Tianhoe Kiong of the South Gate,” referring to the image as well as the young women who gathered at Tianfei Gong to watch theatrical performances and worship on important festivals. Radical youth had expropriated the temple as a school building in 1931 but did not attempt to deface or otherwise remove the image.3 Many elderly people in Quanzhou recall having seen the image before its destruction. One of these local elders, a worker at Tianfei Gong, recalls that when Red Guards entered the temple to destroy the image, they recognized that it would be no simple task. The cleverest of their group suggested that they climb the image, tie a rope around its neck, and pull the image onto the floor where it could be hacked to pieces with axes. Because he was the smallest of the group, the Red Guard member who made the suggestion took the duty of climbing the image. The image was summarily broken and the pieces tossed into the street. Later, the Red Guard member responsible for the destruction of the image was riding on the back of a truck when a sudden grimace gave his comrades a start. They stopped the truck, and his body slumped against one of the side panels. His own scarf had


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caught in the truck wheels and strangled him. Car accidents and suicide seem to have claimed the lives of many other iconoclasts. Apocryphal or not, narratives such as the one above are (to borrow a phrase from the Story of the Stone) “more true than the truth.” They sum the meaning of events in terms of horror and retribution, affirming the public constituted through sharing the retribution narrative. Other narratives of clandestine worship at expropriated or demolished sites form stock descriptions of life in Minnan during the 1960s and 1970s. References to images or incense ash hidden—images in a well or under stacks of hay, censers serving as pig troughs—and allusions to divine retribution are all mythic figures that institute the alterpublic.4 Some of these narratives are no more than an exclamation: “They couldn’t tell it wasn’t a pig trough,” “there in the shed,” or “what a beating I would’ve gotten!” All form popular analogues of the narrative of the mayor and Kaiyuan Si’s pagodas. In these narratives, the locked up, hidden, submerged, or absent becomes the center of practices that ground new publics. From these groups, often of a different composition from earlier temple committees, grew the movement to restore temple structures in the late 1970s through the mid-1980s, a movement that found allies in local intellectuals and bureaucrats who had been forced out of public life during the GPCR and now found themselves rehabilitated. Reconstruction and rehabilitation would set in motion relationships between alter-publics and a para-state administration of local notables serving as patrons. In its restricted definition in contemporary China, culture means formal education. By definition, alter-publics lacked culture; they were relatively uneducated. Many had been economically marginal. Patrons, on the other hand, had too much culture, or at least culture of the wrong kind. The relationship between patrons and alter-publics set in motion a redefinition of the alter-publics’ lack and the patrons’ excess as culture took on a different value. Through these ambivalent relationships, minjian xinyang would emerge as a new public resource in the post-Mao era.

From Alter-Publics to Restored Structures Song, whose memories of the GPCR we touched on earlier, recalled that during the late 1960s and early 1970s, the monastery beside Amoy University was locked, leaving only the seemingly innumerable caves and overhanging ledges on the mountain behind the monastery open as emergency bomb shelters. Shelling from the KMT-controlled Quemoy

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Islands was not unknown those days. The mountain and the beach, just over another ridge behind Amoy University, were controlled with a tight curfew; however, the curfew did not keep the curious from listening to propaganda broadcasts from Quemoy (which included large doses of Taiwanese popular music) or from scavenging balloon-drifted cases of food and electronic goods, watches and radios mostly, that the Nationalists sent over the Quemoy strait. Behind the monastery on the mountain with 18 caves is a large boulder incised with the Chinese character for Buddha. The abbot has set up an incense censer on the rock shelf facing the boulder in deference to popular devotion. Worshippers esteem the character, which was the only image accessible to worshippers that survived the previous years of iconoclasm, as particularly efficacious. In an aside in a conversation with a student monk who viewed worship of the character with skepticism, Song agreed that the nodal quality of the character was a relatively recent development, dating from when the structure was expropriated. During that time, groups of locals would steal to the site to burn incense. With the reforms of the late 1970s and early 1980s, a public formed through making the character nodal. Reconstruction efforts made this public visible, but did not exactly contain it within Buddhist institutions. The student monk, like his colleagues in the Buddhist university attached to the temple, found popular devotion to the character inappropriate. Unlike popular devotion to the character, which continued within and perhaps formed a source of revenue for officially recognized and regulated Buddhist institutions, the publics that formed around Mazu, Baosheng Dadi, and numerous Ongia lacked institutional pathways necessary for recognition as religion. Hence, their normalization as minjian xinyang required the excavation of new institutional spaces from the disorderly and proscribed realm of feudal superstition (fengjian mixin). This work would fall largely to patrons who encountered minjian xinyang as its sites began to attract the interest and support of Taiwanese and Overseas Chinese pilgrims.

A Screen Called “Culture” During the first few months of my fieldwork, Song introduced me to one patron of reconstruction movements in Minnan, a man in his midsixties whom I will call Cheng. Cheng’s description of his work reveals how patronage issues from an ethical vocation that realigns the position of culture. Owing to his tenure on a county public security bureau


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during the late 1950s and early 1960s, Cheng maintained wide connections with provincial and national bureaucracies. Although asked to return to his post in the late 1970s, Cheng preferred to remain in an active retirement. Cheng’s patronage of reconstruction movements has included monetary donations, but more generally the gift of votive tablets. He also held a seat on several temple committees, from which he piloted organizations through bureaucratic straits. Many criticized him for fomenting feudal superstition. He accused his detractors of petty dogmatism. Cheng felt compelled to serve as a patron by what he calls his personal responsibility to his family and a wider responsibility to the history and prosperity of his region. He assessed his efforts for temple reconstruction as a personal obligation. Cheng’s definition of public service combined these sources of responsibility. Cheng joined the Communist Party when 13. He professed belief in Marxism-Leninism for the “benefit of society, particularly the working masses.” The influence of his grandparents and parents, whom he described as “very kind, also having belief, with much faith in bodhisattvas and buddhas,” encouraged him to practice Buddhism for personal cultivation (xiushen). Although personal cultivation was primarily to Cheng an element of private life, he saw no necessary contradiction between his two belief systems; in fact, he claimed that the reopening of religious belief (minjian xinyang de chongxin kaifang) had a great influence on Fujian’s recent prosperity. This private realm of cultivation intersected with Taiwan, for Cheng claimed that if Fujian was to restore its ties to Taiwan, it was only in the sphere of minjian xinyang that any close connections could be found. As one of Cheng’s friends, a temple committee member, pointed out while we witnessed a pilgrimage to one of the temples for which Cheng served as a patron, kinship relations to Taiwan are already very cloudy. Minjian xinyang alone could clarify these ties, for one may forget the names of ancestors but not the names of deities. When he talked about minjian xinyang, Cheng used the term almost interchangeably with Buddhism, as evident in the objects of his private devotion. Minjian xinyang occupied a position contiguous with kinship and personal cultivation. Cheng did not set his altar table with its images of Baosheng Dadi and Kuanyin in the central, main hall of the house reserved for formal, public presentation and reception. The altar table sat in his private study, his place of self-cultivation. Similarly, his promotion of minjian xinyang began with the restoration of a temple closely associated with members of his surname group.

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For Cheng, Buddhism could invigorate one’s work for society; however, xiushen belonged to an intermediate space of activity between society and one’s private subjectivity. Opening this intermediary space between subjectivity and society created a screen against which patrons could perform their responsibilities to the public and behind which they maintained privacy. Like a private study where one contemplates and orders one’s thoughts in writing, this screen defines the realm of culture.5

Overcoming Reluctance This position of culture as a screen between private and public subjectivity was novel, part of the fashioning of a newly legitimate private realm. It was abetted by the multivocality of culture in colloquial Chinese: both an anthropological definition and a restricted definition of culture as educational level are available to Mandarin Chinese speakers. Yet this movement of culture toward the self, so that it could enable the formation of privacy, encountered severe problems. Minjian xinyang was not a given, but a fragile object susceptible to interferences that also threatened the integrity of patrons as subjects. This fragility was due to the inappropriate quality of its associated practices, which were excised from the realm of feudal superstition with difficulty, and its public, which, lacking culture, could not legitimately maintain minjian xinyang. Creation of minjian xinyang as an appropriate public figure thus required an excavation of meanings that could differentiate the progressive culture of belief from feudal practices. Patrons worked to articulate minjian xinyang with other narratives, such as those of ethnic unity, historical mission, service to the people, and Overseas Chinese and local history, to stabilize the position of belief as culture. Like other screens, minjian xinyang’s culture had a dual quality as “medium and representation” (Wu Hong 1996). Culture was both a means to articulate narratives of local history and a signifier within, and sometimes of, them. This dual quality created patterns of interference through which the cultural lack of alter-publics, and hence of reform period Minnan in general, continued to surface. Most patrons stressed that their work, while voluntary, was not freely chosen. Rather they accepted their vocation with considerable reluctance. Reluctance on the part of many patrons was accompanied by embarrassment on the part of the local state. The state was in a double bind, for example, when the first group of Taiwanese pilgrims called the Xiamen City Government from Beijing inquiring about the location of


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a Be Family Alley. Chihe Gong was managed by a group who had worshipped Ti Ongia (m: chi wangye) surreptitiously through the 1970s, none of whom had any culture. According to officials in the city gazetteer editorial office, receiving the Taiwanese pilgrims required a group able to collect local folklore and organize these materials into temple gazetteers, to manage a larger body of finances brought to the temple through Taiwanese donorship, and to present an appropriate image of folk belief in contemporary China. In other words, only members of the scholarly and managerial class could act as spokespersons. Only those with culture could meet official expectations. For scholars asked to serve, however, such work was difficult to pursue. As these officials pointed out, “strictly speaking, we are new to folklore ourselves.” Mr. Su, a retired schoolteacher and member of the provincial calligraphy association who became a temple patron, described his involvement with an Ongia temple in terms of conflicts facing the town government. The arrival of Taiwanese pilgrims required governmental attention. They did not trust the master of the censer who informally managed the temple, nor would it be appropriate to recognize him as chief administrator of a cultural site. On the other hand, the state still considered Ongia temples “feudal superstition.” And Taiwanese pilgrims might be suspicious of state involvement. Obviously, the town government could not involve itself in temple operation directly. The government called on a few local calligraphers, schoolteachers, and historians for advice. “That was how I got pushed into this,” Su concluded. For their part, the retired teachers and other local intellectuals summoned to join newly reconfigured temple committees regarded their potential assignments with suspicion. Why should they come out of retirement when there could be another movement? They had suffered once for their intellectual vocation. Patrons’ conversion narratives outline a process of realization, pedagogy, and identification through which they overcame such fears. Patrons related how they encountered the historical mission and substantial meaning of popular devotion, promoted their sense of the compatibility of minjian xinyang with Chinese socialism through research and propaganda work, and realized themselves as heads of voluntary organizations. Conversion was not merely an internal process but also a means of giving durability to culture in its new intermediate position between privacy and publicity. One patron’s discussion of how he became involved with restoration of Qingjiao East Temple, a founding temple of the Baosheng Dadi cult, vividly captures how realization of the substantial meaning of popular practices overcame his initial reluctance. The Overseas Chinese Office

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asked Mr. Yang to join Qingjiao’s board in 1985. Initially, he feared the lingering effects of the temple’s previous designation as feudal superstition. His transformation from reluctance to commitment followed a period of study in which he researched the life of Wu Zhenren, as Baosheng Dadi was known in his earthly life. Wu Zhenren’s sense of justice (zhengyi) touched him. Aware of the deity’s zhengyi, he was able “to persevere through hardships to restore the temple.” In his work as a patron, he also worked to encourage in others a similar conversion to the position that minjian xinyang is not superstition but a commemorative practice with an implicit moral philosophy. Media for this work include the highly publicized meetings of a research association sponsored by the temple, scholarly publications, and a comic book based on the life of Wu Zhenren. Yang’s conversion is thus a pedagogical process rather than a moment of sudden inspiration. It is, in fact, a charter for research as much as an argument for the public value of devotion. It transforms his position as a researcher. It also shifts the meaning of popular practices: I had visited East Temple when I was a child, before liberation. When the temple was expropriated as a cowshed, I did not think much about it. I thought that worship of Taitoo Kong was merely superstition. Later, when I had been asked to serve on the committee, I began to research Wu Zhenren. As a teacher, I had always been interested in local history. From my research, I began to realize the meaning of Wu Zhenren’s thought, that he was a doctor who neither took money, nor cared for position, who sacrificed himself for the lives of the folk. Then I knew why the people still worshipped him. I was still afraid of trouble, but I began to feel that I should dedicate my life after retirement to promote Wu Zhenren’s thought, and to clarify the importance of East Temple in local history.

In concert with their intellectual vocation, many patrons overcame their reluctance to support reconstruction through literary pursuits such as investigation of history and folklore. They also employed reconstruction to stimulate the formation of a literary community through the exchange of essays and inscriptions.6 Once they had initiated cultural elaboration of temple organizations, intellectuals could define temples as places for the performance of the intellectuals’ public responsibilities. Su’s first act as committee chair, for example, was to collect some materials on Ongia hagiography and narratives of efficacious response, which he obtained through interviewing some old men who sat in the temple during the hot hours of the afternoon. He initially knew little about the Ong at his temple. His experience pushed him to learn much


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about local history, especially the relationship of the Ongia to Taiwan. One of his younger friends, an official with the county Overseas Chinese Office whom he knew through the calligraphic association, was helpful in this research. Although these networks were entangled with, if not embedded in, the local state, they were voluntary in character. At the very least, they traversed several bureaucratic departments, academic institutions, religious organizations, and commercial ventures. For example, I met the young official in the Overseas Chinese Office acquainted with Su through a dealer in religious art in Sanhsia, Taiwan. A few years earlier, the official had coordinated the art dealer’s pilgrimage to a temple in Anxi County. Had the art dealer not introduced me to Su, I would have likely met him through Song, who was acquainted with Su through the cross-Straits art trade. Su and Yang knew each other through another set of networks linking both to a major Buddhist temple in Amoy, the network in which Song also was an associate of Yang. Song was familiar with people in Buddhist and minjian xinyang organizations, primarily because both had extensive networks of Taiwanese and Overseas Chinese donors, Song’s potential clients. Song’s interest in my research derived from the possibilities that it afforded for strengthening these networks. These commercial dealings augmented the reality of culture apart from the state; the personal quality of these networks, involving as they did small gifts and other tokens of human sentiment (renqing), also positioned culture toward the self. For my part, I often delivered letters and small gifts for Song, the official on the Overseas Chinese Office, and their Taiwanese associates. Such personal favors positioned me as a cultural worker nearly as much as my research. Although the commercial face of these networks would suggest that they were instrumental for business or political ventures, all those involved in them relied on the language of sentiment and study to describe their relationships. If patrons identified with the status of the temple within the cultural sphere, they were quick to indicate that their work was voluntary. Apart from his sense of responsibility, Su added that he only took the position at Chihe Gong because he had conditions that enabled him to perform as chair. His home was in the neighborhood, and his pension added to a large income from calligraphy gave him enough to serve as a volunteer. He compiled the current temple history, wrote much of the calligraphy for recently donated votives, and planned to visit Taiwan as part of a tour sponsored by the first Taiwanese group to visit his temple. Like Su, patrons often repeated that they never sought out their positions and, if they had a salary, that they always reinvested it into the reconstruction fund.

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Nonetheless, relationships of patrons to local temples were often ambivalent, as if culture could not adequately screen or display their private intentions in a public medium. Perhaps this was because the state, as well as patrons themselves, often denied the status of culture to practices of folk belief, such as processions and sanguinary rituals of self-mortification. In their ongoing research, patrons discovered the substantial meaning of folk belief within terms available to the parastate, further identifying their role and responsibility with these definitions. For example, patrons of the reconstruction at Chihe Gong defined minjian xinyang as a type of expansive “cultural exchange” (wenhua jiaoliu) that transcended religious institutions and political ideologies. In keeping with this definition, they researched the temple’s relationships of shared incense, particularly to Taiwan, and engaged in cross-Straits cultural ventures. Their research and work rendered the meaning of folk belief and their position more substantial. Whether actively sought or a reluctant choice, patronage required negotiation between alter-publics initially calling for restoration and the internal demands of the local state. Patrons had to stress the voluntary aspect of their activities on the one hand and to develop networks within (and beyond) the local state on the other. Patrons endeavored to secure recognition for their publics through manipulation of bureaucratic categories within the state at local, provincial, and national levels. These shifts in bureaucratic assignment, however, were often conflict ridden. Many of the controversies reluctant patrons feared when invited to join temple committees emerged, albeit in a limited form, when the bureaucratic assignment shifted or became the object of scrutiny. Given the ongoing process of normalization, it could not be otherwise. This instability and interference gave further impetus to patron’s ongoing pedagogical work.

Enlisting Folklore During the 1980s, when Taichiongia Bio was still expropriated as a granary, a group of locals began to worship at a nearby structure. Overseas Chinese interests and the arrival of a few Taiwanese pilgrims encouraged this nascent reconstruction movement. Cheng, who did not return to service after the GPCR, nonetheless had extensive relationships within the bureaucracy and provided crucial contacts with county and city (Zhangzhou) level officials, thus smoothing the application process for the temple to be recognized on the county register of historic places. Such recognition was necessary for the temple restoration, which was completed in 1991.


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Recognition of Taichiongia Bio recast the temple in light of its cultural value. Partisans of the temple argued that its Ming period architecture and position in local folklore should secure its protection. As reconstruction progressed, Taichiongia Bio became the object of local historians and folklorists. Local historians collected records from local gazetteers and conducted archaeological surveys of the original layout of the temple and its transformation through various historical periods, while others recorded narratives bearing on the development of the Taichiongia cult, including its relationship to local agricultural and market structures before 1945. Expert knowledge authenticated the site as a gem of vernacular architecture and an important resource for local history. Cheng, the retired cadre who initially began the bureaucratic process of recognition, was not an intellectual and could not confer such value on the site. Thus, the temple committee also enlisted Mr. Lin, a local historian assigned to the committee responsible for reediting the county gazetteer. Like Cheng and Li, Lin had suffered persecution during the GPCR and subsequent years of iconoclastic violence. Mr. Lin composed couplets and wrote calligraphy for the temple, including a votive from Cheng. The calligraphy was only the final touch on a temple for which he had compiled most of the historical research, inviting archaeological and architectural experts to the county as consultants as well as traveling to libraries in Fuzhou and Beijing.7 Lin was aware, however, that his standing as a local intellectual could not ensure protection of the temple as a cultural resource. For the plaque bearing the formal temple name, Cihui Gong, he invited his own calligraphy teacher, a member of the National Academy of Art, to write the characters. Normally, Lin told me, three of his teacher’s characters would command a great sum, but his teacher donated the characters as a personal favor. Apart from demonstrating the cultural value of the temple, these favors performed in writing moved through the temple to consolidate informal relationships among intellectuals and others in para-state organizations. The temple afforded the exchange of essays, the occasion of conferences, and the donation of votive inscriptions. Intellectuals thus further elaborated culture, located between the state and the crowd, society and self, to expand the place of both alter-public and patron.

Stabilizing Culture Anxieties about the location and mission of culture informed disputes among patrons as they negotiated the bureaucratic assignment of the

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temple organizations in which they participated. In turn, these anxieties connected to patterns of interference that threatened to unseat the patron or make the subject position of patrons untenable. Narratives of a deity’s efficacious response and noisy-hot crowds both threaten to displace historical research and an ethics of self-cultivation related to the public practice of patronage. At Qingjiao East Temple, these interferences derived from competing visions of temples as economic resources. Should the patron be an educator or a professional manager? At issue in this dispute were the mission of culture and the status of the patron’s vocation. Those who opposed reassignment of East Temple as a scenic area considered the temple an historical site charged with disseminating a practice of moral cultivation through ritual, research, and publication. Other members of the group responsible for East Temple’s reconstruction desired to broaden the temple’s audience to include tourists. They also argued that administration of the site as a scenic area would improve management practices. One of the members of the latter group, Ms. Wang, had seen how domestic and international tourism had augmented one local monastery’s status. She hoped the same for East Temple. A woman in her mid-fifties who ran an independent business, Ms. Wang was closely associated with the monastery near Amoy University. Although active in the lay organization, she could never be more than a donor at the monastery. Professional Buddhist clergy manage the monastery and its attached institute of Buddhist studies. When I visited Wang at her house in downtown Amoy, her domestic altar included images of Shakyamuni Buddha, Kuanyin, Baosheng Dadi, and a Tibetan style Thanka. She defined herself as a Buddhist. In the early days of East Temple’s reconstruction, she sponsored a Buddhist monk at the site. He left following disagreements with other members of the temple committee. Later, when East Temple allied with the Quanzhou Taoist Culture Research Association through East Temple’s ties to Quanzhou’s Huaqiao Gong, she pressed for the use of both Buddhist and Taoist clergy for rituals at East Temple. Among patrons of East Temple and in contrast with patrons of other temples, Wang aligned herself most closely with Buddhist organizations and with an ethos of professional management. The latter reflects her success as a businessperson, but also has something to do with her gender. Unlike the retired bureaucrats and intellectuals chosen to serve as patrons, Wang could not participate in competitive drinking at banquets and other activities where male patrons informally invigorated their networks. Such behavior would break many norms for female comportment


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in Fujian. Wang recognized her vocation within a Buddhist lay organization in which women dominated, at least numerically. She realized this vocation gradually, first as a donor and later as a manager. In this regard, Wang resembles many members of the alter-publics who supported temple reconstruction. Because she was not assigned to the temple, her work was entirely voluntary. Like local women who owned and operated clothing stores, small restaurants, or beauty salons, Wang participated in minjian xinyang in ways that entangled public and domestic responsibilities. Her donations were part of a ritual repertoire with which she managed her household, kinship relations, and business. For this reason, she needed to rely on a professional ethos to stabilize her work as public service. Wang became acquainted with East Temple through the Buddhist lay organization. In 1984, a group of about four people from the group decided to go on a day trip to Kahbi (m: jiaomei), where they visited East Temple. Many years as a cowshed had ruined the structure, which was greatly in need of repair. Her group of visitors noticed some of the temple’s faded value in its stone carvings, especially a memorial of a late seventeenth-century reconstruction to which Southeast Asian donors contributed.8 Feeling pity for the ruined state of the structure, Wang decided to organize a group for the reconstruction. Most of this original group lived in Amoy. Wang was the leader of this group of donors, most of them middle-aged women. Like Wang, many of them had wide kinship ties reaching outside of China on which they relied for securing funds and official permission for the reconstruction. Their involvement contributed to the initial bureaucratic assignment of the site to the Overseas Chinese Office. Although initially assigned to this office, the sheer amount of donations at the site outstripped the capabilities of the office to account for activity at East Temple. The arrival of Taiwanese donors further drew the temple committee away from the Overseas Chinese Office. In response, the town government established another body to communicate with the temple. Neither Taiwanese pilgrims nor the temple committee recognized this bureaucratic agency, but Wang admitted that the temple committee had to discover a compromise. She was aware that this compromise would likely involve plans for tourist development, for which East Temple would apply to the city government. Serving as intermediary between the city government and Taiwanese donors could only augment her own position in relation to the town agency. As a patron, Wang cultivated relationships with members of the city and provincial academies of social science and with other temples

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seeking recognition. Aware that lack of recognition would appear as a failure of cultural policy (and hence place pressure on the local state) only if temples seeking recognition could show that cultural networks already enrolled them, Wang gave her associates in the Buddhist lay organization involved in temple reconstruction access to me, as well as to historians in the provincial academy. One of her associates had been working with a group on Amoy’s Gulang Islet to restore a Baosheng Dadi temple there. The locals had enlisted the financial support of Overseas Chinese donors, but much of the temple grounds had still not been reappropriated as of May 1993. The lag in reappropriation meant that blueprints for scenic development at the site gathered dust in the temple office. On a date close to Baosheng Dadi’s birthday, Wang’s associate engaged Buddhist nuns from an Amoy convent to perform a Buddhist ceremony. Wang attracted my attention to the ceremony, but added that a member of the provincial academy of social sciences would also meet her at the ferry to Gulang Islet. Knowing that I was interested in temple reconstruction in the Minnan region, she told me that if I attended the ceremony I could see the process of gaining support for reconstruction firsthand. As I photographed epigraphic information at the site and discussed a recent pilgrimage to East Temple with a few members of the committee, another of Wang’s associates photographed me at work. Only then did I realize what Wang had intended. Wang was honest. She took me aside as we took the ferry back to Amoy and said, “Of course, if you feel uncomfortable, they don’t have to use your photographs. But if they show the city government that an American researcher went to the site to investigate, it would greatly help their case for reappropriation. They have to show that the site is of value.” I consider Wang a consummate public figure. Bringing the public representation of scholarly interest to her associate’s project, she was able to use my own visibility as an index of the value of what was otherwise a local temple. As such, partisans of the temple could claim that the temple was a cultural property. Ironically, extension of networks of producing culture, such as those of American researchers and the provincial academy of social sciences, to the site indexes the failure of bureaucratic agencies to recognize culture. This failure grants to culture its positive status. It also underscores the voluntary quality of cultural organizations. Wang orchestrated these failures to realize culture at the boundary between bureaucracies and alter-publics. In her skillful manipulation of bureaucratic categories as a patron, was not Wang also projecting her own status across the screen of culture?


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Interference and Ambivalence Finding the place of folk belief was a source of ambivalence on the part of patrons and their publics, because minjian xinyang was not contained within the cultural sphere but complicated the possible definitions of culture. The case of Meizhou Mazu Ancestral Temple (zumiao) highlights patterns of interference among the publics and patrons of minjian xinyang. To describe these patterns of interference, we can examine how people close to the reconstruction of the Meizhou Zumiao employed narratives of efficacious response (lingyan) in their accounts of the temple. Narratives that connected the restoration of the temple with spectacular wealth, accounts of lingyan provided a language in which people could situate themselves in relationship to the motives of others engaged in reconstruction. Stories of the initial work to restore the temple vary but usually form narratives of efficacious response focused on the chair of the Meizhou Zumiao Committee. Meanwhile, official accounts (Chen Guoqiang 1990; Shi Youyi 1992) hardly mention the chair. They focus instead on the temple’s intellectual and politically connected patrons. For example, the nominal co-chair of the Zumiao Committee, a member of the Putian City People’s Political Consultative Conference (PPCC), has appeared as the official editor of many publications on Mazu, and he is also the author of prefaces to others, prerogatives of an official patron. An erstwhile member of the KMT who somehow survived the political movements of the last four decades, he served as a literate spokesman for the temple. The PPCC planned international scholarly conferences, produced publications, and sponsored planning for the temple complex. However, to a great extent, the promotional and scholarly functions of the PPCC keep distance from the temple organization in Meizhou. The research association associated with the PPCC is just another group that, like pilgrims, may use the temple structure for activities. Official publications thus avoid the details of popular involvement in the reconstruction of the Zumiao. Shi Youyi (1992: 25) mentions that the temple complex was damaged during the GPCR, giving only the briefest account of “believers [who] gave donations for temple reconstruction” in 1982, several years after the reconstruction movement began. Chen Guoqiang (1990: 75) notes that, other than two buildings within the temple complex, all buildings were destroyed in 1964, two years before the GPCR. Chen’s account of the initial movement to reconstruct the temple is also sparse. By 1990, the account of “local believers [who] donated” was a formula that authors could repeat word for word.

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If the brevity of these official accounts corresponds with the late involvement of bureaucratic agencies in temple reconstruction, temple reconstruction did stimulate an entire range of infrastructural improvements on the island. In this regard, lingyan suggest an institutional lack. Meizhou did not receive electricity until October 30, 1987, in preparation for celebrations of the 1000th anniversary of Mazu’s apotheosis on October 31. Meizhou Bao describes residents of the island as meeting the electrification of Meizhou with firecrackers and celebration. Meanwhile, officials at provincial, city, county, and district levels attending the electrification ceremony announced that laying cable across the bay would have a positive function in speeding up economic construction on the island, developing the tourist industry, and bringing forward the Great Enterprise of National Unification. (Yu Zhong 1987: 3)

By 1987, authors could translate the temple’s reconstruction into these public concerns. What a shift this was from Meizhou’s situation during the late 1970s when all but the military ignored the island.9 An owner of an artisanal store near the ferry landing on Meizhou related how interest in his island was sparked. On the morning in April 1993 when he told me this narrative, many Taiwanese fishing boats were moored in the harbor beneath the temple. He asked me whether I had noticed the boats and added, In 1981 or 1982, before Taiwanese were allowed to come over here, a Taiwanese fishing vessel was caught in a typhoon for two days, eventually making it to a safe port. Because he believed this to be Mazu’s ling, he remembered Meizhou as Mazu’s birthplace. So he came here to give thanks. Back then, there was no temple, at least not upon the mountain. Only a building further down. Later, many Taiwanese people began to come. No one expected it, really. Only then did the government take interest in Meizhou.

Narratives such as the artisanal store owner’s are common accounts of the moment when the goddess again demonstrated her efficacy. In contrast, anthropologist Chen Guoqiang (1990: 111) relies on a similar narrative to dismiss Taiwanese claims that the ancestral temple had been leveled during the GPCR and turns to an account of the opening of Meizhou to Taiwanese tourists. His employment of lingyan conforms to an official history of ten bad years followed by “reform and openness” (gaige kaifang). The artisanal store owner’s account does not reject this history, but offers an ironic complication. It confirms


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that the temple restoration followed popular demand. However, its attribution of a lag between initial reconstruction and official interest indicates a lack of agency on the part of institutions charged with reform. The narrative underscores that bureaucratic agencies with their sights on the temple administration may publicize the temple through books, the media, and even postage stamps; nevertheless, they remain at a distance. Indeed, members of the PPCC and Meizhou Mazu Research Committee commonly dismissed the temple as lacking value. One local historian and co-chair of the research committee admitted that he found it impossible to arrange research at Meizhou. Denying any association between the research committee and the temple, this historian said that the Zumiao was a place of worship alone. Neither images nor architectural structures at Meizhou had any value, just as the temple committee “had no culture.” For my research on connections between Chinese sites and the Mazu cult on Taiwan, he suggested that I visit Pinghai. A nearby site with an extant stone tablet erected by the Qing period admiral Shi Lang after the goddess revived a dry well, Pinghai encapsulated the meaning and mission of the Mazu cult in relics of the Qing conquest of Taiwan.10 As for Meizhou, he compared the Zumiao’s architecture to the “vulgar structures built by nouveaux riches peasants (baofa hu), the kind you can see throughout the countryside here.” Nouveau riche is perhaps not a completely accurate translation of baofa hu. The term suggests that the peasants in question became rich in an explosive or sudden fashion; there is a hint of violence and shock as well as tawdriness and vulgarity, a glint of naojiat. A component of lingyan narratives, this use of baofa hu disparaged the alter-public responsible for architecture at the Zumiao and expressed anxieties concerning the vulgar display of wealth in contemporary Minnan. Although baofa hu described those who had wealth but not culture, it employed the display of private wealth to indicate a lack of public commitment and problems of ownership. The historian pointed to recent developments at Meizhou to complain that the temple chair managed the temple as a private possession. He argued that the Zumiao should encourage the development of an intellectual public. Quoting Zhu Tianshun, professor in the Taiwan Research Institute of Amoy University, he told me that “Meizhou should be the center for international research on Mazu.” The historian would not be alone in his dismissal of Meizhou. Most of the members of the research association similarly found Meizhou lacking in value, which they defined in antiquarian or picturesque

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terms. When advising me on my fieldwork, they repeated that valuable information could not be found on Meizhou, and rarely in Putian. Instead, I should visit Fuzhou, Nanjing, and Beijing, places of intellectual pilgrimage where members of the research association sought out authoritative sources for their books and articles on the history of the Mazu cult (Jiang Weidan 1990; Lin Wenhao 1987). That baofa hu owned the Zumiao was a source of embarrassment and annoyance for this intellectual public. Indeed, spectacular wealth presented inappropriate objects, such as architectural structures and vernacular poetry, which interfered with the formation of culture as a positive object and historical resource. For alter-publics, lingyan traced the failure of bureaucratic institutions to notice cultural resources. Intellectual use of lingyan indicated a cultural lack among alter-publics, as well as institutional shortcomings that kept the state from appropriate recognition and management of historical sites. Both uses entangled culture with the specter of explosive wealth. Those engaged in ventures parallel to reconstruction related their own versions of lingyan, which placed into question the motives of those managing the temple. For example, an assistant manager of a tourism agency told me a lingyan narrative about reconstruction at an important Mazu site. Zheng, who was in his late twenties, had been the assigned guide for the first Taiwanese pilgrims to visit there. According to Zheng, Before the temple had been restored, the temple chairwoman had a dream in which Mazu appeared to her. Mazu said that if she would work to restore the temple, the goddess would bring many pilgrims, causing the temple to be great and the island to be famous. The next day, she went to the mountain where the temple had been to ask the goddess to verify her dream. She encountered other women from other villages on the island, all who had a similar dream. While they agreed that the temple should be rebuilt, no one knew where to get funding for such a venture. Nor did they know who should head the organization. When they threw divination blocks to decide, the goddess chose her. As her first act, she sold her own family’s store of rice and dedicated the money, so that initial capital for reconstruction would not be lacking. Because of her altruistic act, she became the head of the temple committee, and is now probably one of the wealthiest people on the island. They say that it must be Mazu’s efficacy.

Zheng noted that the origin of the current temple committee is necessarily mysterious, because the temple was forgotten until Tachia’s visit to this and other Mazu temples in Fujian made Taiwanese pilgrimage a


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public concern. As for the first groups to venture toward the site, said Zheng, hardly anyone really knew why they would go there, such was general ignorance of folk belief at that time. The temple chair, whom I will call Ms. Ma, does not appear as a heroic figure in the narrative. Zheng’s co-workers snickered as they parodied her dream as “dreaming of New Taiwan Dollars,” a statement with which Zheng would hardly disagree. The parody suggested intentions behind the chair’s altruism. However, Zheng and his colleagues understood that their business, concerned as it was with tourist infrastructures, was complicit with Ms. Ma’s interests. Their company was also dreaming of New Taiwan Dollars. If their private pursuit of wealth appears relatively disinterested, it is because Zheng’s colleagues can more easily convert their work into public terms, such as economic development or cultural interchange. Many residents of the town near the temple also employ the lingyan narrative to cast doubt on the chair’s motives, simultaneously deprecating their own lack of perspective. In the past, they had neither the time nor the knowledge to work for temple reconstruction, because they were fishermen. The lingyan as they told it stressed an ability to recognize opportunity. A merchant from the town gave me the following account: It’s really strange. Back then there was a fisherman; he was Taiwanese. His boat turned over and he floated in the ocean for two days. He had been in the ocean for two days floating around, but he didn’t die. Then he was saved by some of our fishermen. He asked them where he was, and when they said the name of the town, he knew that there was a Mazu Temple here. But because of the GPCR, it had long been ruined. He could only worship at the base of the mountain. He also donated some money to help build a small temple. Because Ms. Ma was around then, she got the idea of restoring the temple. She was “farsighted” [xiang qian kan: puns with “looking toward a profit”]. Later on that committee head, and there were also some other people, all found us to lend our help—I also went up there to work—in starting to build the temple. Not long after, more and more Taiwanese began coming.

In addition to pointing out Ma’s farsightedness at the expense, perhaps, of the townspeople, who had more of a claim on the temple, the narrative also underscores a cultural lack. Ma “could not tell A from B” (mu bushi ding) yet those with slightly more “culture” lacked a more important sensibility: an ability to gauge potential, a feel for the shifting patterns of engagement that would transform formerly inappropriate

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relationships and practices into cultural resources. Lingyan thus fills in the space between Ma’s cultural lack and her emergence as a cultural arbiter. When locals accuse Ma of being farsighted, however, they challenge her authority. Their complaints raise questions of ownership, via an understanding of management practices at Taiwanese temples, as in the following quote: Back then, we were all fishermen. That was a hard life; none of us had time to bother with it. She was a poor woman with nothing to do and nothing to lose, so we just let her do it. We didn’t know what would happen. There are some people from Taiwan who come over to donate to the temple. They’ve told me that they think it’s strange that they came two or three years ago and she was managing the temple; we return this year, and she’s still in charge. In Taiwan, they may change managers every few years. A temple belongs to all the people of a place. The temple belongs to us. . . . But now, it’s really her family’s private reserve.

An inappropriate patron, Ms. Ma presents too well the image of baofa hu. For example, a local schoolteacher contrasted Ma’s humble background with her current wealth. “Her family was so poor,” he said, “that she became interested in religious activities and began to devote herself to burning incense and worshipping buddhas.” Others in the town note that Ma was originally merely the temple caretaker and not a patron or manager in any real sense. With the arrival of Taiwanese pilgrims, she capitalized on her backwardness—her traditional hairstyle, clothing, and piety—to become the representative of the temple. Now her family’s wealth was substantial and visible. They maintained a large house with carpets. Her sons-in-law all carried mobile phones before the devices had become everyday objects. Many complained that her family “ate the bodhisattva’s rice.” Some were unsure whether to attribute the problem to inadequacies in public organization or to private venality. The lingyan narrative both describes Ma’s ability to capitalize on minjian xinyang becoming culture and highlights the figure of spectacular wealth that followed economic reform. To people in her town, Ma’s wealth represents the role of the temple in economic reform in Minnan and a corresponding shift in values. In these narratives, reform renders baofa hu and their miraculous wealth the norm rather than an exception. On the other hand, attention to Ma’s motives and relative lack of culture motivates a call for management of the temple as a public resource. Lingyan also inform Ma’s version of events. Her account comments on reform but avoids direct economic considerations and questions of


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culture. Both interfere with her narrative, however; it is interesting in this regard that Ma directed me to bureaucratic agencies and research associations, underscoring her lack of historical knowledge or other signs of culture: DJ: When did you begin your work on the temple? MA: I think it was between 1974 and 1976. We have been working on restoring the temple for 19 years or so. I started at that time, and since then have continually helped Mazu restore [her temple]. Before, during the GPCR, the temple was torn down. On the mountain was no temple nor was there a Mazu [image]. At that time we would stick incense into the mountain rocks here and there at the base of the mountain. There wasn’t even a road to take up here. Everything had been ruined. Trees had sprouted all over. First some of us came up onto the mountain and began to fell trees, building a small house. We asked the locals to come and burn incense there, telling them Niangma [i.e., Mazu] would show her efficacy. Because Niangma protected them, day after day, people—that is the 100 surnames—they would come to worship. We used the oil and incense money we collected to buy stones and build a small temple structure. That was probably in 1983. As we built, the incense fires also began to flourish. Not only were we locals worshipping Mazu; also there were a few Overseas Compatriots—Malaysian, Indonesian—Overseas Chinese began to come. So we could rebuild in 1985. In 1987, some Taiwanese began coming.

Ma acknowledged the role of bureaucratic agencies in the temple’s management and planning, adding that much of the information concerning the temple’s affairs was in the scenic district administration office overseeing the temple, or at the city PPCC. Likewise, the city PPCC had organized a research association that compiled information on history and local customs. She instructed me to visit these offices, because they knew what was valuable for scholars. She directed me to resume my work with the cultured, the public to which I obviously belonged. Later in the same interview, an activist on the local Women’s Association borrowed the lingyan narrative to frame Ma’s remarks, making Ma the subject of a contemporary fable. The activist employed lingyan as a common language linking cultural and religious publics, specifying the substantial meaning of minjian xinyang across them. I had asked Ma about the situation when she embarked on the reconstruction work and how she had organized locals for the task. Ma replied that there was a spirit medium in the countryside who instructed people to reconstruct the temple. “S/he represented Mazu to say that the temple

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must be reconstructed. So, we went ahead. The public, because they had belief, came to work on reconstruction. At that time, officials were not involved.” Ma’s friend expanded on her remarks. People in the village believed in Mazu very much. They wanted to follow the medium’s advice, but given the risks, no one was willing to take responsibility for organizing a reconstruction committee. Ma stepped in: NHH: They lacked a head. So Comrade Ma volunteered. She has done it completely as her duty. And because at the time the government had not yet liberalized its regulations, she began her work under threat to her life. At that time she could only work secretly. It was incredibly difficult, but she did it all for the sake of Mazu. At that time the government called Mazu superstition, but we folk/people . . . we wanted to promote her charitable and world rescuing spirit. Moreover, at that time we would think of the many believers in Mazu on Taiwan. We knew that rebuilding had the real meaning of unifying the Ancestral Nation. When our palanquins and musicians went out on procession, some people would say that it was superstitious. But they were wrong. We are commemorating and propagating the spirit of a great person, also commemorating the meaning of belief for the nation and for Overseas Compatriots. The national government has not invested a single cent to restore this mountain to a beautifully formed temple complex; all of this has been the constant labor of Comrade Ma for 20 years. She did it all for the sake of Mazu, and in this way people from the 5 continents and the 4 seas have all come . . . to commemorate and research Mazu: DJ: [laughs] Including someone from the “outer oceans” like myself . . . . NHH: Right. You should know that the temple is beneficial to business and economy; it is also meaningful for cultural exchange. Because Mazu—those of us who work on women’s issues understand this —had a save-the-poor and hardworking spirit, thus on the level of cultural exchange, propagating Mazu culture is beneficial. Elder Sister Ma concentrated on the affairs of the temple for 20 years, working diligently, so the public all respects her very much. She has had a great influence on development. . . . Sister Ma must often contact overseas or Taiwanese compatriots, she works, works very hard; moreover, she does it completely as a volunteer. So now there are some people who say that Elder Sister is not only the descendent of Mazu, she is also one of her dharma bodies [or avatar, fashen]. MA: The promotional work we have done the past few years has attracted many Taiwanese Compatriots to build new temple buildings. They share images, taking them back to Taiwan; the temples become larger


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and more numerous. Presenting incense groups come, all telling us how they believe deeply in Mazu. Their donations are completely out of gratitude and their hearts’ desire. Of course, we depended upon their assistance in order to restore the temple. The earliest groups came from Taipei, later coming from every location. Our Mazu, in Japan is also present; Mazu transcends nations.

In the above conversation, Ma talked of Mazu transcending nations and the involvement of overseas donors in temple reconstruction. But her conception of the public responsible for restoring the temple, from its outset to the present condition in which the “temples become larger and more numerous,” was under the sign of Mazu’s efficacy. Her entire narrative was one of efficacious response, which related how, from a small group who burned incense, good fortune spread contagiously to all the 100 surnames of the town and its immediate environs, and from there how flourishing incense fires carried good fortune to worshippers of Mazu overseas. Networks of shared incense form Ma’s public. Meanwhile, Ma’s friend created a fable from Comrade Ma’s experience: The efforts of a woman who may be one of Mazu’s “dharma bodies” causes a desolate town to bloom as a flourishing scenic site. Interestingly, the Women’s Association chair changes her reference to Ma through the course of her remarks, first calling the temple committee chair “Comrade Ma” (Ma Tongzhi), then switching to “Elder Sister Ma” (Ma Dajie). This shift appears as the activist attributes an appropriate understanding of Mazu as a diligent defender of the poor to “work on women’s issues.” Later, when the activist claims that Ma is one of Mazu’s “dharma bodies,” she omits the surname and calls Ma “Dajie” with no surname marker. In this fashion, the activist indicates that Ma is, in spite of appearances, an appropriate patron. In the activist’s account, Ma brought a set of skills marked as feminine to the work of reconstruction. Although stigmatized as an economically marginal woman living on an undeveloped island, Ma transformed the markers of her marginality—her hairstyle, veneration of Mazu, and thrift—into properties of a cultural arbiter. In doing so, she came to embody folk belief. The claim that she is one of Mazu’s dharma bodies is intelligible in this sense. Although her shifting reference to Ma as “Dajie” complicates her remarks, we recognize the Women’s Association activist’s identification of Ma with Mazu as metaphorical. Her praise for Ma may be well deserved, but she placed Ma’s efforts into the context of bureaucratic

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networks through which the temple was recognized. Ma’s friend translated Ma’s religious public into the terms of officially sanctioned public discourses of economic development, capturing the sentiments of Overseas Compatriots and the Great Enterprise of National Unification. A performance for the foreign ethnographer, the activist’s translation of Ma’s remarks still reveals an alter-public not captured in official discourses: reference to “Dajie” and the failure of bureaucratic institutions to recognize values obvious to “we who work on women’s issues.” Similarly, Be Family Alley Chihe Gong described a public at two disparate levels. The first were the group of calligraphers and other patrons who gave me a reception complete with a small banquet, a screening of videotapes of Taiwanese pilgrims to the site, and firecrackers to send me off. Some indication of the network that composed this public was evident from votives at Chihe Gong. The temple shared its reception room with Behang’s Senior Citizens’ Association and the local family planning committee. The shared space suggested not only negotiations with the local state but also that both the elderly and women of reproductive age were among the temple’s constituents. A number of votives were distributed along the reception room’s walls. A large banner, inscribed with the words “Min-Tai [Share a] Single Source” (min tai tong yuan), hung above other votives, one from a local businessman who owned a karaoke, others from an elementary school, the Senior Citizens’ Association, the Overseas Chinese Office, and as unlikely a source as a local People’s Liberation Army unit. We visited the karaoke after our banquet. The second public was a group of locals whom patrons criticized as having “no cultural level” (meiyou wenhua shuiping), meaning that they lacked formal education. This group had formed an alternate temple organization on the outskirts of Behang, which had begun to attract Taiwanese pilgrims. Some of the members of this second public had previously initiated the reconstruction of Chihe Gong. Ideally, lingyan forms a common language in which patrons can engage and transform alter-publics. When patrons employ lingyan in a metaphorical fashion, they also obviate the pragmatic conditions in which patronage networks have formed. My associates at Chihe Gong, for example, talked of lingyan as making evident formerly submerged connections to Taiwan, paralleling yet disguising their own use of the temple organization to cultivate relationships to Taiwanese businessmen and scholars. Minjian xinyang was important because it transcended religious and ideological barriers that blocked these relationships. During an informal interview at the temple, an official on


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the Overseas Chinese Office related that although folk belief had been condemned through the 1970s, Ongia and other deities now showed their efficacy. They provided “one way to clear up misunderstandings and apprehensions built up [between Taiwan and Minnan] over 90 years of separation.” The official added that “for almost two decades, Ti Ong, one of Taiwan’s most intimate connections to Tongan, Fujian, Tang Mountain [i.e., China] was nearly obliterated. But now, people are beginning to appreciate that Ti Ong does provide a common ground.” It would be facile merely to point out the nationalist thrust of this rhetoric. The official and his cohort used lingyan metaphorically, but nationalist rhetoric is also subject to translation in the above remarks. In other words, these statements have a pragmatic import beyond the direct reference of their claims. More than once patrons told me that my work was meaningful because through research on folk belief I was aiding the Great Enterprise of National Unification, a cause that I did not endorse. In these occasions, I would also rely on the language of lingyan to bracket out this set of ends. Indeed, my associates hoped not for assent to a nationalist telos but for a response that could underscore the public nature of my research, its availability to their concerns. At least, I needed to suggest some form of collaboration, some display of human sentiment that could ground a common practice. By underscoring the personal, pragmatic import of nationalist rhetoric apart from its ends so that it also becomes subject to translation, I am not suggesting that patrons are cynical. Rather, I wish to suggest the role of nationalist rhetoric in opening space for culture in contemporary Minnan. Through unification rhetoric, temples served as a node for patrons’ pursuits, many of which include dealings in the cross-Straits art trade, business ventures, or relationships of human sentiment with Taiwanese associates. The temple allowed them to expand their public, as the many bottles of cognac I carried across the Straits allowed a patron of one Ongia temple near Amoy to deepen relationships of gift and debt with the Taiwanese man who introduced him to me. Lingyan tends to obviate the work of the messenger. But what effect does it have on patrons, whose work has to appear both voluntary and directed at real objects? The reality of minjian xinyang and its metaphors is certainly a major source of patrons’ ambivalence toward alter-publics. In talk of shared images and incense ash as ends in themselves, as in Ma’s remarks, practitioners claim lingyan but also make the work of lingyan too visible, increasing the distance that the

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metaphor must carry minjian xinyang in order to reach its substantial meaning. That is why Ma’s friend translated her remarks to a safely cultural idiom. Another source of ambivalence for newly formed temple organizations was that alter-publics and patrons were often explicitly gendered. Of the many temples that I visited in Minnan, very few had female patrons, even though temple organizations relied primarily on women’s labor. Senior women generally cared for temple structures and advised worshippers, prepared food for offerings and banquets, organized pilgrimages, and gathered donations. In fact, women formed the core membership of the emerging alter-publics who had initiated reconstruction. In this regard, temple reconstructions in Minnan confirm that in China “women consistently take leading roles in the informal sector, pushing at the boundaries of local association” (Weller 1999: 140). In contrast with this informal public role, very few women held formal positions on temple committees. The dominance of male patronage may reflect gender ideologies that restrict public and visible ritual roles, such as the Master of the Censer, to men. Another important factor was the shift in temple organizations that occurred as the state attempted to administer minjian xinyang. Formal recognition of temple organizations corresponded with the emergence of male patrons, many invited to leadership roles by the local state. Women who did serve as patrons cultivated informal sources of power to their advantage. At her temple, Ms. Ma accepted a member of the city PPCC as co-chair and invited him to stand as officiant at major rituals. In her work with the temple, she succeeded in transforming her lack of culture into signs of culture. Finally, her sons-in-law could act as spokespersons for the temple in situations, such as banquets, where she could not. Ms. Wang relied on Buddhist lay organizations, as have many women in Taiwan and China (Weller 2004: 94–95), to expand her leadership. Ma and Wang were exceptions, however. Although women’s ritual work figured in representations of the public, women did not often become public figures. I might have seen a differently configured temple organization had I visited Chihe Gong’s rival temple, but I never went there for research. I realized that I was too embedded in networks of culture, too constructed by my relationships with Chihe Gong and its patrons. The ambivalence of Chihe Gong’s patrons toward their fragmented constituency is neither unique nor restricted to intellectuals, for the production of a private realm mediated through minjian xinyang is a work that meets interference from the public figures that preceded it, in which


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temples could be expropriated to serve the people. Moreover, translation of the interlocal networks of minjian xinyang into the terms of national unification, literary community, and new forms of consumption such as tourism required complicity on the part of a dispersed set of actors, many of them Taiwanese. I will approach these problems of translation and complicity in the next three chapters, as I look more closely at the mutual production of administrative organs intended to manage minjian xinyang and the enjoying and believing subjects the work of these institutions would make visible.


4 Objects and Institutions

A Shift in Position Temple committees take pains to maintain historic structures, but they are no antiquarians; they commonly expand temple structures and install new deities. I was looking at such a building project at a temple in Nan’an County when a worker there reminded me that temple reconstructions transform more than architecture. “You see,” he said, “we are building a Three Treasures Hall so we can invite a monk. When that happens, we will have constitutional protection.” Talk of constitutional protection surprised me. Later, I discovered that the worker aligned with a group within the temple management that wanted to change the temple’s bureaucratic assignment. The temple reported to the Quanzhou Tourism Bureau. His colleagues wished for connections to the National Buddhist Association and the Quanzhou Religious Affairs Bureau, relationships that they considered safer. Throughout Minnan, bureaucratic assignment shifted and patrons changed as organizations attempted to achieve provincial or national recognition of temple structures as important historical sites, research organizations, or tourist resources. But bureaucratic assignment was uneven and continued to provoke argument. Minjian xinyang did not first present itself as a resource, but as a problem. Should minjian xinyang be thought of mainly in terms of folklore? Should the structures be valued in terms of the contributions temple epigraphy or architecture make in local social history? Or did folk belief constitute a subset of religious Taoism?

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Each of these questions produced a novel set of networks in which some (and not all) ritual practices could become coherent as “minjian xinyang.” Let’s pause, however, before we attribute minjian xinyang status as a single object. Minjian xinyang as folklore not only held together and clarified a different set of meanings than minjian xinyang as Taoism, it also brought together different practices. It composed a differently configured collectivity. To highlight that these different collectivities were neither mere perspectives on one object nor completely different objects, I refer to minjian xinyang as folklore versus minjian xinyang as Taoism as “object positions.” I use this possibly unfamiliar term from actor network theory to call attention to a problem. Attempts to administer temple reconstruction produced new collectivities of some bureaucratic agents, temple structures, ritual practices, and materials. Object positions refer both to the discursive framing of these collectivities in descriptions and to the material realization of these collectivities, often as part of a larger assemblage that coordinates (or disposes) them. For example, “Meizhou Mazu” might coordinate cross-Straits peace, tourism, pilgrims, and incense ash; but each of these positions, differently realized, might otherwise be distinct or uncoordinated. The novel disposition of these object positions in Minnan during the late 1980s and early 1990s, literally built into temple structures, demands that we follow John Law’s (2002: 14) lead and adopt the method of a naïve observer who “does not start out with an idea of what it is . . . [and] will learn that it is many and quite different things.” Realization of minjian xinyang in the singular required work. Those who employed the term, generally people engaged in administering minjian xinyang and not those whose practices were enrolled in it, needed to coordinate several object positions into one coherent object as they did the work of administration (see Thevenot 2002, Law 2002: 32–33). I examine three different attempts at coordination below. Each caused minjian xinyang to appear as a legitimate field of public activity and concern. The first composed minjian xinyang as a cultural patrimony that should be managed through the model of museum administration. The second described minjian xinyang as a set of religious practices that required standardization to function adequately. The third produced minjian xinyang as a resource for tourism. Although these positions differently defined minjian xinyang, they shared a single problematic: each worked to anchor the diffuse objects of postsocialist China and to situate gaige kaifang, reform and openness, as a normal historical development. Although arrival of Taiwanese pilgrims gave minjian

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xinyang a new disposition, those administering minjian xinyang claimed that it served now, as always, as a means for ethnic identification, as a set of predestined ties among people and places, and a force for consolidation. This vital force toward integration across the Straits seemed an answer to the public crises that marked the advent of gaige kaifang and the elder statesman Deng Shaoping’s 1992 call for greater daring in the work of opening China. In each of the three cases, coordination relied on elements of the material culture of bureaucracy as well as pilgrimage. Each also established the reality of minjian xinyang in its act of organizing an administrative structure and a public. I will return to this performative quality of statements about minjian xinyang as I examine the work of coordination. First, let us set the background in which temple reconstructions began in Minnan during the late 1970s.

State and Para-state Through the first two decades of reform, the emergence of transnational pilgrimage networks linking Minnan to Overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia and Taiwan catalyzed the formation of institutions to manage pilgrimages and associated ritual practices and spaces. Eventually, these institutions, practices, and spaces would all belong to minjian xinyang. The institutions were often dual organizations that paired popular (minjian) management committees with bureaucratic units charged with guidance (zhidao) and coordination (xietiao). As for the management committees, these organizations were never fully incorporated within the local state; in fact, members of the bureaucratic units guiding them always pointed out their minjian status. To take one example, the founding temple of the Guangze Zun Wang cult, Fengshan Si, sits on a summit not far from Shishan, a small market town in Nan’an County. Unlike the county seat, which in 1992 had recently been demolished and rebuilt with new white-tile multistory buildings, the past still clung to Shishan in its decaying streets of early republican period and socialist architecture. On a few pillars supporting the covered pedestrian walkways downtown, in spite of the bright facades and electric light displays that announced an entrepreneurial ethos sweeping through town, one could still make out Maoist couplets stenciled there almost 30 years before. The town boasted at least one karaoke dance hall, an institution that indicated engagement with popular culture and disposable income, at least among some residents. Locals

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pointed out the motorcycles buzzing through the township as one sign of the town’s recent prosperity. They also claimed that permits to rebuild Shishan were pending in the county construction bureau. Perhaps whitetile high-rises were on the way. The prosperity that overcame Shishan as well as many townships in Nan’an and Jinjiang counties during the late 1980s was due in part to business connections extending to Taiwan and Southeast Asia. In the early 1990s, an imagination of Greater Minnan, including Taiwan and Overseas Chinese communities, was present in Taiwanese-style iced-tea bars, the popularity of Taiwanese popular music, and particularly the growth of pilgrimage networks across Southeast Fujian. One may have expected temple reconstruction to have followed an efflorescence of economic relations across the Taiwan Straits and the South China Sea. In fact, temple reconstruction at Shishan preceded the impact of economic reform in the region. Kinship connections promoted the initial push for temple reconstruction in December 1977 (Shishan: 4). In the mid-1970s, revolutionary committees at the provincial, county, and city level began to reorganize Overseas Chinese Affairs offices and hospitality centers, which had been disbanded in the mid- to late 1960s (see Guo and Jiang 1992: 228–238). The dates in which Overseas Chinese Affairs offices reorganized correspond with the rehabilitation of historical structures. In 1978, for example, the Quanzhou City government engaged in a survey of historical structures and began to reassert control over those previously scheduled as antiquities preservation units. Overseas Chinese offices were implicated in more than the normalization of visits and investment but considered their role as part of the construction of socialist spiritual civilization (Guo and Jiang 1992: 230). In their work, Overseas Chinese Affairs offices hastened the process of historical reconstruction as part of this mission. To return to Shishan, in December 1977, the newly formed Overseas Chinese Office began to suggest reconstruction of Fengshan Si. Meanwhile, Overseas Chinese presented not a unified bloc but competed for control of the reconstruction. Similar struggles marked temple reconstructions throughout Minnan. Apart from engaging in competition, Overseas Chinese groups acted as patrons, enlisting the support of the commune head and provincial United Front Bureau to further a reconstruction their local kin could not pursue publicly. Overseas Chinese interest in the site began the process of creating minjian xinyng and thus new positions that pilgrimage sites could occupy. No longer merely a site of feudal superstition (fengjian mixin), Fengshan would become the focus of root searching, a symbol of popular interchange,


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an important scenic area, and a document of Overseas Chinese history. Officially, Overseas Chinese donors and the local state rehabilitated the temple as a scenic site.1 During the early 1970s, the Fengshan Temple grounds were expropriated for sweet potato gardens. Some who had witnessed the destruction of the temple continued to fear Guangze Zun Wang’s retribution. Without Overseas Chinese involvement, claimed many people with whom I discussed reconstruction, none would have dared to worship openly, much less suggest reconstruction. They continued to plant sweet potatoes and to hope that the deity, whom they called SiaN Ong, would understand their predicament. Because the site had become agriculturally productive land, however, Overseas Chinese suggestions to reconstruct the site entered a field where there were competing claims to Fengshan. Similarly, reconstruction of other temple sites in Quanzhou combined popular and official acts of reappropriation and thus required the local state to adjudicate several competing claims. The landscape of urban Quanzhou and, to a lesser extent, Amoy was punctuated with former temples now serving as factories, neighborhood committee offices, and schools (Quanzhou Taoist 1990; Lin Shengli 1992). In the early 1980s, four factories and one elementary school occupied the Tongwei Guanyue Temple (Guandi Miao), which had been a major pilgrimage site. The Quanzhou Tongwei Guanyue Temple Gazetteer describes the impulse toward reappropriation as follows: The three temple buildings were all but demolished, and antiquities scattered. Even so, believers arrived without cease to light incense and kowtow outside the temple doors, often causing traffic obstructions. In order to implement National Freedom of Religion Policies, the then Quanzhou City Government [now the Licheng district government] decided that before the Spring Festival of 1983, the temple must be reopened. (Zheng Guodong 1991: 8–9)

In the above passage, crowds form a tableau of public demand for restoration but also an administrative problem: the rational allocation of public space. With the claim that the crowds caused traffic obstructions, the gazetteer suggests that the role of policy was not merely to “open,” to provide freedoms demanded by a developing public, but to contain the crowds. Reopening the temple gives the crowd closure. This closure is one of a contained sphere in which ritual practices are both legitimate and the focus of state policy. It is a sphere in which minjian xinyang generates problems (for example, how to coordinate popular ritual and

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traffic safety) and from which it also serves as a source of value. Building this sphere was the work of composing minjian xinyang. In 1992, it was nearly possible upon an observation of temples in their second phases of reconstruction to see the years between 1966 and 1978 as an unfortunate anomaly. Yet the composition of para-state organizations was a source of conflict as well as collaboration within the local state. Not long after I met with him, one member of the Fengshan Scenic Area Management Committee told me not to look at the size of Shishan and assume that politics, or anything else, was simple there. I had earlier stumbled onto the complexity of bureaucratic and patronage relationships surrounding Fengshan Si’s reconstruction. On one trip to Shishan, the young member of the town office assigned to my case planned to introduce me to the secretary of the Overseas Chinese Office, who retained formal ties to the temple as the head of a reconstruction and donorship committee that was founded in early 1979 following approval from the provincial United Front Office. When I told the secretary about my research, he bluntly replied, “I am no longer clear about the situation up there.” He left after saying, too politely, that I could go by his office “anytime.” To understand the secretary’s behavior, one member of the Fengshan Scenic Area Management Committee would later tell me I needed to understand the early organization of the Reconstruction Committee. Fearing potential movements, members of the Reconstruction Committee tried to develop an extensive power base. Each village in Shishan Township was represented on the committee by a single commissioner who maintained contact with overseas relatives and local officials. The nominal chair of the committee was one of the secretary’s relatives, who had recently returned from Indonesia. The committee did acquire provincial level clearance to restore the temple as a scenic area, but the committee did little but perform a groundbreaking ceremony in November 1980. My associates in the field would agree on little else; but they did concur that the Reconstruction Committee succumbed to internal, meaning bureaucratic, pressures. Within the commune government, the Overseas Chinese Office, as a newly reconfigured office with limited jurisdiction, was thwarted by the many disputes over the legitimacy of restoring what everyone knew was a temple, even if it were officially designated a scenic site. Additionally, contractors, planners, and provincial level officials all had their own opinions concerning the structure. 2 Nothing, from the width of a road to the form of the structure, could be taken for granted.


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In May 1981, in response to a report from within the Overseas Chinese Office, related units (youguan danwei) in the commune government discussed management problems with the provincial United Front liaison and the commune’s party secretary. A common term in Chinese bureaucratic discourse, related units refers to unspecified government agencies belonging to intersecting domains. In this case, the related units included the commune United Front Office, cultural bureau, Planning Board, Tourism Department, and Historical Association, many of which had only been recently reorganized at the time of the 1981 meeting. In a project such as the restoration of Fengshan Si as a scenic site, guidance of related units produces the internal objectivity of a project as a bureaucratic problem and the project’s external objectivity as an autonomous institution guarding the public interest in adequate space for leisure activities. Here it is useful to consider that guan, which I have translated as “related” in this context, is etymologically related to terms having to do with the closure of gates and windows: a point of connection is also a point of closure. Although each unit had a relationship to the reconstruction project, the terms of relation are opinions reflected within single (perhaps even monadic) units. Guiding the project thus involves a calculation of possibilities suggested by each unit; however, the project remains relatively closed to the actual control of any given unit, or all of them. Such a process of weighing opinions led to the decision to assign seven people to work as managers in an administrative department to be recognized following the meeting in 1981. Management of Fengshan Si became fully public as the sole responsibility of a department distinct, but inseparable, from related units acting as advisors in planning and administration of the site, each with their own relationship to the project: a para-state organization. The work of creating para-state organizations had a performative character that established the reality of minjian xinyang as an object of management as it configured the institutions of management themselves. Guandi Miao, whose crowds of worshippers obstructed traffic, demonstrates the production of the minjian, or popular, realm through bureaucratic oversight. Its application for reconstruction, submitted four years after initial reorganization, finds the minjian as it appears through administrative lacunae. The temple was initially managed through the United Front Bureau, which guided the formation of the temple’s management committee. In 1993, the Quanzhou City Taoist Culture Research Association (TCRA) indirectly administered Guandi Miao, Fumei Gong,

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and Huaqiao Gong from its offices in the rear court of Guandi Miao.3 Each temple had a popular management committee responsible for the everyday management of the temple. This dual organization was amenable to expansion, and the research of the TCRA led to reappropriation and reconstruction of more temples, particularly those associated with the city’s neighborhood system (Quanzhou Taojiao Yanjiu Hui 1990; Wang Mingming 1995). Accounts of temple reconstruction published by the TCRA present a harmonious, quasi-organic development of popular demand into a public institution through the judicious extension of state religious policy. In planning documents for Guandi Miao, particularly the statement of purpose in the management committee’s application to restore the site, the description of Guandi Miao begins to suggest the contours of the related units that would give pilgrim crowds both public legitimacy and closure. As in our discussion of patronage in the last chapter, these descriptions also show the concentration of local notables acting through the temple as a cultural sphere, locating patrons and publics in reciprocal relationships across the screen of culture. To demonstrate public demand for reconstruction, the statement of purpose relies heavily on images not of the local crowds who obstructed traffic, but of Overseas Chinese, residents of Hong Kong, and Taiwanese people, known as “Three [types of] Compatriots” in official language. It also suggests compromise among a variety of units, each with their own ideas on how the temple should function: Whereas Quanzhou Tongwei Guanyue Miao, as recorded in the Quanzhou Prefectural Gazetter, was first built before the Tang dynasty, already having several hundred years of history; Whereas it is one of the most complete ancient Taoist temples in the Licheng district, of great fame overseas; Whereas it was damaged during the “Cultural Revolution,” all three buildings being ruined; Whereas due to the vigorous demands of Overseas Compatriots, and in order to implement the Party’s Freedom of Religion Policy, it has been rehabilitated by comrades of the previous Quanzhou City Party Committee; and Whereas presently two (Sanyi Miao and Sacred Parents’ Gong) of the structures are sadly in a state of disrepair; in order to preserve historical relics, secure [the hearts of ] the “Three Compatriots,” promote scholarly activity on Taoism, in order to serve the development of the tourist industry, this committee invites all related parties to discuss the use of independent funding to undertake restoration of Sanyi Miao and Sacred Parents’ Gong, and thus asks for [all related parties] to offer permission. (Quanzhou Guanyue Miao Guanli Weiyuan Hui 1987)


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Interestingly, the statement of purpose engages the agency of related units in projects for which temple reconstruction is but one component. Temple reconstruction is embedded in the normalization of new forms of consumption (such as tourism), the formation of truth-producing practices (scholarly research), and the ethical implications of such truths (securing the Three Compatriots as Chinese subjects). Nonetheless, the application is an odd document. Hidden in the TCRA archives, it was composed only after the Guandi Miao Management Committee had calculated the opinions of related units; success of the application was not in question. Between initial attempts to organize in 1983 and the application remain four years of empty records. During those years, the management committee worked closely with the city to relocate businesses occupying the structure and solicited funds for reconstruction. None of the documents associated with this work remain in the TCRA archives. The appearance of this document in the TCRA archives suggests that it is constitutive. Yet, we might ask, constitutive of what? The document does not actually act to petition for reconstruction. In 1983, the former city government had assigned retired officials to reorganize the temple committee for the purpose of reconstruction and had begun restoration work through administrative fiat. The application does not actually petition for permission to reconstruct Guandi Miao but serves as a speech act that establishes the TCRA and management committee as voluntary organizations. It is a performative that coordinates the set of object positions for Guandi Miao. The temple was a site of international exchange; an historical structure whose reconstruction needs to be balanced with the needs of contemporary urban dwellers for cultural activities, education, and communications; an example of the judicious application of freedom of religion policies; and an example of local architectural style. The document also specifies the relative responsibility of the local state (related units) and voluntary organizations to this newly legitimate public resource. Coordination of object positions in the application document thus sets in motion a variety of agents, who each find the temple an “obligatory passage point” (Callon 1986) to realize their own projects of gaige kaifang. Nonetheless, the formation of many of these para-state organizations was contingent on earlier conditions of appropriation and subsequent bureaucratic assignment during the reform period, as evident in the case of Quanzhou Tianfei Gong. Officially, Tianfei Gong was the Tianfei Temple Museum of Minnan-Taiwan Relations. The museum administration committee, a national antiquities preservation unit, managed the

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site. Throughout restoration, the city cultural bureau, which assigned members of the museum administration committee, maintained a guiding role. Meanwhile, the temple management and restoration committee was a voluntary organization with ties of shared incense with a number of Taiwanese temples, Fengshan Si, and another Mazu site on the outskirts of the city, as well as close informal relationships with the nearby temple to Siao Ongia, Fumei Gong. As such, Tianfei Gong, like other temples, was divided between an administrative unit on the periphery of the state and a popular organization, allowing the bureaucracy and an alter-public of local worshippers to operate in tandem. A member of the museum administration explained to me that the temple was intended for exclusive use as a museum to provide historical information for Taiwanese visitors and locals on Quanzhou’s relationship to the “precious isle,” Taiwan. Only later, he claimed, to meet the demands of Taiwanese tourists, were images installed and the popular committee formed. When I first visited Quanzhou Tianfei Gong in September 1992, members of the museum administration explained the relationship between museum and temple as a self-explanatory one. Because Tianfei Gong was instrumental in the settlement of Taiwan, especially Lukang, the temple was a sensible choice for a museum. The centerpiece of the museum exhibits is an iron bell (ca. 1837) cast by the Lukang Merchant Guild, whose hall was formerly in the neighborhood just south of the temple. Professor Huang Bingyan, then the head of the museum administration, distinguished the temple committee, a popular organization, from the museum administration while admitting that the two organizations shared members. The state was atheist and certainly would not employ religious practice in its National Unification Policy. A younger member of the museum administration contrasted Quanzhou Tianfei Gong to the ancestral temple of Mazu at Meizhou. According to this administrator, who was trained in antiquities law, activity at Meizhou was a matter of popular interchange. In contrast, his unit was a nationally recognized cultural organization, a public rather than a popular institution. Although the museum was the object of considerable planning at the local and national level, the Meizhou temple was “stirred up by the people” (minjian zai nao). The dual organization of Tianfei Gong thus suggests a set of complicated relationships where minjian xinyang is external to, yet synchronized with, state projects of managing history.4 Members of the popular reconstruction committee, meanwhile, stressed that everyone in Quanzhou holds great affection for Mazu.


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A group of local worshippers crowded the temple on mornings of full and new moons. Some members of the restoration committee claimed that even those on the museum administration had desired to install an image and to engage in processions; however, designation of the temple as a museum as well as public security regulations obstructed these plans. The arrival of Taiwanese pilgrims in 1988, four years after the museum was launched, corresponds with the settling of the first image in the structure since the destruction of the Ming period image in 1967. The pilgrims, the image, and the management committee date to the same year. Only with the arrival of the pilgrims could the management committee form as a popular temple committee rather than a unit attached to the city cultural bureau. Nonetheless, pilgrim crowds served as yet another museum exhibit, as we will see in the next section.

Three Object Positions As para-state organizations formed, they disputed the implications of minjian xinyang. Over the course of my fieldwork, I became complicit with their production of knowledge about minjian xinyang and attempts to interpret this knowledge. Members of research organizations and related units invited me to participate at conferences, write articles for publication, and appear in televised documentaries. In addition to the guiding role of tourism bureaus, United Front offices, scenic area management committees, and Overseas Chinese Affairs offices, these venues were ones in which the object positions of minjain xinyang proliferated and a variety of actors attempted to give minjian xinyang closure. Problems generated though minjian xinyang included the existence of alter-publics that required education, the need to clarify matters of historical precedence, the ongoing lack of official recognition of minjian xinyang as religion, and the development of tourist infrastructures. Each problem opened an avenue for research or management, and through them, minjian xinyang appeared as a positive object. The practices that museum administrations, research organizations, and tourism bureaus would describe as minjian xinyang held such attraction not only because they could ground contemporary economic realities in a history of expansion and openness. They were also practices that, having been stirred up among the populace, gave vitality to a public realm apart from the local state but in need of guidance (Anagnost 1987). In their statements about folk belief, proponents of

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each position commonly employed the term recognition (renshi), most often in the imperative, as in “correctly recognize the substantial meaning of mythology” (zhengquedi renshi shenhua de shishi yiyi). Para-state organizations directed this imperative toward practitioners of minjian xinyang in pedagogical projects to form a proper public. They likewise called on the state to recognize minjian xinyang as a resource for the development of socialist spiritual civilization. Recognition is thus a problem of anchoring truths about ethnic integrity and gaige kaifang in objects that had formerly remained occult, of synchronizing pilgrim crowds with historical statements.

A Museum of Belief As mentioned above, Quanzhou Tianfei Gong was restored under the auspices of the city cultural bureau as the Museum of Minnan-Taiwan Relations. The goal of this museum was twofold: first, to provide knowledge of Quanzhou’s enduring ties to Taiwan, categorized as belonging to “five predestined relationships” (wu yuan) of geography, blood, kinship, religion, and economics (Lin Qiqian 1990, 1992; Lin Qiquan 1992); second, to harness the vitality of this relationship for China’s future. Signs of popular veneration, images shared from Lukang Tianhou Gong and Hsinkang Fongtian Gong, temple epigraphy, and images of pilgrim crowds are living, experiential components of the history exhibited by the museum. Tianfei Gong was thus a curious museum that exhibited crowds and led the viewer, often part of a pilgrim crowd, toward a proper recognition of their significance. Pilgrim crowds formed both the museum’s audience and one of the museum’s exhibits of cross-Straits relationships. To coordinate minjian xinyang as a living museum shifted relationships to pilgrim crowds and ritual practices. How did this change in the disposition of minjian xinyang configure the museum? For one, it amplified pilgrim crowds. The chair of the museum administration made the relationship between Taiwanese pilgrimage in the 1990s and Quanzhou’s history of openness clear in his remarks on the occasion of Lukang Tianhou Gong’s 1992 pilgrimage to Quanzhou Tianfei Gong. Underscoring that Quanzhou was the city from which Mazu worship diffused through China’s maritime provinces and to Overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, he noted that Quanzhou was the site from which successive emperors bestowed titles upon the goddess. Historical materials produced by the temple made similar claims (Huang Bingyan 1990).


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Historical records grounded kaifang in the past but did not point to the reality of kaifang in the present. In his remarks during Lukang’s pilgrimage, the museum chair also mentioned the special status of Lukang as Quanzhou’s “window to Taiwan today,” as donors in Lukang provided funding to restore Tianfei Gong’s theater stage and mountain gate. Although the Mazu cult was a veritable image of kaifang in Quanzhou’s history, the involvement of Taiwanese pilgrims was necessary to realize this image as a set of vital relationships in the present. The museum chair aimed his statements at a contemporary context in which people in Minnan sought relationships to Taiwan in terms of space for political maneuverings and economic benefits. Although it was a space of culture, the museum was also an exhibit of Quanzhou’s status among open cities, its eminent position in fulfilling the historical mission of a national public. A UNESCO program at Tianfei Gong, which celebrated Quanzhou’s role in the “Silk Road of the Sea,” underscored this position. Of course, a national mission can be translated into more local, personal concerns. Taiwanese pilgrims funded the museum and a few related business ventures. The tokens of bureaucratic speech often disguise the jangling of hard currency. But in this chapter, we are more concerned with the deep tones of an iron bell donated by the Lukang Merchant Guild in 1837. The bronze bell had an intimate relationship with contemporary pilgrimages, for performance of the Lukang– Quanzhou relationship in Lukang’s pilgrimages allowed the bronze bell to become an image reiterated through exchanges of incense: crowds and crowd products. The autonomy of a public of pilgrim crowds underpinned the museum’s persuasiveness. Take as an example the brief museum catalog from my fieldnotes: In the rear court: artifacts and textual descriptions of weddings and funerals in Quanzhou that describe the practice of ritual exhumation and funeral theater; portions of a puppet stage carved in the Quanzhou style, marionettes whose form and use recall archaic exorcistic nuo rituals; a set of nanguan instruments. a compass donated by the Sugar Guild, which had close trade relationships with Taiwan. In the main hall: along the wall to the west of the image, a photograph of a 1917 gathering of Mazu images in Taichung (courtesy of Lukang Tianhou Gong). The text does not mention the context of this gathering in the Japanese colonial period, but describes early migration and settlement of Taiwan

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by people from the Quanzhou region. A second photograph depicts the Celebration of the Thousand Year Anniversary of Mazu’s Apotheosis, held in Lukang in 1987. Accompanying text describes Mazu worship. a map of Taiwan that indicates the location of major Mazu temples on the island as well as places with concentrations of Quanzhou immigrants. Accompanying text introduces Lukang, noting that in Lukang, “the accent of their hometown [Quanzhou] has been maintained.” a photograph of a nineteenth century incense censer juxtaposed to photographs of Hsinkang’s 1988 pilgrimage to Quanzhou. A text relates Hsinkang’s relationship to narratives of initial Chinese settlement on Taiwan, identifying Hsinkang as the inheritor of the Ponkang foundation image. a photograph of antiquities at Peikang accompanied by text identifying Peikang’s image as the Ponkang foundation image. Further text describes temple architecture as a fine example of Quanzhou style. a photograph of Lukang’s image on procession surrounded by tremendous crowds, followed by a caption describing the fervor of Taiwanese Mazu worshippers. The text further defines Taiwanese religious “modes of expression” as “replete with Quanzhou’s native traditions (xiangtu quantong).” an iron bell donated by the Lukang Merchant Guild in 1837.

Photographs of crowds dominated the museum exhibits, which highlighted most of Taiwan’s nodal Mazu temples. Literal crowds, meanwhile, grounded the museum’s claims. One moved from the photographs of crowds and temple sites to the bell, which reified these crowds in bronze. The bell pointed to Taiwan’s enduring relationships to Quanzhou, whose customs were displayed in the rear, intimate court, formerly the Sleeping Palace. Taken together, the exhibits moved through crowds to culture. The museum backpedaled hierarchical relationships among temples on Taiwan and between Taiwan and Quanzhou. As noted in chapter 2, competition in Taiwanese Mazu networks during the late 1980s led Taiwanese temple committees to organize large-scale pilgrimages to China beginning in 1987. Votive inscriptions and other products of these naojiat activities were calculated to produce value for Taiwanese donors. In Quanzhou, however, the relationships between temple organizations and the local state limited possibilities for competition. Tianfei Gong was a museum, initially precluding pilgrimage. After pilgrimages were possible, crowd activity was already one exhibit among others. Tianfei Gong was eager to solicit votives for a differently figured project, in the


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process often reversing typical relationships between pilgrims and pilgrimage sites. For example, temple epigraphy commonly employs the parallel structure of classical Chinese poetry to create relationships with founding sites, where a deity first manifested her or his efficacy. Careful choice of geographic terms, balancing contrasting categories literally written into components of Chinese characters such as the “mountain” or “water” radicals, make these relationships dynamic and necessary. Rather than linking Quanzhou to Meizhou, the founding site of the Mazu cult, however, temple couplets at Quanzhou Tianfei Gong poetically bring Quanzhou and Taiwan into contiguity. In effect, these inscriptions lend Quanzhou Tianfei Gong the status of a daughter rather than mother temple to its Taiwanese donors:5 [the] Chin’s waters flow back to [their] source, Quan-Lu [have] one cultural pulse [from] Meizhou [is] transmitted [the] efficacious relic, Min-Tai incense fires [come] together one thousand years

In addition to a reversal in hierarchical relationships, the above couplet also contained the possibility of local activity at the site becoming public through means other than those permitted within the scope of the temple’s museum exhibits. Tianfei Gong accentuated its Taiwanese donors, even at the risk of appearing peripheral to nodal sites on Taiwan, to circulate images of a relationship between Minnan and Taiwan. The museum made crowds visible, forming from these visibilities allegories of national space. For the museum, this channeling of naojiat crowds gives minjian xinyang value.

Limits of the Museum Concept Producing value through crowds, however, is fraught with tension. That the museum was unable to enroll divination poems (chhiam si; m: qian shi) within its scope highlights the limits of the museum’s work of coordination. Divination poems, through which worshippers reflect on crises and communicate with the deity, were conspicuously absent at Tianfei Gong. While I worked in Quanzhou, a few workers at Tianfei Gong learned through personal networks and a few discussions about my work that I collected chhiam texts. My impulse stemmed from an interest in the relationship between popular ritual and literature in China.6 At the time, I wondered whether sets of chhiam si could

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demonstrate relationships of shared incense among temples and was curious about the recent rehabilitation of chhiam in some Chinese temples. One worker at Tianfei Gong was interested in chhiam because of the demand of the temple’s local constituency for this service. She hoped to acquire the set originally belonging to Tianfei Gong or to develop a new set that reflected the temple’s history as embedded in current relationships of shared incense. Her efforts were frustrated by official policy. I once asked a museum administrator about chhiam; he regretted that they were no longer extant. When we talked about chhiam, the worker surmised that the set had survived but that the administration was unwilling to provide them to worshippers. Now that I had been working at Tianfei Gong, I knew that were I to inquire again, the museum administration would understand my question in this context. When I did ask, administrators either lamented the state of the temple during the 1970s and 1980s or condemned chhiam as a superstitious practice with little value. Subsequently, I discussed chhiam with the worker, who wanted me to suggest which of the widely disseminated sets of chhiam may have originally served at Tianfei Gong. I promised the worker that I would give her copies of representative sets in my collection following my return from a short trip to Taiwan. Meanwhile, I decided to share some of my ongoing research into the distribution of chhiam sets in Taiwan and Fujian with the museum administration. Although chhiam were objects of a superstitious practice, members of the museum administration agreed that the distribution of chhiam sets might have value as a reference material for a history of Min-Tai relations. In this fashion, even a superstitious practice might be rehabilitated as a public symbol of enduring links across the Straits. “Negative” aspects of popular ritual practices did not require an application of negative power, such as proscription. Work on minjian xinyang was also productive, because members of the museum administration enrolled elements of negative practices into the categories of relationship that had come to define minjian xinyang as a whole. In effect, they could coordinate object positions of chhiam to reclaim the practice. This pattern of coordination configured chhiam and, by extension, minjian xinyang as cultural objects. Minjian xinyang could not appear as a discrete category (that is, as religion) in the museum framework. For the exhibits to work, minjian xinyang had to belong in the same domain as the musical instruments, local costumes, and marionettes displayed in the rear court of the temple. The formation of minjian xinyang as a discrete category would break the cascading chain


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of referents to shared custom, as exemplified in the museum exhibits, which allowed one to discover in minjian xinyang continuity and integrity of ethnic identity. This continuity was necessary not only for the museum to locate Taiwan as a source of value but also to maintain gaige kaifang within Quanzhou’s history as reflected in language, antiquities, and ritual practice. In this work, arguments within the museum administration concerning liberalization of popular ritual practices and management strategies were often complicit with the strategies of Taiwanese donors. A few members of the museum administration found inspiration to pursue more active patronage of local artisans and performers in the ongoing efforts of Taiwanese temple committees to organize cultural centers, exhibits of vernacular arts, and folk festivals. For Tianfei Gong’s constituency as well as the temple administration, these strategies intensified the basic problems of the museum: on the one hand, to synchronize crowd activity with architectural and other frames that could give crowds meaning, and on the other, to reform one’s own practices to cohere with a culture that crowds made manifest. For this reason, one member of the museum administration lamented confusion concerning the relationship of folk belief to the state, particularly at the Meizhou Mazu Zumiao. If Taiwanese people misunderstood the situation, it was the fault of shortsighted policy decisions that did not account for the potential popularity of Meizhou. Because para-state organizations did not create appropriate relationships to an alter-public at Meizhou, crowds could not be synchronized with public concerns. As the museum format suggests, the role of cultural work is to produce objects through which this synchronization can occur.

Taoist Research In contrast with Tianfei Gong where chhiam remained within the realm of superstition, Guandi Miao was famous for the efficacy of its divinations. The temple’s management committee and its guiding unit, the TCRA, indirectly promote the practice, making the divination poems available to worshippers and researchers alike. Guandi Miao provided chhiam as a service, while the TCRA published a facsimile copy of a nineteenth-century woodblock print of a chhiam guide. The TCRA also publishes a journal for internal circulation, which reports on its research and its reception of foreign experts and students. Even this ethnographer was mentioned, consistent with the association’s mission to facilitate historical and contemporary research on Taoist culture.

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The TCRA’s enthusiasm was not difficult to understand. With every researcher in Quanzhou working on minjian xinyang, the category of folk belief becomes more systematic, given definition in opposition to the occult region just beyond the horizon of the term superstition. Even chhiam could be pulled from the realm of superstition through an account that described divination as a body of folk moral discourse. But the TCRA was not simply in the business of fitting folk belief into the project of socialist spiritual civilization. Systematizing folk belief, to the TCRA, required the discovery of underlying principles through which folk belief could be recognized as religion proper. If the TCRA tended to describe minjian xinyang as a national property, it is an effect of this desire for recognition, without which there could be no constitutional guarantees. At first, minjian xinyang seems a poor candidate for the status of religion, at least given the dominant definition of religion in Chinese bureaucratic practices of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Minjian xinyang lacked the organic quality of recognized religions, formed networks across several scriptural traditions, transcended the boundaries of religious practices to become custom, and waxed and waned in popularity according to rumors of efficacious response. Moreover, the TCRA faced the resistance of many officials, who saw in minjian xinyang an index of everything wrong with China: particularistic ties that vitiated national consciousness, opportunism, and lack of scientific knowledge. To define minjian xinyang as religion required researchers to overcome all these objections. Organizationally, minjian xinyang expanded through territorial networks but had ill-defined relationships to clergy. Moreover, those whom I asked about minjian xinyan said that worshippers were not members of an association, but people who came to “burn incense and worship buddhas,” depending on relationships to the calendar, kinship, and neighborhood organization rather than a core set of beliefs. Hence, researchers argued that minjian xinyang lacked both the formal, voluntary organization and division of sacred and profane spheres proper to religion. One researcher underscored this point with his claim that a quality of minjian xinyang was that “the mass of believers is great, but members or disciples are few” (Chen Chuicheng 1993: 37). Similarly, Mr. Bai of the TCRA noted that folk Taoism, as he called minjian xinyang, was the “most liberal form of religion” because it set no permanent restrictions on its adherents. Worshipping Guan Gong today does not keep one from worshipping Siao Ong tomorrow.


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Although this fluidity of membership qualified as a religious principle to Bai, it caused others to consider minjian xinyang a body of practices parallel to religion proper. A member of the museum administration at Tianfei Gong, for example, argued that folk belief was more highly involved in secular life than religion, noting the location of Tianfei Gong near the economic center of the city. Until the early twentieth century, folk temples also served as foci for local political power, often supporting armed militias. Minjian xinyang does not lack a system, he said; its system merely differs. The suggestion that folk belief, without a body of necessary texts, precepts, or membership, be considered religion struck most of the museum administration as ludicrous. Researchers and administrators serving temple committees were also quick to note minjian xinyang’s syncretism. Mazu hagiography related that she learned healing and prognosticating arts from a Taoist master and claimed that she was the disciple of the Boddhisattva Kuanyin. Syncretism was reflected in the presence of Buddhist and Taoist iconography and even deities at popular religious sites. In the words of one administrator in the tourism bureau that I consulted after having been turned away from the Religious Affairs Bureau of his county, even in cases where deities could be identified as Buddhist patriarchs, such as the Sanping or Qingshui patriarchs, narratives of efficacious response and forms of popular devotion had made them “legendary characters of folklore [minsu de chuanqi renwu].” He concluded, “This is not religion, but a type of mythology or custom.” Thus, minjian xinyang could not be coordinated as religion. Tellingly, those attempting a definition found that minjian xinyang depended on the tempo of crowd time. People came to temples “only to compose renao and [were] not conscious of the sacred”; they had more interest in efficacy than the identity of deities (Chen Chuicheng 1992: 37). Researchers who desired recognition of minjian xinyang as religion needed to locate within crowd time a set of general principles that could disclose its substantial meaning apart from narratives of efficacious response. In contrast to minjian xinyang, the Chinese bureaucratic definition of religion stressed canonical scriptures, codified doctrines, organized clergies, and defined memberships. This body of formally equivalent properties—shared by Islam, Buddhism, Protestant Christianity, and Catholicism—afforded public recognition of religious organizations and integration with the state through United Front and People’s Political Consultative Conference offices.

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Religion in this definition is in many respects amenable to the nation, in spite of its tendency to threaten the borders of the state with its universality. Membership in religious organizations is formal, requiring declarations of faith or confirmation to become a member, augmented by written membership records. Those who would change membership between denominations must expend some effort, entailing education and discipline analogous to naturalization undergone by those seeking citizenship. National and religious belonging share several characteristics. In both, membership is proprietary in that one belongs to the group, and each member owns membership as a personal property (Handler 1988). Both open onto a public of intimate strangers (Anderson 1991, Warner 2002). Although religions differ in iconography, membership is capable of universality in that religions (no less than nations) are formally equivalent (Gellner 1983). The National Buddhist Association, as well as state-recognized Christian churches in China, all prefix their names with patriotic (aiguo). This nomenclature suggests the contours of an ethical problem that formal religious organizations animate in China and in modern societies generally. Given the universality of religious claims across national boundaries and temporal frameworks, how can members of religious organizations submit themselves to the practices and ends of national belonging? Can the Christian, for example, render consistent or even coherent her participation in a national narrative with the total claims that the truth of her election poses? Those who turn back to bury the family dead are already unworthy of the call, much less those who mourn the dead of the nation. In our secular mythology, the solution to this problem has been to compose two kingdoms whose claims, because parallel, will not result in contradiction. In practice, the surveyor’s chain that protects the secular and sacred realms as different ethical universes has also guarded the boundaries of a private sphere. In China, the patriotic religions neither proselytize nor permit religious activities outside of spaces dedicated to religious practice. They also submit to official guidance. Given the response of the Chinese Communist Party to religious organizations that do not fit this model, such as Falun Dafa, one may be tempted to view these restrictions as repressive. That they might be should not blind us to their inherently creative function for religious practitioners who, through them, develop private lives as well as public commitments.7 In contrast, minjian xinyang lacked covenants and baptisms. The tempo of naojiat formed a public that did not neatly correspond to the ideological or administrative requirements of the nation-state. Once


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the crowd disperses, aren’t there many who say, “Oh, I just went to watch naojiat,” leaving behind no visible trail of commitments, let alone covenants, to bind them? Naojiat is also unselective, capturing in its contagious folds those who are less than likely to be considered eligible for membership. Thus, argued members of the TCRA, a correct recognition of minjian xinyang as Chinese religion required an understanding of the different principles that guided minjian xinyang. These principles, in turn, suggested that territories and not memberships were the basic productions (and problematic) of Chinese religion. As one member of the TCRA told me: “Chinese folk belief is concrete, not abstract. The focus of worship in Chinese religion is on concrete, historical figures who have made a contribution to society. Because of epochal changes, many of the names of these figures are forgotten, and people now often call them by surnames or toponyms and the honorific term gong.” The TCRA’s definition of minjian xinyang as religion with Chinese characteristics displaced the bureaucratic definition of religion and attempted to create a new definition that relied on a history of ethnic expansion and commemoration. For practitioners, the problem of recognition created tensions between the forgetfulness that enshrouded one’s ritual practices and a substantial meaning that research had yet to uncover. The scope of this project is evident from the many types of expertise on which research on just one figure of popular devotion could draw. A conference on Wu Zhenren that the TCRA, Ciji East Temple, Huaqiao Gong, and the provincial academy of social sciences organized in 1993, for example, drew researchers and practitioners of Chinese medicine, members of historical research organizations, Overseas Chinese bureau officials, anthropologists, city planners, and experts in decorative arts and architecture to discuss research findings and promote Wu Zhenren’s spirit of self-sacrifice and compassion. According to the prefatory remarks on the proceedings of an earlier conference, research on Wu Zhenren would be meaningful for exploration and research on local history, the relationship between Taiwan and Minnan, the history of relationships between China and Southeast Asia, the history of Chinese medicine, antiquities preservation, and the development of tourism. (Peng Yiwan 1992: 20)

The breadth of this research consolidated networks among bureaucratic and para-state agencies administering minjian xinyang. It also assured researchers that practices associated with Wu Zhenren formed a positive

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object that could be known according to the dictates of historical materialism (Zhou Lifang 1993: 10). “Minjian xinyang as Chinese religion” animated the project of socialist spiritual civilization in Minnan even as it created obstacles to it. My associates in research organizations perpetually expressed surprise as they recognized that practices that formerly appeared to be the trappings of feudal superstition were actually local manifestations of ethnic virtues such as diligence, thrift, compassion, and bravery. To members of the TCRA, minjian xinyang, with its spectacular crowds and capacity for expansive innovation, was the vital pulse of religious life in China. It was the source of new deities and practices and also a means through which organized religions translated their abstract systems into the particularities of local customs. In other words, minjian xinyang formed a matrix between localities and orthodox traditions. It also mediated national identity through time. To the TCRA, the intermediary status of minjian xinyang was the source of its value. Although chhiam could first appear to be superstitious, research and coordination with contemporary realities could prove them a useful means to educate people in values consistent with reform and openness. Research into toponyms and popular ritual practices would further demonstrate a living system of commemoration that maintained ethnic identity, discovering how local figures, such as Wu Zhenren, were translations of more encompassing ethnic virtues. Fang Wentu, a local historian in Amoy, made this translation explicit at the 1993 Wu Zhenren conference when he compared Wu Zhenren to the paragon of socialist manhood under Mao: Lei Feng. “Baosheng Dadi was the Lei Feng of his time,” he said.8 By offering Baosheng Dadi as a twelfth century Lei Feng, minjian xinyang abetted the diffusion of national allegories in Minnan during the early 1990s. Figuring the objects of popular veneration as a series of exemplars of ethnic virtue, researchers suggested that they might discover a single paradigm connecting what were otherwise contingent instances of efficacy. For example, the head of one of the two founding temples of Baosheng Dadi told me at a research conference that I should form a Wu Zhenren Association in the United States. His suggestions actually convey the research program in which minjian xinyang became legitimate: Explain that the commemoration of Taitoo Kong is not superstition but remembrance of a great hero. In the United States, for example, you have memorials to Lincoln and Washington. Commemoration of Wu Zhenren


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is similar. You would write several essays, which you would publish, relating that Wu Zhenren was a Chinese doctor, who has been commemorated for more than one thousand years. His medical expertise, virtue, and charity all deserve the respect of people throughout the world. In America, he could become the symbol or nucleus for ethics and compassion for public health workers. . . . Of course, you would also have to publicize narratives of efficacious responses, and hang banners with the inscription “All requests will be answered.” (you qiu bi ying)

Minjian xinyang would exhort people to imitate moral exemplars. However, the means through which local deities expanded their influence—rumors of efficacious response and spectacular processions—were in tension with the imperatives of minjian xinyang as Chinese religion. Even in the above remarks, efficacious response informs the commemoration of Wu Zhenren over the past millennium. The temple committee chairman shifts from Taitoo Kong, a popular Hoklo name for the deity, to Wu Zhenren, an official title, to signal passage from “superstition” to “commemoration.” When he returns from national allegories (“like Lincoln”) to efficacy, he changes the position of minjian xinyang. Here we see a problem of coordination within minjian xinyang, a conflict that appears when minjian xinyang serves as matrix between localities and the more encompassing values of a national subject. One researcher (Huang Tianzhu 1993) wrestled with this conflict personally as he contrasted his understanding of Wu Zhenren as a moral exemplar with his experience of the deity as simply the Kengchu (m: jingzhu), or Master of the Territory, of his hometown. He remembered fondly the excitement and bustle of the crowds, the noise of firecrackers, and the thickness of incense smoke surrounding the festival (Huang Tianzhu 1993: 25), yet regretted that the villagers did not seem to know or even care about the deity’s “brilliant history” (Huang Tianzhu 1993: 27). In response, the writer encouraged his colleagues to “contact popular sentiments through religion and educate the ignorant” (Huang Tianzhu 1993: 27). Thus, the TCRA and other research institutions embarked on projects of educating official units and the populace to recognize the substantial meaning of minjian xinyang. In relationship to the local state, lifting the veil of superstition meant to expand space for popular ritual practices in the public realm, negotiating with public security bureaus and planning commissions to secure temple courtyards and occasionally permission to engage in processions, still the object of scrutiny if not outright proscription. Reworking popular devotion, however, required efforts to contain the practices of minjian xinyang within the framework

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of commemorative ritual (Zhou Lifang 1992). Pilgrim crowds, although the most visible evidence of expansion and vitality, also threatened to render incoherent the meaning of minjian xinyang so painstakingly sought after by researchers. The intimation that ritual practices produced values beyond those of commemoration did offer something to researchers, however. Minjian xinyang confirmed the need to reform their research practices to keep up with an object that surprised them with the historical depth of spiritual civilization.

Tourist Infrastructures Because pilgrimage figured prominently in the initial liberalization of popular ritual practice in the Minnan region, popular ritual sites were often reconstructed as tourist sites. Some sites on the outskirts of regional cities, such as Sanping Si, Fengshan Si, and Qingshui Yan, were on scenic mountains and had long appeared in travel literature. Those who defined minjian xinyang as a form of tourism denied that popular ritual practice was religious and attempted to reconfigure it as a form of root searching (xungen). This position allowed officials in para-state organizations to turn toward practical considerations of roads, parking, lodging, and other facilities. Although a motive for professional management, it also makes a problem of the cultural level (wenhua shuiping) of a potential market and of the proper uses of public space. As in the other two attempts at coordination, minjian xinyang as tourism was closely connected with the arrival of Taiwanese and Overseas Chinese pilgrims. Pilgrim practices began to appear legitimate once they had been recognized as a form of root searching that, although insufficiently theorized, could turn the affection of Taiwanese compatriots toward the motherland: “Religious belief also contains elements of ‘geographical ties’ [di yuan] and indeed is a spiritual cord bringing compatriots on both sides of the Strait into contact, so that one cannot simply call it ‘superstition.’ Research on the ‘divine ties’ [shen yuan] between Taiwan and Quanzhou may further the sentiments of blood relationships among compatriots” (Liao Lanquan 1986: 148). Root searching was not only an activity of Taiwanese pilgrims, it was also a practice that para-state organizations encouraged as a means to realize the status of Minnan’s cities as rooted in China’s movement toward economic openness. Major tourist sites in Quanzhou included Kaiyuan Si, Tianfei Gong, and the thirteenth-century Islamic mosque, all features that gave Quanzhou official status as one of China’s 24


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ancient cultural cities. Taiwanese tourists demonstrated the vitality of Quanzhou’s roots, particularly in those cases where the visible growth of those roots had been lost or damaged through years of iconoclastic violence. As a matter of practice, scenic management bureaus defined activities surrounding their sites as “activities pertaining to popular amusement and cultural interchange” (Zeng, Su, and Cai 1993: 1). In the case of chhiam, scenic sites provided them as mysterious or enjoyable activities for tourists and as items of historical interest for the discerning traveler. On the other hand, officials on scenic management bureaus were aware that many visitors to their site viewed chhiam—and indeed worship—in a manner inconsistent with the site’s designation as a tourist resource. To these “superstitious” practitioners, management opened one eye and closed another. This disparity was the source of considerable tension and concern within the practices of scenic management committees. On one visit to Shishan, for example, I met a member of the Fengshan Scenic Area Management Committee at a banquet. He was concerned that the scenic area existed in name only. Buses conveying pilgrims to the site left immediately after the pilgrims had concluded their worship. He attributed this lapse not to the ritual requirements of pilgrimage, which can exact strict schedules, but to the lack of well-developed paths, photographic vistas, and items of interest apart from burning incense and worshipping buddhas. In response, he had been working on comprehensive tourist planning for Fengshan. Such plans often fomented conflict. In one such conflict, the chair of the Ciji East Temple Committee opposed an attempt within his committee to secure recognition of East Temple as a scenic area. To him, the temple should promote Wu Zhenren’s spirit rather than attract tourists. Nonetheless, a few members of the committee consulted the chair of a Baosheng Dadi temple on Taiwan, a professor in the art department at Amoy University, and the Amoy planning department to develop comprehensive plans for East Temple’s scenic development. In March 1993, a member of the planning department presented initial directions of these plans to the annual conference of the Amoy Wu Zhenren Research Association in Quanzhou. Careful attention to technical matters of roads and landscape design in these plans is not exceptional. Contextually, however, the plans contain minjian xinyang as root searching and lessen its role in neighborhood organization. Comprehensive plans for East Temple proposed a Garden of Baosheng Dadi Temples in which builders would reconstruct

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temples from more than 30 villages, all slated to be demolished for the construction of an industrial area. The plan prospectively enrolled these neighborhood structures as the history of a future, modern city. The temples would remain the focus of worship for erstwhile villagers, forming a “site for maintaining historical connections and sightseeing” and “a place for rootsearching” (Lin Yinxin 1993: 6). Although it comprehended the role of each temple in village organization, the plan acted to concentrate these historical connections at a site dedicated to tourism well outside the urban spaces where the villagers were soon to move. It required of the villagers an approach to locality in which ritual organization is a matter of private, historical significance and not a principle of neighborhood organization. Minjian xinyang as tourism also led to debates over the cultural level of tourists. During 1992, plans to build a bridge to Meizhou Island provoked disagreements among several organizations administering pilgrimages to the founding site of the Mazu cult, including a research organization, travel agencies, the city tourism bureau, and members of the scenic area management committee. Travel agents who worked with Taiwanese pilgrims agreed with a few members of the management committee that bridge construction would remove the character pilgrims desired in pilgrimage. Passage across the bay reminded Taiwanese of Mazu’s protection during their ancestors’ journey across the Taiwan Straits. Among those opposed to the bridge were also advocates of “ethnic tourism,” who found in the stone villages, local costume, and rustic appearance of the island resources to attract root searching Taiwanese and foreign visitors alike. In their attention to my research and leisure time on the island and in nearby Putian, advocates of ethnic tourism attempted to enroll me as an example of what foreign visitors found appealing: fishermen sorting out their catch, local opera, vernacular architecture and shipbuilding, and morning walks on the beach. Those who argued for radical transformations of the island tended not to criticize the nostalgia that informed advocacy of ethnic tourism. They argued for local rights to better infrastructure and guided their practices of managing tourism through commitments to rational planning. Ease of access, capacity, and resource development were benchmarks for their work. They also questioned whether China, particularly Fujian, could support ethnic tourism. Such pleasures required a cultural level that most in China and, in their opinion, many Taiwanese pilgrims had not attained. Even the hotel, ferry, and shopping area construction that they advocated was hampered by the low cultural level of potential


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workers and tourists alike. Like the other attempts at coordination, minjian xinyang as tourism required pedagogy. Minjian xinyang as tourism raised other problems concerning the allocation of public space. A good example of these problems is an altercation that I witnessed one evening in April 1993 in Chengtian Si, a Buddhist temple in Quanzhou. As I took a short walk through the temple courtyard, I watched a group of students from a local university practicing Qigong. Unimpressed by their practice, a temple worker asked them to leave. One of the students decided to argue. “Why cannot we practice here?” he asked. “This is a public place.” The worker dismissed their claims. The temple grounds were spaces for Overseas Chinese to search roots, believers to worship Boddhisattvas, and tourists to appreciate architecture. As the students left and perhaps for my benefit, he added that many of the temple’s monks were Qigong experts; but Qigong should be practiced in the early morning and not in the main courtyard of the temple. In their defense of their practice, the students argued for a definition of public space open to common leisure pursuits. The definition of the temple as a tourist site acted to subordinate local claims for public space to the interests of pilgrims.

Interfering Possibilities The three attempts at coordination fashioned minjian xinyang as a resource for administrative projects, scholarship, and economic development. Although these attempts made minjian xinyang appear to be an autonomous object, they actually increased the number of networks though which it circulated and multiplied the projects it mediated. What we see is not so much a resuscitated practice that could provide resources for actors within the local state, but painstaking processes of creating minjian xinyang as a resource through coordination of several possible object positions. The values of the three attempts at coordination differ, as do their networks. Together, they posed interfering possibilities for minjian xinyang in Minnan, possibilities connected to pedagogical attempts to reform publics. How did these interfering possibilities interact with Taiwanese pilgrimages? Let us turn to these questions as we look at the invention of Mazu Culture.


Interlude Enjoyment and Sincerity

An Entrance Exam In the spring of 1993, I met a group of students studying for admission to a school of pharmacy in Anxi. In addition to knowledge in basic science, mathematics, and Chinese language, questions about Meizhou, the founding site of the Mazu cult, would appear on the entrance exam. The students were required to know that Meizhou Bay had potential to be a large industrial harbor, that the island was one of 11 National Tourism Special Economic Zones, and that it was home to the original temple to the goddess Mazu, now called in bureaucratic parlance “Goddess of Cross-Straits Peace” (haixia heping nüshen). On the entrance exam, folded into the project of gaige kaifang (reform and openness) was a site that until very recently had been emblematic of feudal superstition. Moreover, the exam was not a test of ideological purity. Knowledge of Meizhou Mazu was an indicator of an appropriate “cultural level” for students aspiring to a place in a local college of pharmacy. Although the entrance exam implicated Meizhou Mazu in the production of socialist spiritual civilization, it did so through gestures toward an object that was autonomous, of some historical depth, and— dare I use the word—positive. Proper knowledge of Meizhou Mazu, including the practices of Taiwanese pilgrims, was material through which the aspiring students could constitute themselves as appropriate (wenming, civilized) subjects. Folded into the entrance exam, Meizhou was a token of an otherwise abstract set of plans and discourses in which China’s history and destiny were neatly laid out, or at least as neatly as one might in the moment of Chinese socialism corresponding with flexible accumulation (Dirlik and

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Meisner 1989). Conversely, there is a sense that the diffused, allegorical quality of gaige kaifang represented in Meizhou Mazu translates it into terms of the token itself; some in Minnan experience gaige kaifang as the manifestation of Mazu’s efficacy or perhaps the fear of her retribution. Similarly, minjian xinyang is the result of complicity with bureaucratic agency and not a primordial cultural schema. The folding of the two together is, in fact, the mode in which they become autonomous objects. In this interlude, I give a brief account of the possibilities and problems that minjian xinyang afforded for enjoying and believing subjects. Both types of subjects were the objects of discourses that attempted to channel their participation with minjian xinyang into appropriate forms, much as the entrance exam encouraged students to develop an allegorical reading of Meizhou Mazu. As minjian xinyang became a coherent object, it also suggested new possibilities for being and acting in reform period Minnan. Sincerity, a value from popular religious practice, would then inform life in adjacent fields with which minjian xinyang was coordinated.

Enjoying Subjects As minjian xinyang emerged as a legitimate resource for history and tourism, its sites and practices became grounding objects in a reform period ethical field. Culture became an ethical substance on which reform era subjects in Minnan worked, the better to fashion their public commitments and newly legitimate private lives. Play (wan) became a valuable type of ethical work, a productive practice of cultural improvement. During the early 1990s, a number of pedagogical works encouraged readers to have fun. They called for the transformation of enjoyment into a source of value, while lamenting both the lack of knowledge and venues available to facilitate quality leisure. One of my associates in the field, a member of a research organization active in the investigation of minjian xinyang, became the editor of a newspaper directed at young workers, which included among its features discussions of how to improve one’s cultural level through leisure activities. Books and periodicals on how to develop pastimes proliferated during this period. I received one of these books as a small token of friendship and find it a useful introduction to the problems that faced the composition of enjoyment as a legitimate practice. How to Have the Best Time instructs readers in a wide variety of possible types of wan. Providing instructions and resources for games,

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hobbies, and travel, it attempts to situate wan as a necessary component of a good life. As the editors proclaim on the back cover, “Not being able to wan is equal to not being able to live” (Chen and Xiang 1993). Yet all this enjoyment is serious business. The authors connect wan to a wider social field through a move familiar to cultural anthropologists, albeit one no longer widely practiced in the discipline: consideration of the cultural functions of wan. Wan brings greater focus to work and increases one’s productivity, a function that the authors attribute to the cyclic character of labor and leisure. It also is a means to “govern emotions, increase knowledge, open vistas, improve aesthetic appreciation, maintain interpersonal relationships, set the body and mind in balance, and increase physical health” (Chen and Xiang 1993: 2). In short, wan is a cultural means to improve one’s physical and mental “quality” (suzhi), a “motive force to complete and perfect oneself” (Chen and Xiang 1993: 2). Similarly, an article in a local periodical, Fujian Xiangtu, praised popular participation in karaoke contests, narcissus carving exhibitions, calligraphy associations, and an emerging cultural market for “improving the quality of thought, culture, and character” of residents in Zhangzhou County (Ni Hefu 1992: 8). Through these and other activities, “the tentacles of modern culture have reached toward every cell of society” (Ni Hefu 1992: 8). The objects of wan also exhibited the increased valorization of locally marked forms. When I participated as a special guest performer in a Minnan language singing contest held in Zhangzhou during December 1992, promotional materials for the event stressed the relevance of the event in the improvement of local musical culture and as a bridge of friendship toward Taiwan, origin of many of the songs that performers chose to sing (Fujian Zhonglü 1992). For activities celebrating National Day on October 1, 1992, the Quanzhou Communist Youth League had no time for boring commemorative speeches! No, they met at Qingyuan Shan for a guided tour of the mountain’s temples and stone inscriptions, including a monumental statue of the Taoist Patriarch Laozi. Unfortunately, given the relative lack of knowledge about wan and resources for the development of positive forms of enjoyment in China at the time of the book’s publication, the authors of wan pedagogy works regretted that wan did not often result in beneficial enjoyment. People were not really having fun. Left to their own devices, people, particularly youths, could wan in ways that were neither enjoyable nor advantageous. Thus, having shown wan’s cultural functions and having noted that the “universalization of wan is a giant step for

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society” (Chen and Xiang 1993: 1), the authors of How to Have the Best Time demonstrate that it is necessary to police the quality of leisure. The formation of wan as a site for personal perfection demands no less; moreover, the vigilance required is not the province of pubic security bureaus and schools alone. People should actively reform wan as part of the overall order of their lives (shenghuo guilü; Chen and Xiang 1993: back cover). In How to Have the Best Time, travel to religious sites appears beside “folklore travel” (minsu fengqing you), “cultural travel” (wenhua lüyou), and other types of travel as beneficial forms of leisure. The authors give an historical pedigree for travel in Chinese antiquity (Chen and Xiang 1993: 149–150) and locate the higher forms of enjoyment that cultural and religious travel offer in international trends (Chen and Xiang 1993: 157, 159). As for the enjoyment that religious travel offers, the authors locate four kinds: understanding the historical development of religious sites, observing religious activities, participating in traditional entertainments, and appreciating architectural art (Chen and Xiang 1993: 161). Throughout, the authors point out that participation in popular ritual and developing an understanding of architecture and history is the source of “interesting knowledge.” The stance that the authors encourage is thus one in which the traveler gains enjoyment through gathering information. Ritual practices are amenable to travelers as forms of traditional amusement that they can learn to place within the appropriate historical context. Forms of wan, which include playing mahjongg, collecting matchbooks, or singing in karaokes, to name a few of my favorites, are fun. But the enjoying heart/mind (xin) is properly a substance on which one works to make oneself more productive, civilized, and attuned to reform. The youths that visited Laojun Yan, the monumental carving of Laozi on Qingyuan Shan, on National Day learned from the chair of the Quanzhou Tianfei Temple Museum of Minnan-Taiwan Relations to appreciate the local tradition of stone carving as a sign of Quanzhou’s artistic achievements and status among China’s kaifang cities. Wan could thus work to build a chain of reference from objects like the stone carvings toward truths that the enjoying subject should accumulate and make manifest. Remarking on the pedagogical quality of travel and other types of wan is not to discount the pleasures that they afford. When I lived in Minnan, I encountered many people who formed themselves as knowledgeable and kaifang through travel to religious and historical sites. One of these travelers shared with me an interest in temple epigraphy,


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launching a friendship based on supplementing our respective collections of temple couplets painstakingly copied into notebooks. Others I met in the field could argue at length about which sites had the most local flavor and which had been “sadly overdeveloped” or would mourn what they considered the vulgarity of song-dance halls in comparison to the refined pleasures of listening to nanguan in a temple courtyard. Another, who worked in a watch repair shop, taught me to appreciate and tend tiny banyan trees. An important ethnographic problem is to understand how these pleasures, which are private pursuits that open one into a public of shared interest, are complicit with the remaking of the local state. Bureaucratic organizations competed over sponsorship or “guidance” of the many para-state organizations that formed around the management of the objects of wan. The emergence of enjoying subjects also encouraged the privatization or spin-off of previous bureaucratic components, such as tourist concessions or travel agencies. Tellingly, these pleasures situate culture as a source of anxiety as well as value. In the case of minjian xinyang, enjoying subjects may participate in the crush of pilgrims adding incense to the temple of Wu Zhenren or Mazu. Whether they have fulfilled their responsibility depends on whether they have properly apprehended Wu Zhenren as a projection of ethnic virtues of bravery, public service, and scientific attainment, all necessary for reform. At least they should understand Mazu as an historical symbol of enduring links between Taiwan and the Ancestral Nation, from which they should reconfigure the goods that they pursue when not enjoying travel. Good, that is to say virtuous, religious travelers should cultivate knowledge of history and proper sentiments toward the native soil. Following MacIntyre (1984), one might call these the internal goods of their practice. My friend who collected temple epigraphy would hardly be a good collector were he not to develop an understanding of the relationships of sentiment and kinship among places that temple couplets intimate. Whether he turns his personal involvement with root searching into a commitment to the Great Enterprise of National Unification is a question that might define him as either a virtuous or vicious collector. Sadly, I would likely be found among the latter. But perhaps not. His collection also points to the conversion of wealth into publicity, includes puzzling characters that sent us to multivolume dictionaries, and engages in a poetics derived ultimately from ritual interlocation and not national representation. The objects that enjoying subjects employ to develop character thus become culture only through

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a set of operations that transpose them. They could easily escape this description.

Sincerity They could equally fix the reality of a culture apart from the political realm. My friend could remain convinced that temple couplets were evidence for unification. He could be certain that any reasonable collector would be bound to reach such a conclusion. However, he could consider that conclusion, although ineluctable, as belonging to a set of ends external to the objects in front of us, the temple couplets. We could focus on the form of interlocation and find both of us sincere in our cultivation of sentiment among places, deferring conclusions on the implications of this sentiment. Through this move—complicity—our practice produces politics and culture as autonomous spheres. Complicity also gives our practice a degree of freedom while fixing its set of internal goods: the relations of sentiment that link places, patience, and quickness in solving linguistic puzzles. Nonetheless, the formation of internal goods: produces a set of diagnostic anxieties for enjoying subjects. These anxieties are those connected to measures of one’s own cultural level on the one hand and the relationship between intersecting but autonomous (hence complicit) spheres on the other. In the field of ritual practice, this anxiety repeats itself in the tension between wan and sincerity. Early in my fieldwork, I remarked to a patron of a local temple to Mazu near Quanzhou that I had found the birthday celebration of the patron deity of my neighborhood in Taiwan very enjoyable (hen haowan). He glared at me for a moment and said, “You shouldn’t think of the celebration as wan but develop a sincere heart.” He admitted that deities had to be efficacious for their festivals to be naojiat but at the same time distinguished between people who went to watch the spectacle or “worshipped for enjoyment” (baide haowan) and good ritual practitioners. Unlike religious travelers, however, his conception of how one cultivates the goods proper to ritual practice requires neither knowledge of history nor a sense of the deity as moral exemplar. Instead, sincerity is the good to be cultivated amid the noise and bustle of ritual activity, which should result in reputation, prosperity, and peace. Like many patrons of local temples, he can point to the extension of his temple’s networks to Taiwan as a demonstration of the deity’s efficacy. He does not attempt to resolve the tension between naojiat and sincerity but indicates how a virtuous ritual practitioner should proceed.


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For ritual practitioners, naojiat was a value disposed toward the expansion of ritual networks and divine efficacy that remained in tension with sincerity. For institutions of managing minjian xinyang, naojiat was also a value, but one that maintained legitimacy only in relationship with forms that fixed the integrity of expansive crowds. These forms, such as hagiography, root searching, and the historical meaning of ritual practice, were all cultural forms against which ritual practitioners, religious travelers, and those researching or managing religious sites had to evaluate their practices. This diagnostic quality of minjian xinyang created productive tensions throughout institutions governing its practices. But how did the objects of minjian xinyang become real? What were the structures that held this tension in place? To answer these questions, we need to examine the invention of minjian xinyang as “culture.”


5 Itineraries and Structures

A Photograph When I visited Tachia Zhenlan Gong during the summer of 1992, a member of the temple’s board of trustees showed me several photographs from the 1987 pilgrimage to Meizhou. As the board member related, their pilgrimage “caused all of Taiwan to be naojiat” because the pilgrimage, the first publicized Taiwanese visit to the founding site of the Mazu cult, overturned what had been a fixed hierarchy with a few major temples at its summit. He added that the pilgrimage proved Tachia’s rightful position as a temple filiated directly from Meizhou and not a daughter temple of Peikang as widely believed on the island. One of the photographs especially captured my interest. This photograph depicted the trustees holding images and a censer while standing in front of an artist’s rendition of the planned Meizhou Mazu Founding Temple (Zumiao) reconstruction. In this photograph, two types of technology met: first, ritual technologies that qualify claims of historical precedence and efficacious response; second, architectural technologies of guiding interpretation and movement. As planners, members of Meizhou’s temple committee, Overseas Chinese investors, Taiwanese donors, scholars, and bureaucrats in Putian and Fuzhou revised plans for the temple, Meizhou came to encompass a wide variety of positions, all under the rubric of “Mazu Culture” (mazu wenhua). In 1987, however, Mazu Culture only existed at the level of plans for a temple complex, awkwardly juxtaposed with the competitive complicity of its earliest Taiwanese donors. The photograph intrigued me for another reason. The plan as depicted there was not followed. The orientation of the mountain gate in the

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plan differed from the structure as it appeared in 1992, as did the form and height of temple buildings. Decorative elements of the structures did not follow, nor did the distribution of buildings on the mountain. Bureaucratic reassignment, conflict with investors, and competitive publicity all diverted the Zumiao complex from the original plan. Planners, bureaucrats, and investors agree that the complex grew from a logic that escaped them, a body of practices that local scholars and officials would come to call Mazu Culture. For their part, Taiwanese pilgrims collaborated in this process. As they disputed which itineraries and modes of pilgrimage were authentic, they invested Mazu Culture with the weight of tradition and symbolic value. In other words, they contributed to a process in which minjian xinyang became conventional.

Crowds, Comprehension, and Contexts The arrival of Taiwanese donors was a watershed for the public recognition of temple reconstruction movements in the Minnan region. As it developed through the Minnan of the late 1980s and early 1990s, minjian xinyang was more than a convenient fiction abetting cynical cooperation among Taiwanese donors, temple committees, and the local state bureaucracy. Rather, it was a boundary object: a conventional focus of activity that coordinated disparate object positions and mobilized contrasting forms of labor (Star and Griesemer 1989; Roth and McGinn 1998; see also Thevenot 2002, Woolgar 1990). Donors, planners, parastate organizations, and alter-publics all pointed to pilgrim crowds and their products as visible forms of a belief among the folk (literally, minjian xinyang) and worked upon these forms, without a consensus about their meaning. They thus wove a body of statements relating to competition, reform, and culture that situated minjian xinyang as the common substance of their arguments. Like other boundary objects, minjian xinyang was “robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites. . . . [it was] a means of translation” across heterogeneous social worlds (Star and Greisemer 1989: 393). Work on minjian xinyang generated an array of interfering possibilities. Situated within the boundary of several distinct fields of endeavor, minjian xinyang remained autonomous from the vantage of any one of these fields. As a result, it did not strike any of those engaged in temple reconstructions as an invention. It appeared as a fact. It could thus serve as an indexical background in the wide variety of arguments in which those active in temple reconstruction engaged. Nonetheless, each argument—whether about historical precedence or economic


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reform—enlisted different components of minjian xinyang and folded new components into minjian xinyang’s mix. In other words, work on minjian xinyang redistributed its object positions, producing different possibilities for what it was. For these possibilities to remain coherent, pilgrims and their hosts had to emphasize some possibilities as “facts” and bracket out others as “interests.” Understanding this shifting figure of facts and interests requires an approach that does not immediately reject Mazu Culture as inauthentic or reduce Mazu Culture to a congeries of opposed interests. To take a comparative case, Fred Myers (2002) has argued in his work on Aboriginal painting that critical questions of authenticity or interest vitiate understandings of indigenous art that grasp its unique construction within, and of, an intercultural space. Myers suggests that we attend to “shifting formulations of Aboriginal arts” as the “intersection of different technologies of intervention into Aboriginal life” (2002: 184). According to Myers, these shifting formulations embrace policy, exhibition practices, market structures, and the acrylic paintings themselves. Likewise, Mazu Culture was a form whose invention implicated changing forms of political-economic intervention, discourses of cultural renewal, and the literal construction of temple structures, itineraries, and ritual protocol. In this chapter, I will not accuse the inventors of this complex of cynicism. I will analyze another type of power: the structures of complicity through which Mazu Culture became a boundary object that at times appeared to be prior to and wider than the positions from which Taiwanese pilgrims and their Chinese hosts composed it and at other times seemed an object through which these positions, as “interests,” could be scrutinized. This feature of Mazu Culture produced conditions in which sincerity could emerge as a problem. For those composing it, Mazu Culture alternated between being context of action and an immutable object that moved across contexts. This shift in the reality of Mazu Culture followed from the work that those engaged with pilgrimage did with this boundary object. Once set in place, Mazu Culture positioned pilgrim crowds, researchers, and tourists as types of subjects whose relationships to each other and to themselves could be specified and managed. If disputing Taiwanese donor groups were complicit when they agreed on the self-evident reality and importance of ritual propriety, the form of images, architectural motifs, genealogy, and toponyms as objects of knowledge, it was because the formulation of these as problems formed an icon of an imagined moral order and their place in it.1 Similarly, as researchers, disputing temple committees, and planners produced knowledge of Mazu Culture, they

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valorized certain subjects (such as the goddess, the party, or popular will) as agentive, while blackboxing other subjects, placing entire sites of ontological work under ellipses. In spite of this work, which channeled arguments into the framework of Mazu Culture, aggregation was matched by a flow in the opposite direction. The very work of realizing Mazu Culture differentiated it into instances, events, or pilgrimages, all of which threatened the appearance of Mazu Culture as a single, preexisting object. Let’s look at this danger more closely. Those who worked within the framework of Mazu Culture understood it as conventional. However, this status, which suggested that Mazu Culture was merely symbolic, could work against their understanding of Mazu Culture as real. The different meanings that Mazu Culture had across social worlds could make its common form appear arbitrary or fragment it into its component instances. 2 To guard against this fragmentation, those working on Mazu Culture built structures of complicity. Structures of complicity manage complication and channel work on boundary objects to affirm the reality of a common practice. Although the patterns of interference that result threaten to unravel Mazu Culture or cause it to appear monstrous, structures of complicity guard against some of the dangers that proliferating object positions present. That is, because structures of complicity are objects in the world—they are monuments, itineraries, landscapes, images, and votives—the coordination of object positions can be built into their very form. As such, they translate and extend the agency of those engaged with minjian xinyang. The colossal image of Mazu at Meizhou and its twin at Peikang create a landscape in which the relationship between Meizhou and Peikang appears privileged. Nonetheless, structures of complicity have various degrees of freedom. And they cannot always guard against realizations that culture, like colossal images, is merely symbolic. For that reason, they make a problem of sincerity as well as indicating its possibility.

Two Translations In Fujian, the mode of conventionalizing pilgrim itineraries (in contrast to Taiwan) was to translate them through a hegemonic body of statements, those pertaining to “reform and openness” and to the “Great Enterprise of National Unification.” Given the reliance on Taiwanese and Overseas Chinese capital in Fujian’s development, the two discourses were often conflated. Although this translation may appear to


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be a ruse, Taiwanese pilgrimages equally translated gaige kaifang into a necessary and natural process rather than a form of bureaucratic reorganization. As a boundary object, Mazu Culture abetted this translation. While working on different projects, Taiwanese pilgrims provided much of the labor that rendered gaige kaifang normative. In short, Mazu Culture mediated local desires for restoration and Taiwanese competition, naturalized gaige kaifang, and translated Taiwanese competition into truths of an “ethnic subject.” An important organ for the promotion of Mazu Culture, Meizhou Bao, began publication in 1986, following on the heels of another publication named for the city in which the journal was published, Putian. Although the early revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen promoted Meizhou Bay in his economic prescriptions for “saving the nation” in the 1920s, the change of publication name suggests an increased relevance, as if Meizhou were central in the imagination of Putian’s citizens as forming a public. It might at first seem odd that Meizhou could serve as a synecdoche for a public engaged in gaige kaifang. During the 1970s and most of the 1980s, the island was synonymous with backwardness; assignment there was considered a bureaucratic death sentence. An early report from the Meizhou Scenic Area Management Committee (1990: 3) related what had recently been an official litany: you can’t get there, you can’t stay, there’s nothing to eat, you have diarrhea but there’s nowhere to go, there’s nothing to buy, you cannot get around, and you cannot get out (jinbulai, zhubuxia, chibuliao, labubian, goubudao, xingbutong, chubuqu).

Although journalists and party propaganda departments employed the disparity between Meizhou’s underdevelopment and the promise of gaige kaifang to demonstrate the efficacy of party policy, juxtaposition of underdevelopment with Meizhou’s appearance in Sun Yat-sen’s ambitious plans placed gaige kaifang within a broader temporal framework. If Meizhou Bay were not the industrial harbor it could have been, it was a result of historical reasons: military mobilization in the civil war and, later, ten years of far leftist politics. If the founding temple of the Mazu cult had remained, the island would have strengthened its position in the hearts of Taiwanese and Overseas Chinese compatriots. Writers thus employed Mazu Culture to generate truths about popular sentiment and human nature. In this fashion, journalists, scholars, and bureaucrats also worked on restoration of the Zumiao as a concrete component of more encompassing

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projects, such as economic development, righting the mistakes of extreme leftist policies, and the enterprise of national unification, to which Mazu Culture stands as a solution. An outstanding array of local projects could be contained within Mazu Culture’s increasingly expanded rubric. Mazu Culture included bringing electricity to the island, improving transportation infrastructure, solving the drinking water problem, and increasing the number and types of hotel accommodations available on Meizhou. It also encompassed beach development, local women’s dress and hairstyles, aquaculture, a golf course and a yacht club, management of the ferry, regulations for restaurants and souvenir shops, and development of human resources. Mazu Culture channeled the work of this wide set of networks. Mazu Culture expanded as reform consolidated. Meizhou had received national funds for coastal construction (haijian) from 1986 to 1990. Bureaucratic reorganization of the island, which placed its administration in the hands of a management committee directly responsible to the Putian city government, would increase the role of private capital in the island’s development, even as the island and surrounding region were promoted to ever higher status: first, as a provincial SEZ in 1988; finally, as one of 11 National Tourism and Vacation Zones (NTZ) in 1992. The policy instruments that established NTZ, moreover, stipulated that foreign capital should have a dominant role in the development of each NTZ site. Thus, the chair of the Management Committee remarked in 1992 that its principles, in line with the spirit of Deng’s recent Southern Tour Talks, were those of “small government, big society” (Yao Tianji 1992; Meizhou NTZ 1993a: 2). In this context, production of knowledge about Mazu Culture served important purposes. Each description of Mazu Culture reduced bureaucratic agency and made big society visible and agentive. Mazu Culture would be the center of a “multifunctional, comprehensive tourism economic zone” (Chen Guoqiang 1990: 85; Ai Hai 1993). Reiterating this goal in 1993, the Management Committee stressed that it would “strive to construct, within this century, a comprehensive, multifunctional, and outward facing harbor city and international transshipment harbor, with heavy industry, export processing, and tourism industry in a guiding role” (Guo Youwen 1993: 1). This goal presented several problems. How could those working on Mazu Culture strengthen and make evident Meizhou’s local characteristics? Actively employ preferential economic policies? Augment the island’s spiritual and material civilization? As the members of the Management Committee noted, these problems required further reform if Mazu Culture were to fulfill its historic mission. That


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this mission was no less than bringing prosperity to Fujian and serving as a “bridgehead in the struggle for National Unification” (Yao Tianji 1992: 10; Meizhou Committee 1990) increased an impetus toward study and reform within the administration and coordination and pedagogical work without. The visible work of Taiwanese pilgrims substantiated these claims and permitted the erasure of bureaucratic work from the account, again making “big society” visible. Mazu, Goddess of Peace, revealed truths of human nature obscured when her worship was falsely denigrated as feudal superstition. The language that surrounded Mazu Culture stressed that it was a “spiritual bridge” (jingshen qiaoliang) maintained in spite of the political rift between Taiwan and China (Lin Wenhao 1987, 1990; Lin and Lin 1987; Chen and Zhou 1990). Moreover, “Mazu Culture and Mazu worship were planted in the deep soil of the people’s desire for security, their hopes for peace” (Tang Xiaoke 1991: 1). The Putian City PPCC chairman, Lin Wenhao (1987: 2), placed these desires in their political-economic context when he argued that Mazu Culture expressed a desire for peace necessary for the success of the Four Modernizations. 3 These and other statements project contemporary desires into the past through deployment of culture, obviating the bureaucratic contexts in which the objects of these statements were constructed. Thus, Mazu Culture provided a rationale for administrative projects. Shifting between portions of incense ash and images to numbers of pilgrims and projected patterns of development, from realities of political conflict to infrastructural problems, work on Mazu Culture in internal documents, scholarship, and journalism produced truths about popular will and human nature. Although scholars made reference to pilgrim crowds and their products to substantiate these truths, they also made a problem of the remaining forces disposed against peace and development. Under the rubric of Mazu Culture, these forces appear arbitrary and unnatural. Refusal to consider Mazu worship a type of culture, continuing conditions of isolation, disputes among rival sites, and the misunderstandings of Taiwanese and other Overseas Chinese people all impelled further self-criticism, reform, research, building, and coordination. Other truths from other quarters lent reform—and Mazu Culture’s role in it—a sense of immediacy. Although visions of the close of the American Century and the advent of the Asian one had already entered public opinion in Minnan during the late 1980s and early 1990s, natural processes could be, as they had been, derailed for historical reasons. In the late 1980s, this historical context was no longer merely one of class

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conflict, but one of global competition. Chinese people, whether PRC citizens or ethnic Chinese elsewhere, had to compete in a world that global economic forces often disposed against them. Globalization and regionalization will necessarily mobilize Chinese societies worldwide. It will cause them to draw closer together for the purpose of mutual benefit and to ensure their survival and development within a fiercely competitive global market. At different levels and through different methods, they will build relationships of assistance and cooperation. (Lin Qiquan 1992: 57)

In this world of intensive and broadening competition and interconnection, such authors argued, Mazu Culture had the virtue of maintaining relationships among Chinese people otherwise separated by region and language. The integrative role that Mazu Culture played in Taiwan’s development would also serve in the emergence of transnational Chinese subjects, as an unintended consequence of worship. Worshippers felt only a desire to seek good fortune and avoid disaster, but would cultivate a “special sentiment of rootsearching and ancestral remembrance” (Lin Wenhao 1987: 16). Aware of Mazu only as the object of worship, pilgrims would strengthen ethnic identification and patriotic resolve (Lin Qiquan 1992: 58–59). Mazu Culture thus disposed pilgrims toward the truths of human nature that Mazu revealed. It produced a series of epiphanies disclosing a popular will that desired contact, peace, cooperation, and interchange. For reformers, the problem was to enroll and follow this disposition of popular will. Conditions on Meizhou and elsewhere certainly occluded the truths so earnestly sought.4 Work to clarify and realize the substantial meaning of Mazu Culture embraced technical, architectural, and scholarly work. Disaggregated from this work, popular will provided a warrant for the many complementary forms of labor that Mazu Culture enrolled. As one member of the Meizhou Mazu Research Association remarked in an article in 1992, presenting incense did not yet fulfill the function of popular interchange across the Straits, but remained a form of “primitive contact” (Zhou Shiyao 1992: 84). For Mazu Culture to realize its potential, researchers and administrators had important tasks to perform. Popular interchange “awaits the advancement of our level of self-consciousness and the completion of each structural project” (Zhou Shiyao 1992: 84). These descriptions of pilgrimage in the media and bureaucratic accounts produced knowledge through pilgrim crowds; but architectural structures, landscapes, and itineraries fixed this knowledge as truths


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through which gaige kaifang became necessary and against which opposed dispositions appeared as problems. The construction of such objects also enrolled Taiwanese pilgrims, who were engaged in the production of different truths. Their infamous intertemple disputes and gaige kaifang thus formed a common project, even if the commitments each group attempted to fix in itineraries and structures remained distinct. The structures also had to become available to public elaboration. On the one hand, publicity fulfilled journalistic requirements to provide images of a rapidly reforming and developing Fujian active in the enterprise of national unification. On the other hand, with the normalization of pilgrim itineraries, Taiwanese pilgrims could effectively circumvent bureaucratic agencies (such as the Taiwan Affairs Bureau or the local PPCC) that formerly administered pilgrimages. Groups formerly within the bureaucracy, such as travel agencies, also separated from local tourism bureaus to become largely autonomous units. By 1993, PPCC members active in publicizing Mazu Culture through postage stamps or scholarly conferences and journals would lament that Taiwanese pilgrims never contacted them any longer, but preferred to deal with the Zumiao Committee. Their complaints seem off the mark. Did not the PPCC and the NTZ Management Committee remove themselves from direct involvement in Taiwanese pilgrimages? Hadn’t they preferred to write scholarly articles and manage the construction of tourist infrastructures to further the process in which the practices of pilgrims, autonomous and public, could become self-evident problems for independent domains of scholarship or economic planning, now unified by a single, conventional Mazu Culture?

Meizhou Mazu Temple as a Crowd Product Over the course of a few months in 1993, the planning documents for the Meizhou Zumiao obsessed me. Carrying letters of introduction, I visited the PPCC offices, the NTZ Management Committee, the Lippo Group’s Putian offices, the Xiamen City Planning and Design Research Institute, tourism bureau offices at city and provincial levels, and even the provincial television station. At each stop, officials or businessmen either claimed they did not have any copies of the plan in their possession or protested that allowing me to see the plan would be inconvenient. Besides, said one of the officials, the plan was beyond the scope of my research. In my conversations about this elusive object, I developed a sense of what Law (2002) has called “fractional coherence.”

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The plan balanced between the many plans of Taiwanese donors, local alter-publics, and bureaucratic agencies and the single plan to which each referred. Planners attempted to give this possibly monstrous object coherence through descriptions of Meizhou as comprehensive. Through the work of all of these dispersed agents on the plan, it became a boundary object coordinating their work. The Zumiao complex was the subject of at least three successive plans. The Xiamen City Planning and Design Research Institute drew up the most powerful one, in terms of providing an interpretation of the site, in July 1989. According to one source (Chen Guoqiang 1990: 86), the provincial and city construction commissions sponsored these plans with the cooperation of the Zumiao Committee and the city PPCC. By July 1989, however, much of the Zumiao complex had already been completed or at least had begun construction. The disdain for Meizhou’s architecture among members of the Mazu Research Organization suggests that planning was not tightly controlled or coordinated by a single, identifiable agent. Comments from the Zumiao Committee support this inference. When asked about plans, members of the committee responded that “Taiwanese people would come, wanting to build a certain temple, so we would build one for them.” While construction companies hired directly by the temple designed temple buildings, one of the temple chair’s nephews told me, “As for the plan, that should be with Mr. Zhu [a member of the city PPCC] in Putian, or maybe down the road [at the NTZ office]. They had an expert who came and he told us how all the buildings should be.” Rather than viewing the newly reconstructed temple as a complex generated from a single plan, we need to grasp the complicity of several divergent actors. The Zumiao Committee understood the plan to designate a comprehensive document operating from general principles telling them “how the temples should be”; in other words, a prescriptive document devised by cultured people. A plan that specified the distribution of buildings did exist. However, members of the Zumiao Committee determined each structure’s local architectural features. Taiwanese donors also suggested images, decorative objects, and epigraphy. Instead of a single plan, the ancestral temple was constituted through several strata of plans and arguments across these strata. Combination of these strata in one complex defines the Zumiao as a structure of complicity. Each stratum of plans translated the surrounding ones, amplifying the reality of Mazu Culture. Although internally differentiated, the Zumiao was a multiplicity and not merely a “thing of shreds and patches.” In China, the dual lens of economic and political publicity translated Mazu Culture toward state


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projects of reform and openness. Meanwhile, Taiwanese temple organizations wished to gather and move crowds as part of ongoing intertemple disputes. Each rival temple with the requisite financial means to do so was willing to donate to the reconstruction of entire structures. All these positions converged on the figure of crowds and the production of historical truths. The Zumiao emerged as a structure that gathered truth-producing crowds while bracketing out the intentions of those active in temple reconstruction. In the process of becoming a structure of complicity, the temple complex became a crowd product.

Condensation and Differentiation Rebuilding the Zumiao was accompanied by the promotion of spectacular, mass pilgrimages. For Taiwanese temple organizations, the emergence of mass pilgrimages corresponds to their reevaluation of Meizhou. Formerly a site where relics might verify historical claims, Meizhou became a site where donations could demonstrate privileged relationships to the founding temple of the Mazu cult and huge crowds could indicate efficacy. Lukang Tianhou Gong, for example, initially disdained Meizhou for its lack of antiquities. Neither the Cave of the Apotheosis nor an original image, which could have offered proof of Lukang’s claims, survived intact. In Lukang’s 1990 pilgrimage, some pilgrims identified fragmentary relics at Meizhou that resembled objects in a set of photographs that Lukang’s temple managers produced on their 1922 pilgrimage. This discovery added to their conviction that what remained of the authentic Zumiao was currently found in Lukang, not in Meizhou. The Lukang committee argued that even the Meizhou temple seal, said to have survived decades of iconoclastic violence, was copied from a seal in the possession of Lukang Tianhou Gong. Later, the lack of relics became an asset. Meizhou’s importance in intertemple disputes would center on crowds and not history. Means to document pilgrim crowds on Meizhou first followed established modes. Initial reconstruction at Meizhou, which focused on the Sleeping Palace and the Prince’s Palace, gathered donations from many sources in the reconstruction of one building within the temple complex. Donor groups would, as was customary at other temples, attempt to display a privileged relationship to Meizhou through manipulation of images or epigraphic material. The proximity of a votive tablet to the main altar of the Sleeping Palace, for example, could be a sign of intimate connections between Meizhou and a donor group. Alternately,

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one could move a shared image from the donor temple into a preeminent position among the guest images housed at the ancestral site. All these means permitted both condensation of wealth and differentiation among sites as a sign of Mazu’s efficacy. Some cynical observers of the Meizhou Ancestral Temple, such as an artisan in Lukang, who made a pilgrimage in 1995, or one of the temple commissioners at Yunlin Jubao Gong, think of such strategies as an example of how “Taiwanese Compatriots” have become “Duh-wanese Compatriots” (taibao biancheng daibao). Both held that Meizhou’s committee was adept in manipulating human sentiment, moving votive tablets or images into higher positions to give incense guests a sense of intimacy and respect that tugged at their pocketbooks. Yet, in the logic of popular ritual practice in Greater Minnan, there was no shame in the Zumiao’s visible wealth. Without accumulation, the Zumiao would fall into disrepair, becoming cold and lonely— lengchheng—as opposed to naojiat. Temples record and display the “fragrant names” of donors on stelae and on bright red paper posted prominently within temple courtyards. The problem for temple managers is how to control the flow of crowds and the wealth they bring. Condensation is a necessary condition for the construction of the Zumiao as the central source of value in the Mazu cult, but it is not a sufficient one. The temple complex must also permit wealth to retain and even to produce further differentiations within the overarching unity, several “veins” or “flows” (mai) that pilgrimages reproduce as varying in strength or depth. The need to perform both condensation and differentiation would influence the structure of the rebuilt Zumiao complex and its relationship to nearby Mazu centers.

Deferred Conclusions Most founding temples in Fujian continued a conventional mode of gathering wealth, differentiating the status of donors through votive tablets, images, and epigraphy. At Meizhou, this strategy failed because of the intense competition among Taiwanese Mazu temples. In 1987, Tachia arranged for exclusive donorship for the construction of a new gate at what was then the boundary of the temple mount. Exclusive donorship rights were soon extended to construction of discrete buildings or elements within the temple complex. By the outset of the first mass Taiwanese pilgrimages in 1988 and 1989, competition for donorship rights to specific structures in the Zumiao complex often involved subtle attacks on rival donors.


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Those who drafted the 1989 and 1993 plans integrated all structures into a complex of stations that incense guests traverse, providing variable paths through the site. Each station provides standards of evaluation depending on the position of the structure within the complex or on the basis of its historical significance. Thus, the Cave of Apotheosis promised value in spite of its relative invisibility. The Grooming Tower and Chaotian Pavilion commanded a fund of myths. And the giant image planned for the mountain’s summit, facing Taiwan, would magnify the fame of any potential donor. As they rebuilt the Zumiao, Taiwanese temple organizations extended and argued against the implications of Tachia’s 1987 pilgrimage. Tachia went to Meizhou to “share” an image and thus establish a direct link to the Zumiao. If Tachia claimed to flatten a hierarchy in which a few nodal temples on Taiwan claimed positions of privilege, Peikang was first to follow Tachia’s rebellion with a move that would solidify its own role at the apex of Mazu worship on Taiwan. In June 1989, Wu Hsiang of Peikang Chaotian Gong arrived in Meizhou with seven colleagues to discuss donorship. Soon the local media announced Peikang’s decision to fund a 14-meter high granite Mazu to be erected on the temple mount’s summit. The monumental sculpture had been in the planning stage since 1987, when the Mazu Research Association chose Amoy University artist in residence, Li Weisi, to provide a model for the colossus. Planners expected that the statue face outward rather than along the temple complex’s north-south axis. She would not gaze toward Meizhou Bay. Rather than greeting pilgrims from the harbor, the colossal Mazu would face eastward, toward Taiwan. Over the course of negotiations with the Zumiao and the PPCC, Peikang added an unexpected modification. While plans for the temple complex included a single monumental Mazu sculpture to face Taiwan in her role as Goddess of Peace Across the Straits (in other words, Our Lady of Unification), Peikang complicated unificationist messages with competitive ones. As a condition for funding the construction, Peikang commissioned Li Weisi and his team of artisans to produce two mirror image sculptures: one to face Peikang from Meizhou, the other to face Meizhou from Peikang. Thus, Peikang would counter Tachia’s shared image with dual, giant images indexing a privileged relationship to Meizhou. Peikang would become the representative center of Mazu in Taiwan, as Meizhou was for China (and arguably, the entire world). The competitive possibilities of the twin statues interfere with other object positions in which the colossus expresses hope in reunification or appears as a scenic property.

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People in Lukang, who read the competitive messages more readily than the unificationist ones, claimed that the monumental image did not concern them. They enumerated examples of large, historically undistinguished images. A temple in Miaoli County had long billed itself as home of the world’s largest Mazu image. Yet another temple in Ilan County touted the world’s largest Mazu image executed entirely in gold. One could compare none of these images to either the historical importance or efficacy of Lukang’s Foundation Mother, they claimed. What other temple on Taiwan had an image carved from the coffin wood of the historical Mazu, Lin Mo-niang? In case historical verification proved insufficient, the Lukang Tianhou Gong Committee’s response to the monumental sculpture aimed directly at Peikang. In mid-July, the temple committee head concluded negotiations to rebuild Chaotian Pavilion, a shrine within the ancestral temple complex from which a monk was reputed to have carried the Ponkang Mazu, which Peikang and Hsinkang claim as Taiwan’s Founding Mother. Once workers had completed the Chaotian Pavilion structure, Lukang’s committee installed a large-format photograph of Lukang’s Foundation Mother in the ground floor of the tower and settled a replica of the same image on the top story, overlooking the temple complex. This displacement—instead of seeing the Ponkang Mazu in the Chaotian Pavilion one sees the Lukang Foundation Mother—establishes Lukang’s precedence in the Mazu cult and suggests the inauthenticity of claims based on the colossus. In spite of the value that structures promised to donor groups, donors had little control over their final appearance. Clear in the plans that donors consulted were only the formal arrangements of elements. With changes in planning accompanying proclamation of SEZ status at the provincial level in 1988, orientations of buildings in the complex changed, as did the projected path through the complex. Rather than a path from the wharf up steep steps to the temple forecourt, a more extended procession from the wharf would take incense guests around the mountain, then up several sets of wide, granite steps to a fortress gate, and finally to the level of the main temple complex after ascending 323 steps to a large exhibition field. These plans changed again with the Lippo Group’s involvement and the Meizhou Management Committee’s successful application for NTZ status in 1992. At the outset of reconstruction, Lukang Tianhou Gong attempted to influence planning of the reconstructed temple complex by providing photographs and drawings of the Zumiao as it appeared in the 1920s. A local historian on Lukang’s management committee in the early 1990s


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recalled that “The Zumiao committee just took money from each group. If you wanted to build a structure, they would build you a Chaotian Pavilion; for someone else, they would build a Grooming Tower, and so on. The building of these was chaotic, without consideration of the original structure.” However, rebuilding at Meizhou did fold into a single complex the multiple demands placed on the site, translating these demands within architectural structures. Worshippers throughout Fujian began to visit the temple by the late 1980s. The Zumiao Committee encouraged this local constituency through rebuilding in contemporary vernacular versions of traditional architecture. Temple structures resembled those constructed by newly prosperous families in Quanzhou and Putian. The Zumiao Committee also recognized competitive patterns of Taiwanese donorship and ensured reconstruction of a series of discrete structures each funded by a single donor group. The PPCC and NTZ management committee recognized the demands for scenery and cultural interest that secular tourists would bring to the island. In this fashion, different strata of plans formed around different publics. As pilgrims donated to rebuild the site, wealth condensed and differentiated through the temple under the sign of Mazu’s efficacy. Planners, meanwhile, defined their role around the gathering and movement of crowds, attempting to provide transcendent meanings: Mazu’s role as a cultural “bridge” and her new title as “Goddess of Peace across the Straits.” Each stratum of plans amplified the Zumiao, condensing several constituencies while never reducing them to a single identity. These constituencies in turn extended their own agency through the Zumiao, even as their intentions often remained opposed. I found it curious that Lukang Tianhou Gong chose to rebuild the Chaotian Pavilion rather than the Cave of Apotheosis. Some sentiment for restoring this structure was prevalent among members of Lukang’s committee. One member of the Lukang committee, Mr. Cheng, noted that, of all sites, the temple management at Meizhou should have restored the Cave of Apotheosis according to Lukang’s photograph collection. However, no photograph can make visible the structure’s most important quality: its internal dimensions. Thus, the restoration highlights the impossibility of verification. One could no longer prove claimants to Foundation Mother status by attempting to fit images, like so many feet in Cinderella’s forgotten glass slipper, into the cave. Destruction of the cave ensured that Meizhou could not prove the precedence of Lukang’s image, or of any other. Hence, Meizhou could become a field in which competition among Taiwanese temples could play out continuously,

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through the ultimate deferral of a conclusion. Perhaps a Chaotian Pavilion rebuilt through funds from Lukang was more useful than the Cave of Apotheosis could ever be: by serving as a node for mass pilgrimages, it would continually feed the gathering of crowds and the production of publicity.

Communications: Complications of a Plan Mazu Culture formed within the boundary of local initiatives for economic development and attempts on the part of opposed donor groups, scholars, and officials to fabricate historical truths. Its realization required coordination of interfering positions that threatened incoherence. Planning is a bid at coordination of a particular type. Planning documents serve as powerful boundary objects that outline the roles of various elements and actants in the composition of a project. Thus, planning makes performative gestures that, when felicitous, establish possibly divergent positions as perspectives on a single object. It communicates less information than it attempts to specify horizons of meaning in which communication can occur. It is interesting in this regard that the planner’s vision of Meizhou centered on “communications” (jiaotong), as planners attempted to interpellate believing, enjoying, and managing subjects into a comprehensive horizon. Jiaotong differs from “communication” in American English because of the width of the Chinese term’s semantic field, which we may gloss under the parallel terms transportation and contact.5 The breadth of jiaotong’s meanings was one reason why planners could translate a wide variety of concerns into development at Meizhou. In this process of translation, planners guaranteed the site’s coherence, which threatened to become lost in the fragmentary patterns of donorship and bureaucratic commitments. Through attention to communication, Meizhou could become comprehensive (zonghexing). The “comprehensive” plan attempted to define the parameters of complicity. In their work, planners augmented the potential of the jiaotong rubric. They explicitly related architectural features to the movement and display of crowds. General organization, as well as specific architectural elements, intended to communicate to pilgrims and tourists messages about the deity in her nationalized epiphany as Goddess of Peace Across the Straits. Yet plans for the temple complex also projected a number of paths leading crowds to circulate through a central exhibition field. Rather than defining these crowds as pilgrims, plans specified the island’s multiple functions. When planners introduced multifunctionality, they


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stressed the wide variety of communications the island should support. Secular tourists would visit Meizhou for sightseeing, beach holidays, or golf. Multinational capital would invest. Officials would meet for conferences and receptions. Taiwanese and Overseas Chinese would come as pilgrims. Each communicative form corresponded to a specific type of subject with specific needs and agendas. Multifunctionality required that planning calibrate the simultaneous movements of each type of subject and their medium of communication, each coordinated as a set of localized functions. Although these could be mapped across the island and the surrounding bay as discrete functional zones, the central exhibition field and giant image provided focal points where functions intertwined under the auspices of Mazu Culture. Investment, sightseeing, pilgrimage, and even scholarly conferences could each make appearances on the exhibition field. Multifunctionality was thus not a matter of zoning as much as it was the coordination of multiple modes of communication, the simultaneous movements of different subjects that together constituted Meizhou. These multifunctional, simultaneous movements make up the body of communications and compose minjian xinyang as culture. Para-state and state organizations assigned the entire Zumiao complex to folkloristic functions, giving it nodal status in relation to other functional zones, each augmenting and adding interest to a site centered on folk religious intercourse. Such augmentation aimed at expanding Meizhou’s demographic base of tourists. NTZ regulations further required that each functional zone reflect local characteristics, here offered to tourists as a decorative element conveying the unity of the site within Mazu Culture. These decorative elements reduced local characteristics to the status of a symbolic marker resolving potential contradictions among the site’s functions. Thus, minjian xinyang became a diacritic through which one recognized the site’s identity (or integrity). From a purely functional standpoint, all NTZ were equivalent; but identity survived in an architectonic tag conveying a minimal distinction. Repeated across functional zones, the decorative element maintained the consistency of communication. The newly built temple complex produced a space for communication across multiple functions, linked together through minjian xinyang as the form in which each function expressed its particular value within the set of media, linkages, and zones making up the NTZ development. This system already suggests the projection of folklore into an almost exclusively visual medium. With the advent of mass pilgrimages, minjian xinyang became increasingly spectacular. Minjian xinyang already

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pointed to the appearance of the crowd as a source of value. Now in the spaces informed by the concept, planners embarked on a radical reorganization of temple structures where crowds would achieve an expressive visibility. The model of such architectural spaces was first and foremost the exhibition field. Planners for the Zumiao complex made explicit reference to exhibition fields in their 1989 document. Their “guiding philosophy” (zhidao sixiang) stipulated that planning should “respect the historical development of the site and its contemporary situation . . . and emphasize that Mazu is a deified human” (Chen Guoqiang 1990: 86). This did not mean that the temple complex should be rebuilt according to its previous layout, a strategy impossible to pursue in 1989. Concretely, the planners’ response to the charge was to construct the site as a “trilogy” through which crowds would move. Of the three steps followed by pilgrims, the second is the exhibition field, reached through a gate explicitly modeled on the form of the gate from which Beijing’s famous exhibition field borrows its name: Tiananmen (Chen Guoqiang 1990: 87). One can hardly think it coincidence that planners chose Tiananmen as a model, even though its form violates the prescription that elements of the temple complex express local characteristics. In response to such objections, they claimed that the ancestral temple of Mazu, “Sacred Mother of Heaven,” should have an imperial grandeur. The importance of this architectural allusion is deeper than an imperial motive, however. It follows from the centrality of the exhibition field, reached after 323 steps from the gate, in accord with the date in the lunar calendar of Mazu’s birthday: the 23rd day of the third month. For Tiananmen is China’s exhibition field. Carved from what had been an enclosed area for imperial processions, Tiananmen was gradually converted into a space for popular gatherings throughout the Republican period in a process of difficult negotiations (Strand 1989). After Mao proclaimed the People’s Republic to crowds assembled there in 1949, Tiananmen Square became the object of concerted urban planning to secure the site as one where a national public could be displayed as well as imagined. Chairman Mao’s words on October 1, 1949 were “The Chinese people have stood up!” Historians, urban planners, and poets thus celebrated the site as the architectural expression not of the Ming emperors who built it to exclude the masses but of a popular will that had now gained ascendancy. Addition of the Revolutionary Memorial and the tomb of Mao Zedong were final steps in the transformation of the site from a ritual enclosure for the production of imperial power to an exhibition field for making visible the people, formerly occulted in the forms of


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imperial architecture, as the subject of history (Hou and Wu 1977; Wu Hong 1991). Taking Tiananmen Square as a model for Meizhou’s exhibition field completed in the realm of architecture what had already begun to inform the use of folklore in mass media and scholarly accounts. At the Zumiao, the exhibition field was the central area where all potential paths through the complex met. It served as a magnet and a circulator, drawing crowds and making them visible as the crowd, evidence of shared culture and popular will. This construction transformed temple architecture and pilgrimages, as a set of photographs from Lukang’s 1922 pilgrimage to Meizhou illustrates. In these photographs, no giant Mazu image gazes across the Straits toward Taiwan. Neither is there any large open area for the crowd to become visible as an exhibit. Instead, the temple appears as a mass of dark, twisted paths and concave roofs linked by narrow stairways and stone platforms. Crowds could gather here, becoming naojiat, but they were not photographable. On their 1922 pilgrimage, wanting to photograph themselves within the temple complex, Lukang’s temple commissioners brought large mirrors to project light into the Zumiao’s dark spaces and deep roofs. In contrast, the temple structure in 1992 was open to light and visibility. The exhibition field presented pilgrim crowds as subjects for mass media. The exhibition field frames several of the standard photographic views of the temple. Planning grounded specific structures, such as the Sleeping Palace or Chaotian Pavilion, against the negative space of the exhibition field or mountain, causing temple structures and crowds to emerge as figures. In turn, the exhibition field produces an oscillation of visual reference from the crowd to the temple and back to the crowd. Both attain a figural quality. One sees either the crowd circulating through the space of the temple or the temple emerging from the expanse of the crowd. Moreover, in this new architecture, photographers and videographers can create images of crowds in movement. The new visibility of temple structures and crowd provided new demonstrations of efficacy, ritual precedence, and meaning, possible now that architecture situated the pilgrim crowd as spectacle. Places where destruction had not been so thoroughgoing as at Meizhou would also develop exhibition fields. Exhibition fields replaced, at least terminologically, temple mouths (bio khao; m: miao kou), those open areas in front of temples for producing theatrical spectacles, performing rituals, and holding banquets. In Taiwan, a temple mouth generally connotes a formal or informal market. If an efficacious temple, it should

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be one of the most naojiat places in town. But the noisy-hot press of crowds produces whorls and eddies of exchanges that counteract the visual staging of the crowd. Often dirty, seemingly chaotic, and potentially violent, the gestures of crowds in temple mouths do not conform to official demands for celebrations that are civilized, hygienic, secure, and orderly. On Meizhou, these demands led to the creation of internal teams within the management committee responsible for keeping peddlers off the central exhibition field during birthday celebrations for Mazu in 1993 (Meizhou NTZ 1993c: 3). Otherwise, activity in temple mouths had the potential to occlude the symbolic figure through which Mazu Culture was unified. In Quanzhou, to take another example, planning for the restoration of the city’s twelfth-century Islamic mosque suggested demolition of surrounding structures to create a preservation zone. A large portion of the projected preservation zone is a paved, open area for viewing the mosque and Confucian Temple as paired monuments of Quanzhou culture (Du Xianzhou1991: 107–108). As at Meizhou, culture came to reside within a visual medium. The Quanzhou City Construction Commission’s planning initiatives, with the collaboration of other government agencies and private businesses, transformed Kaiyuan Si’s East and West pagodas into urban symbols printed on everything from official stationery to underwear. The potential of the monument’s visual profile to circulate broadly yet so intimately derives from the pagodas’ reproduction across multiple media, which relies on abstraction from surrounding urban space. Historical preservation law interdicted buildings that obstruct sightlines to the pagodas from nearby scenic mountains. Additional planning, completed in 1993, further stipulated that buildings along nearby roads conform to visual regulations. Without these regulations, advocates of historical preservation in Quanzhou feared that the city’s identifying features would vanish among the white-tile high-rises and flashy facades that now dominate much of the southern Fujian landscape. As a temple mouth, the space in front of temples served to gather people. It mattered little whether one could see the crowd or temple as long as one could link the pair in the circular logic of efficacy. This logic relied on the partibility of incense ash. It depended upon naojiat rather than spectacle and photographic reproducibility. In Hsinchu, a city in northern Taiwan, for example, the city god temple disappears within the surrounding market. Images of the city god peer out over tables and past people eating glutinous rice dumplings from fluorescent orange bowls. In contrast, when the rubric of folkloric history replaced temple mouths


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with exhibition fields at Meizhou and other Chinese sites, the crowd and temple became visible within communicative structures that employed techniques perfected under Mao. The crowd, exhibited to itself as well as to others, sees in itself the expression of an external referent: folklore, ethnicity, or culture. It is a strange form of ecstasy, complicit with the logic of efficacy that it augments.

From Bureaucratic Elaboration to Elaborated Publicity In a related process, Taiwanese travel to China shifted during the 1990s from an elaboration at the level of bureaucracy to elaboration at the level of publicity. This changing form of elaboration sheds light on the normalization of minjian xinyang as culture in Minnan. For Taiwanese pilgrims, normalization permitted a new focus on itineraries as symbolic and available within the rhetoric of intertemple competition. Previously contained within bureaucratic elaboration, itineraries emerged as items in a public lexicon of statements concerning history, authenticity, or ethnic sentiment. Chou, a Taipei businessman active in a number of civic organizations, frequently traveled in China.6 Taking advantage of a 1978 meeting in Japan, Chou was able to begin his research into family history, a pursuit that he has followed through nearly three decades, scores of trips to sites in Jiangsu and Henan as well as Fujian, and several filing systems. When I met him in 1992, nearly direct flights to Xiamen and Fuzhou routed travelers daily through Hong Kong and Manila. Itineraries had changed greatly since his first visit. In 1978, Deng Xiaoping had not yet ushered in the era of reform and openness. However, more intrepid Taiwanese people could enter China, provided they stayed in Japan a few days waiting for their applications for Taiwanese Compatriot Entrance Visas to clear. From Japan, travelers would book passage to Beijing—or Beiping, as Chou called the city— and wait for the Taiwan Affairs Office to designate assigned companions, determine an itinerary, and notify relatives. On Chou’s first visit to Hui’an, his itinerary was the product of considerable scrutiny by Taiwanese affairs offices, United Front bureaus, PPCC organizations, and tourism bureaus at national, provincial, and local levels. Unlike the typical account of Taiwanese pilgrimage, which follows the migratory routes of one’s ancestors, Chou’s itinerary followed the hierarchical divisions created by bureaucratic segmentation: from

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the national capital Beijing, to the provincial seat Fuzhou, to the prefectural city Quanzhou, to Hui’an County, and finally to his father’s home village. Successive bureaucracies cleared his travel at every level in advance, and with each change of jurisdiction, new members joined an already large entourage. Officials assigned to Chou’s case arranged for his meeting with family members, supervised and coordinated banquets, and secured lodgings and transportation. In 1978, tour agencies were not yet autonomous. The route, the vehicles, and guides were not assigned within a single office, but required the coordination of several units, who passed Chou’s information, reports on vehicle requisitions, and official companion assignments for a Taiwanese Compatriot from office to office. In this bureaucratic itinerary, documentary evidence of Chou’s journey acquired the obligatory signatures, marginal notations, intra-office reports, and red stamps from all relevant units on standardissue, translucent paper in multiple copies. Yet, in 1994, Chou told me that his 1978 trip to Hui’an was invisible. The KMT did not permit China visits before late 1987. To circumvent possible trouble on returning to Taiwan, Chinese authorities provided visitors with detachable booklets for entrance and exit permits. Visitors could remove these from passports, destroying them before arrival at Chiang Kai-shek International Airport. In China, Taiwanese visitors created paper trails within bureaucratic units, but no one publicized their visits. Physical evidence of Taiwanese visits was filed away into archives, to become internal documents (neibu ziliao). The situation of factional politics was still unclear, particularly at the local level. Bureaucrats, as well as travelers, had little to gain in publicizing an event whose status remained ambiguous. Pilgrimages were strangely private, locked away in the secretaries and bureaus of agencies that coordinated visits as a matter of containment. Initial bureaucratic assignment of many Fujianese temples displays a similar elaboration. Formation of scenic area administration zones and temple committees through the coordination of People’s Political Consultative Conference, United Front, tourism bureau, and cultural bureau agencies encouraged the creation of new para-state units tailored to temple administration within an inter-bureaucratic versus a massmediated public. The eventual shift from bureaucratic elaboration to elaboration at the level of publicity was part of a process of complicity among temple organizations, the local state, and Taiwanese donors. This process created conditions for mass pilgrimages in the late 1980s, as did an official shift toward publicity in engaging KMT policy on cross-Straits relations. Although limited direct travel between Quemoy


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and coastal areas of Fujian would not be a reality until 2003, wharf construction for a Meizhou-Taichung ferry line began in earnest in 1990, accompanied by calls in the PRC media for direct travel.7 Taiwanese temples, for whom the media had long been a terrain for intertemple controversies, abetted these calls even as they scrutinized itineraries in their arguments about ritual propriety. Mass pilgrimages, with their elaboration of publicity, contributed greatly to the process in which minjian xinyang became conventional. They also placed the sincerity of pilgrims and their hosts under greater scrutiny.

Tachia: From Clandestine to Mass-Mediated Pilgrimage Tachia’s widely publicized 1987 pilgrimage to Meizhou, situated between bureaucratic and mass-mediated versions of a public, reveals how mass mediation informed Taiwanese pilgrimages through the mid-1990s. When Tachia’s commissioners performed their groundbreaking pilgrimage to Meizhou, the Taiwanese mass media had already been covering intertemple disputes surrounding the 1000th anniversary of Mazu’s apotheosis. Because crowds served as evidence of a temple’s legitimacy in these disputes, Taiwanese temple committees would favor mass pilgrimages. Nonetheless, much of Tachia’s 1987 pilgrimage to Meizhou remained clandestine. In contrast to later mass pilgrimages, Tachia’s 1987 pilgrim group was relatively restricted. Only 16 people participated. All were members of Tachia’s board of trustees. Tachia did not publicize or even plan the itinerary in advance. The itinerary was primarily the product of bureaucratic elaboration. Tachia’s committee filed away its encounters with Chinese officials, which took most of the group’s time on the road. By 1992, this record of the itinerary was lost; the only planning documents for pilgrimages available in Tachia’s temple archive were those from subsequent pilgrimages, when publicity had begun to displace bureaucratic elaboration. Although absent during the journey to Meizhou, the media were never far away. On hand in Meizhou were reporters from Renjian magazine, a unificationist if opposition-leaning geographic journal, who also traveled to China through semilegal means.8 Tachia’s pilgrimage would become highly publicized—perhaps too much so, say the temple commissioners—but the temple commissioners planned and executed the pilgrimage in secret. Newspaper reports of the event did not circulate

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until the group’s return. The Renjian article did not appear until nearly three months later, in December. The commissioners’ 1987 itinerary formed through a number of bureaucratic entanglements. One of Tachia’s commissioners took Tachia Zhenlan Gong’s Third Mother image to Japan on October 21, where he began to contact Chinese agencies and purchased plane tickets for the other 15 members of the group. On October 25, he met the other temple commissioners. They flew with the image from Osaka to Shanghai on October 27. In Shanghai, the group made further arrangements with the national Taiwan Affairs Office, which assigned a representative to Tachia’s group. The group traveled from Shanghai to Fuzhou, and then to Quanzhou, where the chair of Tianfei Gong arranged for the Third Mother image to be sent in advance to Meizhou, so the Third Mother could spend the night at “her mother’s house.” When the group arrived in Putian, members of the city People’s Political Consultative Conference, the Taiwan Affairs Office, and the Putian Tourism Bureau joined the national representatives already accompanying the group. Public Security Bureau members were also on hand to clear the yet incomplete road of bicycles and ox-drawn carts, helping the trustees’ diesel-fueled bus to lurch down the dirt track to Wenjia Harbor, where they would take a fishing boat to Meizhou Island. The trustees felt grateful for such accommodations. Many Taiwanese pilgrims to Meizhou in 1987 and 1988 had to contend with local three-wheel trucks, which sputtered along the route up one hill and down another where, at the village limits, one needed to switch to another vehicle. Nevertheless, some of the trustees got carsick. At least they had not eaten breakfast. Their hardships have not inspired admiration of their piety more than they have encouraged construction of improvements, such as development of better roads, modernization of the ferry, and creation of a tourist infrastructure. By 1993, former assigned companions for the Tachia commissioners had left the Putian Tourism Bureau and operated a semiprivate travel agency specializing in travel to Meizhou. To pilgrims who stayed away because of inconvenience, they stressed the relative ease of travel. To others who had political reservations, they highlighted their own business; now that most of those accommodating pilgrims were minjian (private) rather than official units, pilgrimage had been “purified.” These developments suggest that as Mazu Culture formed, privatization accompanied bureaucratic elaboration. Folded into pilgrimages, both form part of the collective history of minjian xinyang. For Tachia’s commissioners, although bureaucratic elaboration surrounded the passage to Meizhou, other details of the pilgrimage required


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judgments of ritual propriety. Appropriate images for the passage, the timing and duration of one’s stay, and qualities of coals and incense ash all became matters of publicity. In late October 1987, performance groups organized and began to practice for a procession in Tachia. People in town secured theater groups and mobile striptease floats, engaged caterers, rented round tables and stools, and bought disposable red tablecloths and crates of beer for banquets. Application forms for a procession sailed through the police office, for many local political figures sat on the temple committee. A strange silence surrounded the reason for the procession. It did not fall on the 1000th anniversary of Mazu’s apotheosis. And where did the temple trustees go? Townspeople prepared to meet a guest yet unknown. Only on their return did the trustees reveal that the occasion was the Third Mother’s return from a visit to “Mother’s Old Home.” Then the Third Mother and the newly acquired Meizhou Ma toured Tachia in a single palanquin. Publicity surrounding the 1987 pilgrimage rendered Tachia visible while leaving Meizhou largely obscured, a hidden source of value. Like many Taiwanese temples to follow, Tachia’s trustees carried a subsidiary image and not their temple’s Foundation Mother. Temple trustees worried that the Meizhou Zumiao would demand that Tachia relinquish its Foundation Mother, certainly older and more efficacious than Meizhou’s current image. After all, narratives of stealing images are stock descriptions of how temples acquire their efficacy. And what if the Foundation Mother decided to remain in Meizhou? This decision to carry an image not shared from Meizhou, however, might disqualify the pilgrimage. An image not from Meizhou could not return there except as a proxy. Circumventing this objection, coverage of Tachia’s pilgrimage focused on the thin, pink face of the new Meizhou mother, whose features contrasted with most Taiwanese depictions of the goddess as distinguished and grandmotherly. Tachia’s published account of the event (Guo Jin-lan 1988) highlighted a pattern in which the Meizhou image attracted attention but the passage to Meizhou remained invisible. Ceremonies following the return of temple trustees form the most detailed section of the account (Guo Jinlan 1988: 93–104). Another detail demonstrates how other questions of ritual propriety entered into publicity: In order to fulfill the requirements of “returning to Mother’s Old Home” the pilgrims arranged a way for the Third Mother to arrive a day earlier than themselves, so that the image could spend the night of 30th October in the Temple. (Guo Jinlan 1988: 95)

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Like a married daughter, who can choose to return to her mother’s home for brief visits, Tachia had a daughter’s share in Meizhou Mazu’s efficacy. To underscore this point, Tachia’s photographs from the 1987 pilgrimage show temple commissioners passing images over the Zumiao’s incense censer, marking the images as directly shared from Meizhou. These photographs suggest the forms of publicity that would displace bureaucratic elaboration. As Tachia’s commissioners worked on and circulated photographs of images, incense ash, and itineraries, they limited the scope of their practices to traditional forms, bracketing out the political work necessary for their pilgrimage. In this fashion, elaboration in publicity obviates minjian xinyang’s relationship to bureaucratic agency. Pilgrimage thus appeared as tradition.

Propriety and Recognition Tradition imposes strictures, but discussions of these strictures—what vehicles, architectural elements, and itineraries are appropriate, what crowds and what representatives, what elements or itineraries may be replaced or transposed—underscore that tradition is a particularly modern genre. At least, these discussions render tradition fragile, more susceptible to countercontextualization than likely to emerge through it. The problem is not so much that tradition is invented as much as it is the pervasive requirement that tradition create a referential chain to the past while obviating the extensive networks and anachronistic technologies that make tradition appear. When challenged, tradition often reveals a body of interests. Thus, the critical impulse commonly employed in anthropological work asks questions of tradition that catch critique within tradition’s own rhetoric. Here, as elsewhere, critique does less to investigate complicity than to reproduce it. To demonstrate this point, I will examine the jeremiads of those who consider contemporary pilgrimage an affront. A member of two temple committees in Lukang whom I will call Mr. Cheng often complained that there were no true pilgrimages to China these days: “No,” he said, in response to my resistance. “Not even by our Lukang people. All of those activities were naojiat stirred up by tourist agencies.” Cheng studied at Taichu #1 High School during the 1930s.9 During the Pacific War, he avoided military service by attending college in Japan. He belonged to a small group of elderly temple committee members who often gathered at Tianhou Gong to watch television and drink tea. All of them spoke Japanese fluently. Cheng was also a notable local historian and folklorist. His stature in town tempted me to dismiss his


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disparaging comments as the grumblings of one of Lukang’s famously conservative elders. Surely there was evidence that many of the several hundred pilgrims were sincere. To fortify his statements, Cheng pointed to the many publications around Lukang that advertised the pilgrimage. He also questioned the timing and the mass basis of pilgrimage: He saw both as revealing interests beyond Mazu’s fame. All exposed the role of travel agencies in its planning. Indeed, the chairman of one of these travel agencies was none other than an erstwhile temple committee chair. The travel agencies offered customized itineraries ranging from a 5-day tour, which would minimally cover the pilgrimage, to a 15-day tour, which took members of the pilgrim group to Beijing, Hangzhou, Huang Shan, and Shanghai. Similarly, Tachia’s planning documents for pilgrimages in 1988, 1990, and 1994 list travel agencies that transported participants on separate tours. Cheng claimed that people did not go to present incense but out of curiosity. Alternately, they wanted to travel but did not feel it appropriate without visiting Mazu as well. Cheng was not alone in his description of today’s incense guests as people for whom modern forms of consumption had to be disguised as tradition. A young man who accompanied his mother on the 15-day tour concurred with Cheng’s remarks. Their qualifications of pilgrimage remind us that we cannot always keep enjoying and believing subjects separate. These subject positions form not in isolation but often through the practices of people who cross from one subject position to the other. Whether this connection between the two subject positions is trivial or the source of problems depends ultimately on the mode through which one produces knowledge of, or forms as an ethical subject through, pilgrimage. Inasmuch as Mr. Cheng wants to make a problem of the commercialization of tradition in Lukang, he is bound to discover the interests of travel agencies. For the young man’s mother, in contrast, the travel agency might serve to render a desire to become an enjoying subject coherent with her role as a female head of household. As someone charged with economic management of an extended family as well as ritual work to safeguard family fortunes, she would likely view travel without pilgrimage as a wasteful expense. Pilgrimage here serves as a source of enjoyment and a sign that she remains responsible to her family.10 It allows her to bracket out her desire to be an enjoying subject even as it allows her to form as one. Mr. Cheng also underscored that the contemporary practice of making three consecutive annual visits had no historical basis. Three annual pilgrimages were an innovation of travel agencies capitalizing on the

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sincerity valued by pilgrims. In contrast, Cheng listed pilgrimages Lukang Tianhou Gong made to Meizhou during the 200 years before 1989: Qianlong 52 (1787), Jiaqing 22 (1817), Guangxu 7 (1881), Minguo 5 (1916), and Minguo 11 (1922). In each case before 1989, the temple embarked on pilgrimages to commemorate an important event in temple history. Tianhou Gong presented incense only after a successful restoration of the Lukang temple or in tandem with major renewal ceremonies. Both required remembrance of Lukang’s relationship to the Zumiao. If presenting incense was a relatively infrequent event before 1989, it was also a greatly restricted one. For the Japanese colonial period, we have sufficient documentation, including both oral histories and photographs, to contrast a pilgrimage taken by a few of Lukang’s temple managers in 1922 to those the temple organized in the 1990s. This contrast, for Cheng at least, points to the impurity of a contemporary pilgrimage complex. It also demonstrates the role of mass media in creating traditional spectacles. By 1922, the Japanese authorities had already closed Lukang harbor to commercial traffic. In response, the pilgrimage traveled overland to Keelung, where it was possible to sail directly to Quanzhou. The temple managers stayed in Quanzhou several days, where they rented photographic equipment and hired porters. Documentation of the pilgrimage was important in light of the emergence of Peikang as a major pilgrimage center, which depended on the railway system that made Lukang’s harbor redundant. Apart from the photographers and porters, no one accompanied the eight men on their pilgrimage. Cheng described the 1922 pilgrimage as difficult and time consuming, in contrast to the indulgent present. “You couldn’t just go there in a day or two by plane and deluxe bus,” he said. Time and financial constraints rendered Meizhou inaccessible to most people beneath the censer until recently. Photographs from the 1922 pilgrimage show that great crowds did meet the temple managers and the image but not in Meizhou. Documents at Lukang, as well as at other temples, show that pilgrimages to China during the Japanese colonial period enrolled crowds only at the send-off and return of images, which a small group of representatives carried to ancestral temples. In 1922, these crowds assembled on the return of Lukang’s Presenting Incense Mother at Takao (Kaohsiung) Harbor, where the image began its procession back to Lukang. This pattern contrasts with mass pilgrimage circuits associated with passenger railways, which began to focus on Peikang during the 1920s and with Taiwanese pilgrimages to China in the 1990s.


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Pilgrimages to China in the 1990s were mass phenomena. Pilgrim groups often included several hundred, if not thousands of, participants, groups whose uniforms and pennants filled temple complexes in China with bands of bright color, heat, and bustle. Contemporary pilgrimage made the traditional accessible to a wider number of people than previously imaginable. The persistence of tradition owed its promotion to modern communications, including both mass media and transportation. Canny temple committee members are not, of course, the only responsible agents of this elaboration of pilgrimage. The logic of intertemple disputes certainly was a factor, as was the failing KMT project of representing China, which in programs for Chinese Cultural Renaissance mobilized the public for the recuperation of tradition. If pilgrimages appear as traditional, they do so as the countercontextualization of KMT projects, an index of their (successful) failure. Hence, we might choose, like Mr. Cheng, to bring the responsibility of travel agencies back into our frame of reference, but for a different purpose. Rather than debunking pilgrimage as impure, we can see in mass pilgrimages a collective history of tradition. The proliferation of itineraries offered by travel agencies made presenting incense a spectacle of communications. Although these forms of communication threatened to erode tradition, one could avoid this outcome if one subjected itineraries, media, and conveyances to the logic of popular ritual rather than that of interests. In this fashion, transportation became a matter of ritual scrutiny and rhetorical effect. Ritual propriety is as much a quality of the image as it is a feature of memory. In the past, argue those associated with major Taiwanese Mazu temples, only a few temples could present incense to Meizhou. These temples were revealed by the form of their Founding Mother images, which corresponded to features of the founding temple. During the pilgrimage boom of the late 1980s, however, the original structure of the founding temple had long since disappeared. Many Taiwanese temples, which Mr. Lee, a member of the Lukang committee, called “highly commercialized,” claimed that they were directly shared from Meizhou, often sharing off a new image. Yet, in the context of the pilgrimage boom, their claims were devalued. “If you say you have one new Meizhou Ma,” explained Lee, “I have seven of them.” On the other hand, the (im)propriety of presenting incense to Meizhou inheres even in the new images. The difference, then, is not in the relative propriety of an itinerary but in the interests that seem to inform it: a new image can only indicate an intention to circumvent the hierarchy of Taiwanese nodal sites.

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Other temple committees would argue about conveyances. They claimed that only the specific manner in which they traveled was the correct one. For the transfer of efficacy from a highly valued site to another site to occur, the separating fires ritual must cause the incense smoke of the pilgrim temple and that of the pilgrimage site to intertwine. Pilgrims must also acquire live coals from the pilgrimage site or, minimally, maintain an unbroken chain of incense from pilgrimage site to the home temple. Mass pilgrimages of the late 1980s and early 1990s could rarely fulfill these requirements. Either the personnel at the Chinese temple did not have the requisite ritual knowledge, or security requirements surrounding travel demanded that the fires be extinguished. Thus, the coordinators of Yunlin Jubao Gong’s 1993 pilgrimage to Quanzhou argued that their itinerary, by boat from Taiwan to Macao where they transferred again by boat to Amoy, was the only authentic mode of presenting incense possible. Pilgrimage by airplane could not directly transmit incense fires and thus failed. From this rigorous perspective, very few pilgrimages would have the intended effect. Jubao Gong and other temples attempted a direct transmission of efficacy when only indirect travel was possible. In doing so, they worked on tradition, incense, transportation, and intertemple competition, which were all intersecting realms of the boundary object: Taiwanese pilgrimage. Similarly, attempts to reconfigure hierarchies of Taiwanese temples, arguments about ritual propriety, and bids to define the substantial meaning of pilgrimage redistributed the object positions that constitute Mazu Culture. When successful, these arguments fixed the reality of Mazu Culture as an object, just as the Zumiao formed one horizon of pilgrim crowds becoming a public. This horizon also grounds a set of statements we may call performatives, but that we might also describe as expressions of hope in a future state of affairs—“now we have the most direct relationship to Meizhou,” “we have a shared culture,” “pilgrimage will push forward cross-Straits exchange and reform.” In this sense, planners, alter-publics, and pilgrims constructed the “substance of things hoped for” through their ongoing complicity in projects to rebuild the Zumiao and other sites. Complicity was the source of good faith and its possible undoing. Some of the language that surrounded Taiwanese pilgrimage conveys a sense of the anxieties provoked by work on Mazu Culture. Observers on both sides of the Straits often described Taiwanese pilgrimage as a “fever” (re, literally “heat”). “Presenting incense fever,” “root-searching fever,” “mainland fever,” and “Mazu fever” formed common diagnoses


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of mass pilgrimages. Fever connotes an overheating that trumps reason, a compulsion that overcomes one’s better judgment, and a real possibility of chaos. Planners, scholars, and bureaucrats worked on Mazu Culture, aware that this boundary object threatened disorder. Those creating structures of complicity faced a double bind. They had to sustain fever rather than stifle it. At the same time, structures of complicity had to channel fever toward recognition of a shared project, if not the substantial meaning of pilgrimage. Recognition, of course, required work. It launched an entire pedagogy of increased comprehension and self-consciousness that was embedded into the very form of structures. No doubt, recognition assumed that some truths were both self-evident and normative. But what did one have to externalize for these truths to appear? Those inventing Mazu Culture erased the conditions of its production: planners toiling over drafting tables, political-economic calculations, and poisonous disputes that figured in the collective history in which Mazu Culture became real. Instead of evoking bureaucratic reorganization and elaboration, Mazu Culture became a sign within a communicative structure, a property of the people on both sides of the Straits. No longer indicating the conditions of its production, Mazu Culture would begin to generate truths of history and human nature. These truths would not hold were they not to appear, seemingly spontaneously, from the practices that incense guests brought to pilgrimages. For this reason, structures of complicity are limited.11 Like Mr. Cheng or the pilgrims from Jubao Gong, pilgrims or their hosts could employ elements of Mazu Culture to place other people under scrutiny or to suggest that Mazu Culture was a fabrication. The anxieties felt by those who invented Mazu Culture indicated the fragile life of this new form of being. Movements of incense ash, photographic documentation, and dissemination of Mazu images through newly rebuilt structures were all techniques of complicity that cut and resectioned the flow of conversation into the reported speech, reported events, and images of the crowd that became opinion. If structures of complicity made Mazu Culture durable, techniques of complicity enlivened it. These techniques eventually pushed complicity to its limits, however, and Mazu Culture began to unravel. Taiwanese pilgrims began to see Mazu Culture as a forgery. Taiwanese temple organizations in search of new forms of publicity would turn away from mass pilgrimages toward other techniques consonant with the increased value of “native” (bentu) sites and forms on Taiwan after martial law. I turn to these anxieties and techniques in the next chapter.


6 Techniques and Forgeries

What to Do with History? The Specter of Feuds As Taiwanese pilgrimages to Fujianese sites progressed during the early 1990s, Taiwanese donors and their would-be ancestors formed coalitions that engaged in scholarship, ritual, and reconstruction to augment their status. For Taiwanese temple managers, claims of efficacy and legitimacy were grounded in generational proximity to founding sites. On the other hand, relationships to founding sites were made through periodic ritual. History was a field of competition, and competition made the relationships intimated by historical truths vital. In response to these disputes concerning historical precedence, research and management institutions worked to shift the meaning of these disputes, causing historical truths to appear amid competition. Those engaged in historical disputes were complicit with the local state if often at odds with it. Taiwanese donors could not simply transpose their competition to a Chinese arena because of the specific context of temple reconstruction in Fujian. Official media in Fujian heralded competition in the limited economic sphere as reform and openness (gaige kaifang). Even under the rubric of gaige kaifang, however, history was not open to controversy. Researchers in para-state organizations could only consider historical disputes a negative factor, as they designated intertemple competition in analyses of the Mazu phenomenon (Zhu Tianshun 1992, n.d.; Jiang Weidan 1992). Their work acted to stem historical disputes by assigning rival sites value as individual expressions of Mazu Culture. Finally, they argued, there is only one Mazu, known correctly as an exemplar of ethnic virtues.

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Tellingly, those who produced knowledge of pilgrimage as Mazu Culture had to engage and enroll competition among donor/ancestor pairs even as they employed unifying arguments that fixed historical truths. Their practice of enrolling competition was twofold: first, policies that limited reconstruction to religious sites with an historical warrant; second, description of Mazu Culture as inclusive, transcendent, and generative. As culture, pilgrimage endowed previously stigmatized markers of local identity with value. Deployment of the culture concept also reworked the meaning of competition. Competition appeared not as an unseemly motive underneath pilgrimage but a relatively superficial activity through which one could discover the truths of an enduring culture. Indeed, according to the rubric of Mazu Culture, culture motivated Taiwanese pilgrims to engage in competition, which would eventually find harmony within the figure of the goddess. In spite of this work, Mazu Culture did not always attain the status of historical truth. Mazu Culture was only partial in its normative power, and its ability to enroll Taiwanese pilgrims into its harmonious vision failed as elements of Mazu Culture began to appear too invented, arbitrary, and constructed. Failing to recognize Mazu Culture as culture, Taiwanese pilgrims and their Chinese hosts would accuse each other of duplicity, finding political economic interests behind pilgrimages and temple reconstructions. As Taiwanese pilgrims came to denigrate Mazu Culture as monstrous or ideological, they demonstrated an ethical danger of complicity: the possibility that deferred ends might become too valuable to those engaged in a practice to remain bracketed out.

Attenuation and Amplification In this chapter, I will examine techniques through which complicit actors bracket out ends and intentions or, alternately, bring them into visibility. Both discursive and nondiscursive, these techniques produced dispositions rather than meaning. When deployed in the invention of Mazu Culture, they suggested an ineluctable factor manifest in events that escaped the agency of participants (Jullien 1996). Comprehending this set of dispositions, Chinese officials could see the poisonous competition among Taiwanese temple organizations as secondary to a culture expressed through pilgrimage in which the essential identity of Taiwan and China was waiting to be discovered. Meanwhile, Taiwanese organizers of pilgrimage relied on similar techniques to realize their own sincerity. Making culture a durable object that caused crowds to gather at temples, these techniques constituted the publics of minjian xinyang.


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Throughout this book, I have defined complicity as a situation in which people actively externalize some ends of a practice to realize the possibilities, problems, and pleasures that this common practice affords. Techniques of complicity are the tools that perform this work. These techniques are implicated with agency: who or what qualifies as an agent, who or what motivates action and to what ends. One of the signal contributions of ANT has been to show that agency is not a property of individual human actors. To be an agent is to share one’s potential, to find one’s action distributed, mediated, and transposed by other agents without whom one could not act (Latour 1996b). In this regard, ANT shares some unexpected common ground with sociolinguistics, which has worked to decompose the speaking subject into several, distinct “participant roles” (Goffman 1981, Hanks 1996, Kockelman 2004). Goffman’s work on footing, for example, decomposed a speaker into three participant roles: the animator, who speaks or otherwise transmits an utterance; the author, who composed it; and the principal, who motivated the utterance or on whose behalf it is made. Although we might argue whether there are only three participant roles, the concept of footing does provide a means to examine agency. Agency involves “the conditions for and consequences of being implicated in one or more” participant roles (Kockelman 2004: 132).1 Extended to our discussion of ritual, footing raises questions concerning the responsibility of incumbents of each role during a given action or actions: Does their responsibility differ in form? To what extent do they find themselves encompassed by other actants as they perform their role? Is their footing in this context relevant to other contexts of action? I find an acoustic metaphor useful to understand shifts in footing. Some shifts in footing may increase the responsibility or potential of those occupying specific participant roles. These shifts in footing amplify the agency of these roles and their incumbents. When fixing historical truths as normative, on the other hand, people may actively attenuate their agency as authors or principals. Together, amplification and attenuation bracket out subjective factors so that a common practice can be organized in compliance with a reality (of culture, history, or nature) invented in that practice. Amplification and attenuation distribute responsibility so that people can develop appropriate responses to historical truth. Techniques that attenuated the agency of pilgrimage boosters, for example, permitted those engaged in pilgrimage to pursue a politics based on the truths of Mazu Culture and not sectarian or political interests. Amplifying the agency of these boosters, conversely, was

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a response from those who began to feel that such interests, realized in temple structures, threatened their own sense of self. In the spectacular pilgrimages that flourished in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Taiwanese pilgrims employed many techniques that cut, frame, transpose, and redirect crowds and crowd products to fashion self-evident truths and sincere actors. In this chapter, I will examine a few of these techniques. Uniforms both unified and differentiated pilgrim groups. Rituals attenuated the agency of local notables, ironically to legitimate their authority. A giant image of Mazu displaced the bureaucratic invention of Mazu Culture only to amplify the agency of bureaucrats once pilgrims recognized the image as a forgery. Together, these examples show how pilgrims and their hosts employed the relatively inclusive or exclusive properties of ritual, shifts between amplification and attenuation of agency, and the discrete or continuous properties of networks to ground some possibilities of Mazu Culture and cast doubt on others. Techniques of complicity often transpose subject positions across practices or contexts. One source of the ethical relevance of such techniques, transposition incites anxiety. It is often the focus of critique. As I will demonstrate, pilgrimage led to the realization of a shared culture. However, those administering Mazu Culture defined it as a form of commemoration. As they attempted to extend this definition of Mazu Culture to a wider set of practices, they unintentionally amplified their role in its invention. Eventually complicity would unravel in accusations of duplicity.

Uniformed Differences Before Lukang Tianhou Gong’s October 1992 pilgrimage to Meizhou, the temple committee supervised distribution of pilgrim uniforms. Participants on the 10- and 15-day package tours set their uniforms in a corner of their suitcases. They wore uniforms only during their last three days in China, from Fuzhou, where pilgrims gathered after four separate tours. Uniforms helped pilgrims transition between their experiences as tourists to their roles as pilgrims. They also constituted pilgrim crowds as publics. A surface repetition of category markers across the crowd, uniforms unified pilgrim crowds and differentiated pilgrim groups from each other. Through uniforms, organizers of pilgrimage attempted to resolve tensions between unifying statements and the differentiating movements that gave pilgrimages vitality.


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For most pilgrims, uniforms were simple. For Lukang’s 1992 pilgrimage, they included a brown jacket embroidered with the temple name and an orange hat printed with the temple name and the official designation of the event: Lukang Tianhou Gong Meizhou Foundation Mother Presentation of Incense and Homage to Ancestors in Commemoration of the 312th Anniversary of the Arrival of the Foundation Mother in Lukang. The travel agencies that coordinated tours provided both items as a complementary service. Each agency printed its name on the uniform with the stereotypic donorship phrase “respectfully offers.” The uniforms resembled those from internal pilgrimages on Taiwan, as well as those that palanquin-bearing teams wear. When I served as a palanquin bearer at a neighborhood temple in Lukang, the team leader provided us with uniforms on every important occasion. These contained a tee or polo shirt and sweatpants as well as a baseball cap. The tee shirt was sometimes emblazoned with unexpected graphics such as the year’s most popular Japanese animated figure. That they were attractive (ho khoaN) was part of their addition to activities that needed to be naojiat to be successful. New uniforms commemorated major events: a ceremony for settling an image, pilgrimages to highly valued sites, or an annual procession now associated with a local folklore festival. Although very contemporary in their sporty forms, uniforms augmented an image of the temple’s public during rituals that commemorated its life. The uniforms’ surface repetition created a solid visual field from pilgrim bodies. This continuous surface reduces distinctions among pilgrims and, when the pilgrim group is large, offers pilgrims a reflexive view of themselves as a unified crowd. Pilgrimage studies have noted uniforms as part of the leveling-down process of communitas (Turner 1974). Yet Taiwanese pilgrims’ uniforms combine uniformity with distinguishing marks such as bright colors and large inscriptions. These qualities juxtapose the participation of multiple pilgrim groups with the distinguishing characteristics of a single group. When seen from a distance, incense guests belonging to different groups appear distinct as contiguous bands of orange, red, or yellow circulating through pilgrimage sites. Pilgrim groups might be a single body of pilgrims attending a single event, yet remain multiple and never resolve into identity. Uniforms thus motivate tensions between unification and differentiation in ways that Taiwanese pilgrims value as naojiat. Uniforms also internally differentiate within pilgrim groups. White jackets, white hats, and yellow armbands embroidered with name and title were the property of temple committee members. Particularly honored guests, such as legislators or other government officials, wore dark

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blue suits. The Master of the Censer (loo chu m: lu zhu) dressed as a bridegroom in a dark blue traditional suit with a bright red ribbon tied about him and on his chest into a large, circular bow. I wore a pilgrim’s orange hat, but with a madras shirt and khakis. Lukang’s official photographer was similarly clad. Profusion of different uniforms within a single pilgrim group brought the crowd of incense guests into definition as a public appropriate to the event. Although surface repetitions combined with differentiation to distinguish types of pilgrims, uniforms performed yet another operation. Pilgrimage had previously been the preserve of temple committees. Mass pilgrimages became prevalent as temple organizations vied to establish their value through the gathering and movement of crowds. Pilgrim masses in uniform created a visual surface that served as the ground against which the temple committee differentiated itself as representatives of a temple’s public. Uniforms define the crowd as those “under the censer.” Pilgrimage organizers, who wished to make arguments through pilgrim crowds, worked visually to differentiate the censer as the nodal site toward which the crowd gathered. By extension, the representatives of the censer, such as temple committee members, disaggregated themselves against the field of pilgrims. As pilgrimage rituals unified crowds to produce publics, they also motivated a corresponding work of differentiation to enroll pilgrims in the production of ritual (and social) authority. One element of pilgrim uniforms, the command or incense pennant (leng khi, hiuN khi; m: ling qi, xiang qi), compels pilgrims both to produce and channel naojiat. Probably the most important of uniform elements, the leng pennant is a small triangular flag that pilgrims carry along their route. The pennants are usually imperial yellow and inscribed with the character leng (m: ling), meaning “command.” They may also include a gourd-shaped receptacle into which pilgrims may insert a stick of incense. Pilgrims obtain leng pennants when they register at the temple, where workers stamp the pennants with the temple seal, adding the pilgrim’s name and the date of the pilgrimage. Pilgrims carry the pennants throughout the pilgrimage, placing them on their domestic altar as a subsidiary image once they have returned home. They may carry leng pennants on several pilgrimages. One often sees a pilgrim carrying as many as seven or eight leng pennants rolled together. Leng pennants gain their efficacy to protect pilgrims once activated by incense. For many pilgrims, the goal of pilgrimage is to pass their leng


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Figure 6.1 Pilgrims pass their leng pennants over the incense censer at Quanzhou Hubi Kiong. Quanzhou, 1993. Photograph by author.

pennants over the censer of a particularly efficacious temple. They also use their leng pennants to touch images newly invigorated through the incense fires of a particularly valued site. At the climax of pilgrimages, the censer of the nodal temple is awash in fire and tongues of orange silk pennants (see figure 6.1). Palanquins burrow through a sea of bodies and small, colorful flags, and the report of firecrackers fills the air. Leng pennants draw the crowd toward censer and image. They impel pilgrims to press together, to tug at each other, to reach arms forward with shouts. Their uniforms singed here or there by a stray stick of incense, jostled about by struggles to reach the censer, pilgrims carry with the leng pennant a memory of specific crowds. The leng pennant unifies these crowds as a public through relationships to the incense censer during ritual, but even more so as an assemblage of leng pennants twisted together on one’s home altar. Leng pennants motivate the shifting play of figure and ground in which believing publics and their spokespersons appear, suggesting a multiplicity of personal desires and motivations that cannot be reduced to the terms of enrollment. Like uniforms, they call attention to differentiation as well as unification along the pilgrims’ path.

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Mastery and Attenuation Although a minimal pilgrimage ritual requires only an exchange of incense and not an elaborate set of prestations, the inflation of ritual form on Taiwan during the 1970s and 1980s led organizers of pilgrimages to stage events whose forms borrowed from archaic official rituals as filtered through KMT state Confucianism. A product of complicity between Taiwanese temple organizations and the KMT party state during the Movement for Chinese Cultural Renaissance, these rituals formed the template for presenting incense ritual at newly reconstructed sites in China. With their orderly ranks of pilgrims and coordinated tempo of bows and prostrations, these rituals contrast with the naojiat surrounding them. Nonetheless, the rituals mediated distinct models of relationship reproduced in pilgrimage. Rituals of presenting incense and dividing fires both decomposed participant roles and attenuated the agency of celebrants, such as the Master of the Censer, as principals of the ritual. The ritual featured a silent (and invisible) author, an animator who directs with his reading of the ritual protocol all the movement of the ritual, and a principal who never speaks but acts only as instructed in ritual protocol. The Master of the Censer’s bows and prostrations were scripted; and when he presented offerings, assistants placed them in his hands. The ritual reader directed action and read the memorial, but from a script provided for him. The author likely composed the protocol from available formulae. Ironically, however, attenuation generated mastery. The basic form of these archaized rituals involved a series of prestations, each separated by a set of three prostrations and nine bows. The offerings began with incense and ranged from flowers, through wine and cloth, and finally to a written memorial. Presenting incense ritual formed a narrative of increasing cultural refinement. At its apex was writing that, while cultural in form, visibly conveyed the significance of what had only been concealed as potential signs within natural phenomena. In its allusions to this powerful strata, the ritual celebrated Mazu as an efficacious mediator of the natural cosmos and a cultural hero through which cosmic order unfolded in human history, particularly that of the pilgrim temple. Ritual memorials made these attributions explicit. They recounted the occasion of the pilgrimage and the significance of the deity in Taiwanese history, adding stereotypic requests for favorable winds and gentle rain, prosperity for the nation, and among the people, peace. Finally, the memorial included a list of every participant in the pilgrimage. Having


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completed their reading, ritual experts burned it in a censer containing live coals. From this fire, they transferred live coals and incense ash to the pilgrim temple’s censer. This procedure, called dividing or sharing fire, was the ritual’s climax. The prestations, written protocol, and memorial were relatively recent additions to dividing fire rituals. Immolation of the memorial became the centerpiece of the ritual, however, because its ashes composed part of the substance later divided and shared from ancestral to daughter temples. The memorial reinforced incense exchanges. It described the boundary of those under the censer in exclusive, centripetal terms. However, the basis of this ceremony was not an exchange among people, but transfer of a highly valued substance, efficacious fire, from a nodal manifestation of deity to one of its shared, daughter images (Huang Meiying 1994: 104, 108). In other words, burning and distributing the ash of the memorial established structured, ethical relationships that remained potential in the poetic form of its language, whose parallel constructions intimated an ordered disposition of places. The spiraling plumes of incense smoke made pilgrims complicit in an exchange between two manifestations of the deity, producing a set of dispositions that resemble lineages. To make these dispositions hold, the ritual reconfigured relationships between places. Mazu was both the motivator and the guarantor of this work. Hence, although he was a principal of presenting incense rituals, the Master of the Censer was a relatively passive one. The attenuation of his role both legitimated his authority and enrolled the movement of pilgrim crowds into the figure of Mazu’s efficacy. The Master of the Censer represented the daughter temple. In his role, he remained a silent figure who acted out a written protocol. Moreover, he often had not chosen his role. Generally, temple organizations determined the Master of the Censer through divination. Although he gained in prestige by composing naojiat, the Master of the Censer did not act upon the deity or upon those under the censer. He acted upon the crowd only by attenuating his agency, allowing the scripted protocol to guide his motions. His sincerity, the extent to which he developed inner dispositions consistent with attenuation, served as the basis of his authority as a representative of those under the censer. In this regard, presenting incense ritual resembled ancestor worship as described by Steven Sangren (2000), in which performance of the role of an abject son before the ancestors produced sons as patriarchs. The passivity of the Master of the Censer in the ritual produced him as a local spokesperson, while displacing the source of this authority upon the deity. Attenuation of the Master of the

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Censer’s agency fixed the compact among places in the figure of the goddess (or at least in her image), which would endure beyond his tenure. Around him stood incense guests who joined this compact through the memorial and the exchange of incense. Together, they colluded in this complication of quasilineages and the exchanges that bound them.

Planning and Protocols As pilgrimages became mass phenomena, pilgrimage planning underwent shifts unforeseen in the tentative pilgrimages of 1986 and 1987. On the part of Taiwanese temple organizations, planning for the mass pilgrimages of the early 1990s attended much less to motives and technical problems, tending instead to highlight problems of communications, crowd control, and ritual protocol. Attention to communications provided fertile ground for complicity with the local state in Fujian. Taiwanese temple committees were anxious to contain and fix the possible values produced by pilgrimage in a field marked by fragmentation, as were those in Fujian charged with administering minjian xinyang. Ritual protocol served this purpose and attenuated both the competitive motives of Taiwanese temple committees and the political engineering of state and para-state units. Although ritual combined both concerns into a single set of gestures, ritual protocols amplified tensions within pilgrimage between enjoyment and sincerity. Particularly on Meizhou, planning required a detailed knowledge of protocol, itineraries, and timing. Timing had to account for extreme tidal shifts between Wenjia and Meizhou, yet it also had to follow traditional prescriptions regarding auspicious times. Usually, pilgrim groups performed rituals in the early morning hours, immediately preceding or following dawn. Given the importance of photographic reproduction, planning had to account for lighting conditions and composition techniques as well. Much of the specialized knowledge of tides and transportation arrangements necessary to plan pilgrimages gradually devolved to private travel agencies, who also could take responsibility for the purchase of items necessary for ritual. Specialized teams within the temple management committee divided other crucial tasks. In 1988, for example, Tachia Zhenlan Gong’s temple committee organized four teams to manage its pilgrimage to Meizhou, Gangli, and Quanzhou. A general affairs team coordinated planning with temple committees and officials at Meizhou and Gangli, as well as with local officials on Taiwan. A ritual team created ritual protocol, purchased materials for the ritual, offered guidance in writing the memorial, and


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coordinated affairs with the head of each pilgrim group. A publicity team coordinated with travel agencies and documented the pilgrimage. A financial management team rounded out the work groups. In 1990, an “order” team replaced the former publicity team. The new team combined the responsibilities of the previous one with ensuring the orderly flow of traffic. Although Tachia’s planning documents from 1988 and 1990 contain exhaustive descriptions of various itineraries followed by the pilgrims, in 1993, itineraries appeared secondary to detailed planning of ritual protocol. With the professional involvement of travel agencies, communications could shift from literal to figurative dimensions. Metaphors took the place of buses. Attention to ritual protocol in Tachia’s documents is even more notable when one considers that planning for the 1988 pilgrimage included a paragraph devoted to the motives for pilgrimage. In 1990 and 1993, this paragraph is missing. By 1993, Tachia no longer needed to communicate its motives officially in an internal document, but to clarify protocol for ritual at Meizhou and Gangli. This shift parallels a burgeoning desire among officials in Putian for a standard ritual protocol for rituals at Meizhou. During an interview with an official on the Putian Tourism Bureau, the official connected Meizhou’s global status, international exchange, and improvements to ritual: PT: The Meizhou Zumiao has the place of ruler among all Mazu temples in the world. Apart from construction projects related to cultural and religious exchange, we would also like to communicate the meaning of Mazu belief through the improvement and development of protocols for Mazu worship. For example, Confucian temples have definite procedures and rituals. We likewise want to systematize a method for Mazu worship, making rituals at Meizhou both mysterious and solemn, with substantial meaning. DJ: Would Taiwanese pilgrims really accept such measures, especially originating from a government unit? PT: Certainly they would. We have been acting according to their suggestions rather than forcing people to accept changes. We think that there should be a definite protocol for rituals there. And these are protocols that anyone could accept; they are civilized programs with no political color. Will it do to have people crowding in and out and pushing around through the Zumiao as it is now?

To this official, ritual communicates a substantial meaning related to Meizhou’s central status in the Mazu cult, a cult that transcends both

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religious and political boundaries. In her transcendent role, Mazu serves as a positive force for world peace; ritual is an active component analogous to structures. To maximize the potential of this force in folk belief, it should likewise be subject to engineering. Improved rituals were at odds with popular appropriations of the site, however, and would thus produce either believing publics (those committed to the substantial meaning of Mazu Culture) or enjoying ones (those drawn to the site to observe mysterious and solemn rituals). To the official, “crowding in and out” would not suffice, even if in other contexts he might have pointed to naojiat crowds as evidence. The Taiwanese temples organizing mass pilgrimages brought to Fujian a prior history of engagement with the KMT movement for Chinese Cultural Renaissance, in which they augmented rituals with protocols derived from state Confucianism. In doing so, they expanded their value within bureaucratic and religious arenas. Taiwanese temple committees also promoted standard ritual protocol at Chinese sites. The sectarian differences of these rituals occasionally surprised those associated with temple reconstructions in Fujian. Some pilgrim groups brought Buddhist sutra reading teams, while others inflected Confucian derived rituals with Taoist motifs. These differences were usually the result of intertemple competition rather than formal relationships to Buddhist or Taoist organizations. Some officials in Fujian hoped to remove these differences, the better to fix the meaning and location of deities. Others found these differences evidence not of the competition among Taiwanese temple organizations, which called on these organizations to produce rituals that were colorful and distinctive, but a sign of the integrative role of minjian xinyang. For the latter ritual planners, the question was how to subsume as well as accommodate differentiation. Their task would be easier if they could say that their work were coordination and clarification of already current practices. In this fashion, they did not invent Mazu Culture as much as organize its counterinvention through the “suggestions” and “opinions” of Taiwanese pilgrims. The local state in Putian found ritual protocol a place to embark in reform through principled commitment to a supervisory position, one in which they encouraged popular reformation of ritual life. In so doing, they attempted to establish a footing in which they could communicate the substantial meaning of Mazu Culture without authoring or motivating it. Taiwanese temple organizations collaborated in this invention of Mazu Culture, but tensions remained. For Tachia, the importance of ritual protocol was also communicative, but in a sense very different from that of Fujianese officials. The importance of following a set protocol was not


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to communicate the meaning of Mazu Culture, but to expand the temple’s value. For Taiwanese pilgrims, presenting incense should reproduce direct ties to a highly valued site, increasing their temple’s own incense fires. Failing to bring the incense smoke of the two sites into an interlocking spiral or missing one of the several ritual prestations would act against the creation of such a propensity. In the dialogue between Tachia or other Taiwanese donors and the Putian Tourism Bureau, ritual protocols managed, at times, to combine both intentions in one gesture. In each pilgrimage, Taiwanese pilgrims worked toward a standard protocol for presenting incense rituals at Meizhou. Concern with ritual protocol on the part of the local state, the Meizhou committee, and Taiwanese donors continued to provide grounds for complicity, even if the rituals were subject to criticism for a lack of substance, when they appeared as spectacles for enjoying subjects, or for an excess of political motivation when bureaucrats could not establish the proper footing.

New Images At Cermak and Wentworth Avenues in Chicago, a commemorative arch emblazoned with Sun Yat-sen’s emblem—“All Under Heaven For the Public [Good]” (tianxia wei gong)—guards the entrance of the city’s Chinatown. Near Archer Avenue, sits a pedestrian mall executed according to modern planning. Different from typical Chicago storefronts, stores on the mall face away from the street. At the center of the new pedestrian mall lies a large exhibition field with decorative Chinese gates. Sculptures of the twelve zodiac animals surround the plaza. Something about the sculptures reminded me of contemporary allusions to archaic sculpture I had seen before. I looked at the inscriptions on the pedestals to find that the producer of these sculptures was the artist-in-residence at Amoy University whose team had also produced the 14-meter-high monumental Mazu image erected in 1990 at Meizhou (see figure 6.2). Before he received his commission to produce sculptures for a plaza where Chicagoans consume stereotyped images of Chinese culture while shopping, the artist had already amassed a portfolio of monumental productions offering Chineseness to his compatriots. Amoy Harbor’s colossal Koxinga sculpture as well as Fuzhou’s Lin Zexiu both came from his atelier. Like sculptures in Chicago’s Chinatown Plaza, both were figures immediately recognized as visible markers of Chinese history. In Amoy and Fuzhou, production of these images for public consumption paralleled the emergence of new urban spaces where most visual markers of Chineseness had been erased or were otherwise irrelevant.

Figure 6.2

Goddess of Peace across the Straits. Meizhou, 1992. Photograph by author.


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In Putian and Quanzhou, pedestrian malls and white-tile buildings in the new city centers, the architecture of socialist commodity economy, alluded to previous urban forms. Otherwise, they attempted to mirror the form of nearby structures saved from the bulldozer on account of their historical value. Pedestrian arcades along Quanzhou’s Bade Road mimicked the rooflines and cantilevered window boxes of traditional urban architecture. In one of Putian’s shopping districts, a glass city gate literally reflected an old city gate left standing near the city center. Augmenting these allusions to vernacular or high Sinitic form, sculptures anchored public zones where those traversing them could imagine what (they imagined) had been lost (Ivy 1995). Additionally, these new urban spaces were fun (hao wan). They formed part of the environment of the enjoying subject. Unlike the pedestrian mall in Chicago, however, the statues of Koxinga, Lin Zexiu, and Mazu reworked local histories as well as performed experiments in urban form. This reworking abetted the diffusion of allegories of national virtue in postsocialist China. The status of the monumental figures as paradigms and recognition of these images as markers of Chinese history acted to make relative and reduce the claims of Maoism. Lin Zexiu and Koxinga no longer served as types fulfilled in the figure of Mao but coexisted with him as predecessors of a socialist commodity economy. On the other hand, many people in Minnan also recognized these images as official interventions or considered them mere decoration, visual noise, or kitsch. Given their connection to the historical grounding of socialist commodity economy, how people in Minnan appropriated these images demonstrates the ways that they negotiated the economic transformation of Fujian at the end of the twentieth century. Mr. Lin, the artist who designed the new image, was one of many candidates in a competition held under the auspices of the Meizhou temple committee and the Putian PPCC. Guidelines for the competition stipulated that designers provide an appropriate model for a work that, when complete, would be 14 meters high. Apart from practical considerations involving technical feasibility, potential designs were required to capture Mazu iconography as developed through history and in light of its relevance to contemporary life. A newspaper account written by Zhu Hepu, a member of the Putian PPCC propaganda department (1990: 3), noted that the Provincial Party Standing Committee charged artists: “Respect history, respect tradition, care for the wishes of Taiwanese compatriots and the masses, and at the same time consider the response of the masses. The Mazu image should be an image of historical tradition and an image of a person who has legendary status.”

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Mazu’s new official title as Goddess of Peace Across the Straits crystallized the “wishes” and “response” of Taiwanese compatriots and the masses within the idiom of pacification. Comprehensive plans for the island paired the image with a monumental inscription that proclaimed Meizhou to be the island of the goddess in this new guise. The artist’s task was to create an image in conformity with this title, an image that would also be—respecting the wishes of the masses—mass reproducible. I met Lin at a reception for a group of calligraphers visiting Amoy. Song, whose cousin coordinated the gallery opening, knew that Lin would attend and arranged to have us meet. The recent release of the Mazu commemorative postage stamp had overcome the artist with hundreds of inquiries from philatelic societies and enthusiasts, all requesting autographs on their first day covers. Although suffering from too much attention, he was eager to talk with me about the new image on this and later occasions. I had to admit that the image embarked on a bold refiguration. Although the image was recognizable as Mazu, the sculptor took a unique approach to iconography rather than imitating extant Mazu images. The giant image was the product of more than a year’s research. Lin visited all of the major Mazu sites he could reach. Reproductions and originals of sculptural and painted images, historical and hagiographic documents, and items in archives and temples, he had examined them all as he strove to combine various iconographic motives into a single concept. Because the sculptor was artist in residence at Amoy University, he also had occasion to visit Zhu Tianshun, then chairing the Mazu Research Organization. Zhu introduced him to Jiang Weidan and other important Mazu scholars. In many respects, the artist’s itinerary in the field had mirrored my own. The giant Mazu image at Meizhou succeeded in that it facilitated recognition of the goddess, but simultaneously directed recognition toward the goddess’s new official title. 2 The artist was frank about image’s didactic intent. It was, admittedly, motivated by a desire to grasp Taiwanese sentiments and to encourage Taiwan to “return to the embrace of the Ancestral Nation” (huigui zugode huaibao). The didactic intent of the giant image is not hidden. On the contrary, Zhu Hepu claimed that the image “has implications for our era as well as a basis in tradition. . . . That the image faces toward Taiwan increases the spirit of ‘anticipating return’ [of Taiwan to China] of our era” (Zhu Hepu 1990: 3). The giant image gained its authority and historical significance, said to be as gigantic as the image itself, from the problem toward which it communicates: separation from Taiwan. From this condition of separation,


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the image would stand as a metaphor of a cosmic integration of heaven, earth, and man and as a symbol of ethnic spirit (Zhu Hepu 1990). The giant image thus commemorates Mazu to fulfill a “national longing for form” (Brennan 1990). As the colossus objectifies this desire, it also amplifies the agency of Mazu as culture. Zhu does not describe designers or builders as orienting the image to face Taiwan. Rather, like other writing on Mazu Culture, the above passage attributes intention to the image, which faces outward on its own volition. Inasmuch as the image’s gaze was a product of design, Mazu (Culture) suggested the orientation as an imperative. The giant image enrolls pilgrimage into unificationist politics in a manner that attenuates the agency of planners. Meanwhile, the status and circulation of Mazu images incited much controversy on Meizhou and in Minnan in general. Image carvers on the island and in Quanzhou produced Meizhou Mazu images for pilgrims who desired to acquire images shared from the Zumiao. In theory, an image of any provenance can become a shared image if passed over the Zumiao’s censer. If first activated there, images would certainly be considered directly shared. On the other hand, the Zumiao Committee feared that circulation of images produced by artisans not licensed by the Zumiao could threaten recognition of reproductions of the Meizhou First Mother as the most valued image type. Attempts to control the circulation of Meizhou images led the Zumiao Committee to limit shared status to images bearing the temple seal, which only appeared on images that licensed carvers—generally relatives of the committee chairwoman—produced, regardless of whether the images “had their eyes opened” at the Zumiao. This decision was the source of debate among image carvers but also Taiwanese pilgrims, to whom the Meizhou Mother images, which were young and pink-faced, violated typical depictions of the goddess as grandmotherly and for whom black-faced images were an index of efficacy. The iconography of the giant image was also at odds with reproduction of Meizhou’s First Mother, even if the colossus would soon become a trademark of the island. This conflict suggests the distance between commemoration and pilgrim practices. In interviews at his studio, the sculptor complained that he struggled to convince the Zumiao Committee to accept his new iconography, even though thorough historical research guided its design. According to those acquainted with the process of constructing the colossus, the Zumiao Committee had suggested that Lin substitute his design with an image based on the appearance of Meizhou’s First Mother. Yet the Meizhou First Mother resembled figures in Putian’s local opera and had no respect for historical periods, these

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critics said. Such complaints ignored that Lin’s own creative process also involved synthesis of several historical periods and iconographic motives, including explicitly Western conventions. More significantly, the other, mass-produced images at Meizhou suggest a disjuncture between the national(ized) Mazu image appearing on postage stamps, gold coins, and tourist pamphlets and the images produced for incense guests when “sharing a body” to their own localities. These two series refer to differently realized spatial representations: one national, the other determined by a different territoriality.

Miniature Reproductions The new, monumental Mazu image soon became widely available for public consumption not only at the site, where staff photographers captured visitors with the image at stereotyped vantage points, but also in nationally circulating miniatures. Some miniatures were official and didactic, while others employed the new image in unofficial projects of creating value. Officially sponsored miniature reproductions included the Mazu postage stamp, issued in autumn 1992, and the Mazu commemorative coin, which the national mint released to coincide with birthday celebrations for the goddess in April 1993. On both occasions, the local PPCC made public statements about the propagation of Mazu Culture. Although deeply invested in Mazu Culture, promoters of the postage stamp and coin relied on stereotypical images of pilgrimage to attenuate their own agency. Their attempt to enroll pilgrimage was not entirely successful. Talk of forgery was one way that critics brought the agency of PPCC members and other officials back in, qualifying the claims of Mazu Culture. On the national release of the Mazu commemorative stamp in October 1992, Meizhou Bao published a special section featuring articles by the city PPCC chairman, the city PPCC’s propaganda department chief, and the stamp designer (a Putian native working in Beijing). The special edition reproduced congratulatory inscriptions from several notables. Even the provincial party secretary joined the festivities, presenting the following inscription: “Sentiment Links [the] Two Banks [of the Taiwan Straits]/ Virtue Continues [for] One-Thousand Autumns” (“Inscription”). The party secretary’s inscription placed Mazu at the center of a complex of sentimental and spatiotemporal relations. The colossal images gaze fondly across the Straits, “awaiting return.” Like this pair, the postage stamp objectifies sentimental links across the two banks, which the goddess’s virtue will extend through time. In keeping with this claim,


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the city PPCC chair referred to the stamp as “something dreamed of by sons and grandsons of the Yellow Emperor within China and abroad” (Lin Wenhao 1992). The stamp made visible the involvement of Taiwanese pilgrims in the invention of Mazu Culture, but erased the work of other actors. According to Lin Wenhao, the city PPCC chair, Tachia’s groundbreaking 1987 pilgrimage stimulated his imagination. The postage stamp concept arrived soon after. Although his idea attracted compliments, he considered it impossible to pursue. His chance came by coincidence in 1991, when the National Postal and Telecommunications Administration leadership held a conference on Meizhou. Lin was on hand to introduce these official guests and seized the opportunity to relate Mazu’s hagiography. I spoke as well as I could, intending to pique their interest,” he relates, “and I do not know if it was Mazu who manifested her efficacy or my old head of white hair and constant badgering which had its effect.” (Lin Wenhao 1992)

Finally, the postal administration representatives said that they could consider a Mazu stamp. The city PPCC sent a report to the national PPCC via the provincial organization. Because Lin had presented a report on developments on Meizhou to the national PPCC Reunification Association Committee conference that year, the report sailed through the postal and telecommunications administration bureaucracy like a boat under the goddess’s protection. The national administration received the proposal favorably as a “symbol of peace, unity, and friendship to be conveyed to the entire world” (Lin Wenhao 1992). Like the postage stamp, the commemorative coin took the giant image as its model. According to the city PPCC chair’s remarks on the release of the coin, read as part of birthday celebrations for the goddess in 1993, the coin “demonstrated that Mazu work has become more and more brilliant; so that Mazu Culture has been accepted by more and more people” (Lin Wenhao 1993: 1). Although the city PPCC chair’s remarks locate production of the stamp and coin within bureaucratic channels—hence his reference to “Mazu work” (mazu gongzuo)—they also create space for Mazu’s efficacy. Indeed, one can attribute neither the inspiration for nor the eventual production of the stamp or coin to the PPCC chairman alone. As such, he is a relatively attenuated principal who makes visible both Mazu’s efficacy and the “dreams” of “sons and grandsons of the Yellow Emperor.”

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The stamp designer similarly described his work. The bulk of his remarks in the commemorative edition of Meizhou Bao discussed the stamp’s fate through a series of personal vicissitudes. He related how the stamp was nearly struck from 1992’s list of commemorative stamps through bureaucratic error, how he was almost unable to complete design of the stamp because of a scalded foot that left him practically bedridden, and how bad weather frustrated attempts to take a clear photograph of the image. He enumerated these trials with the tone of a pilgrim who asks, “Could it have been that Mazu wanted to test my sincerity?” Fortunately, Mazu once again manifested her efficacy: the clouds parted for a moment about the image, allowing a few crisp photographs. Then it began just as suddenly to rain. As he left the island, he related, “I tightly embraced the camera against my chest, feeling that I was like many a faithful Taiwanese Compatriot who has just invited home a Mazu image from Meizhou Zumiao” (Wan Weisheng 1992). In such remarks, the stamp designer conflated the two series of images: those whose movement invigorates ritual networks and those that give form to national ambitions. His remarks also collapse the practice of sharing images from the temple with his photographic practice. As one might expect, the designer hastened to add that his design merely augmented the clarity of the giant image as a symbol of hopes for friendly intercourse across the Straits. Remarks prepared in the PPCC office for the release of the Mazu commemorative coin also evoke a standard image of pilgrims, here to attribute the motivation for the commemorative coin to pilgrims: Of the world’s believers in Mazu, one must count Taiwanese compatriots among the most passionate and sincere. Amidst the continuously arriving troupes of pilgrims, I often see several Taiwanese compatriots who have just invited an image back from the Zumiao. They hold the image tightly against their breast, carefully carrying it as if it were a rare, priceless treasure. I have also seen many Taiwanese compatriots take the fu [packets of incense wrapped in decorative paper or cloth] they have just taken after worshipping in the temple and place these in their shirt pockets, close against the skin. They say that if they only have this fu they feel that Mazu is with them. Whether they take cars, boats, or planes, they will always be safe. Many Taiwanese compatriots have repeatedly brought up that the Zumiao should have Mazu commemorative coins. In this way they will be able to open a box [in which the coin is stored] and venerate Mazu’s image. They could even mount the commemorative coin on a gold necklace, and always have her image hanging before their breast. Now, their hopes have become reality! From this day on, Mazu’s brilliant image will


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take on precious gold to enter everyone’s heart and reside there always. (Lin Wenhao 1993: 2)

Although the stamp designer’s account cast himself as a pilgrim, the above remarks produce knowledge of pilgrimage in a manner that depicts the PPCC and the national mint as facilitators who enable Taiwanese compatriots. In this fashion, the PPCC chair emerges as a spokesperson for a believing public. His statement turns on an equivalence of fu with the gold coins, however; and here his technique begins to fail. It is not consistent with the position of fu within pilgrim practices. These practices interfere with the meaning of Mazu Culture even as they are subject to enrollment within it. This interference issues from the way that pilgrims incorporated the coin into their practices. I do not doubt the sincerity of the PPCC chairman’s remarks on the occasion of the coin’s release, timed to one of the year’s most naojiat celebrations. Many Taiwanese pilgrims did want to acquire gold coins stamped with the image of the goddess. On their return to Taiwan, they displayed the coin with other items purchased along their travels in China: local special products (techan), such as Anxi tea, Beijing cloisonné, Hangzhou silk, Huian stone teapots, Suzhou paintings, Zhejiang inkstones, embroidered depictions of the Eight Immortals, and marionettes from Quanzhou. For tourists as well as pilgrims, purchasing techan created a concrete depiction of a journey through China. The array of objects displayed later at home indicated the value of having visited particular places; and those who understand local products narrated journeys through these objects, inviting conversation. Techan were also appropriate, almost obligatory, gifts for those who stayed at home. In this sense, they are very different from the incense exchanges of pilgrimage. Incense exchanges and taking fu produce expansive relations of reciprocity among humans and deities. These exchanges link incense guests and their hosts as those under the censer. They employ exchange to reinvigorate relationships among localities linked in the evaluatory geographies of pilgrimage. The purchase of techan, in contrast, does not create relationships of reciprocity between two localities but arrays several localities along the traveler’s path. They do not form relationships with the Other but, like photographs, show the self across a range of possible locations. Techan contain the value of a place in a commodity form without making the purchaser actively involved in intersubjective relationships with the place or its people. This value is stored, to be actualized in exchanges that occur only once the home destination has been reached.

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Thus, purchases of Mazu commemorative coins or other objects as techan placed them outside exchanges between the goddess and pilgrims. Mazu commemorative coins attempted to insinuate the national image into pilgrim practices as a fu as well as an object within a convivial map of China. Pilgrims, in contrast, employed the commemorative coin in practices that denied reciprocity with its producers while promising potential exchanges between pilgrims and those who remained at home. Nonetheless, the giant image did appear as an element in the system of techan; and as such, demanded recognition as the symbol of Mazu culture. By providing this recognition of the giant image as Mazu, incense guests validated the colossus, lending it authority to become a conventional symbol of their own practices. Although denying one type of reciprocity, they furthered the process of complicity that invented Mazu Culture. Caught in this ambivalent translation to Mazu Culture, presenting incense to Meizhou would soon lose its appeal to many Taiwanese people. By 1992, many pilgrims often parodied the Zumiao’s First Mother image as resembling a puppet and denigrated the colossus as a monstrosity. As they amplified the agency of officials and the Zumiao Committee in the construction of the new image, they began to see the new image not as an index of truths about pilgrimage but an obvious forgery. The colossus offers itself as valuable, but this value is potential in recognition. It borrows from conventional iconography even as it attempts to carry conventional iconography into new configurations. These configurations follow the translations through which Mazu Culture formed as an appropriate realm of public activity: connections to the discourse of gaige kaifang circulating through the national and local state apparatus, local desires to rebuild the temple, official programs within the Great Enterprise of National Unification, and the venture capital of multinational developers. Mazu Culture became self-evident to the extent that those engaged with pilgrimage could attenuate their agency and that of the disparate actors with whom they worked. Charges of forgery, on the other hand, amplified the agency of certain actors through attacks on the objects through which Mazu Culture was evident. When the objects are false, the actors are duplicitous.

Mazu World in Miniature Recognition of the giant image as a forgery brought the intentions and ends of other actors back into the framework. Taiwanese pilgrims and temple commissioners, Chinese temple workers, members of


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management committees, and local bureaucrats all began to accuse each other of harboring divisive interests, marking the limits of complicity in a string of failed, or forced, translations. The failure of “Mazu World in Miniature,” a Mazu-themed garden on Meizhou, demonstrates some qualities of this horizon where complicity shades into duplicity, showing the ethical dangers of enrollment. By 1992, Taiwanese pilgrimages had begun to wane, and a highprofile project on Meizhou Island had stalled to a near halt. An ambitious attempt to gather miniature models of Mazu temples worldwide into a “Mazu Culture World Garden,” this project would depict the expanse of major Mazu temples from Tianjin to California. The Mazu Culture World Garden would join the Zumiao and a proposed Mazu Stelae Garden to form Mazu Culture City, the central component of five major functional areas in the Meizhou NTZ. Curiously, in 1993, several bureaucrats in city and provincial units claimed inspiration for the concept, even though it had run aground on donors’ declining interest. The tableau of Mazu Temples in miniature would communicate the global reach of Mazu Culture and form a tourist attraction suitable for secular sightseers. Those engaged in planning for Meizhou hoped that each represented temple would underwrite the garden, just as they had funded reconstruction of the Zumiao. Yet even more than the giant image, the miniatures were directed at disparate publics. Although Mazu temples worldwide would provide funding, enjoying subjects seem to prevail in other aspects of planning for the garden, which resembles China in Miniature parks in China and on Taiwan. A member of the Meizhou NTZ Management Committee’s Information Section related that the Mazu Temple Miniatures would be attractive to a younger set of local tourists, who form a marketing segment primarily attracted to the island’s fine sand beach. Especially well adapted to photography, the garden would present Meizhou’s local color in an attractive, novel way. In its availability to pilgrims and tourists, the garden would fulfill Meizhou’s role as an NTZ, which was to forge new directions for the tourist industry through careful deployment of local characteristics and other tourist resources. More than vernacular architecture or picturesque fishing villages, Mazu was Meizhou’s local characteristic. As an official on the Putian Tourism Bureau told me: “Only Mazu could make Meizhou, a forsaken island where birds do not call and flowers are not fragrant, a nationally recognized tourist site. Would Taiwanese visitors have come otherwise?” Mazu Miniatures first appeared in the comprehensive planning document of 1991. An interview with Song Hulin, who

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had been responsible for the 1991 plan, described the Miniature Scenery Garden, a golf course, and a bridge linking Meizhou with the mainland on a list of “new directions.” These new directions, as the title of the report suggests in the imperative voice, would stimulate the effort to “Develop Meizhou into a First Class International Tourist Destination” (Yang Zhenhui 1991: 4). Meizhou’s international status informed the collection of miniatures and the assumed audience of the garden. In February 1992, when the head of the provincial tourism bureau toured Meizhou in coordination with Travel in China Year, his remarks promoted the Miniature Scenery Garden in the context of developing tourist festivals: With Meizhou Mazu Temple as our subject, and attracting foreign capital as our main principle, we will construct a Meizhou Mazu Temple Complex Miniature Scenery Garden, causing each unique Mazu temple from every part of the world to gather together at Meizhou Island, to form from them a large scale, systematic, and abundant representation of pilgrimage. At the same time, we will firmly grasp the major tourist programs “Mazu Birthday Festival” and “Mazu Culture and Art Festival,” so that within this year Putian’s tourist industry will scale new heights. (“Putian Yao”)

When the provincial tourist bureau head made his visit, an application for Meizhou’s status as one of the first of 11 NTZs was on the floor of the national assembly. He and others who promoted Meizhou were pressed to translate pilgrimage into the terms of tourism. The visual interest of pilgrimages figures importantly in this translation. Although beauty is a value among Taiwanese pilgrims, in the tourism bureau chair’s remarks, pilgrimage is a spectacle for tourists and the garden a perpetual representation of pilgrimage. In keeping with this translation, the tourism bureau head avoids calling the second festival in his list a celebration of Mazu’s apotheosis. In bureaucratic parlance, that event was a folk arts festival, eliding the contradictions involved in official promotion of folk belief. Most intriguing in his remarks is the dyad of taking the Zumiao as subject (ti), also translatable as “essence” or “body,” and foreign capital as zhu, here meaning mode, intention, or purpose. In a curious invocation of the late-nineteenth- to early-twentieth-century reformers’ phrase “Chinese Learning as essence/body (ti), Western Learning as utility/use (yong),” the tourism bureau head reconfigured a structure that assigns foreign capital and local color positions in a binary of essence versus utility. Through this binary, he and other officials aimed to preserve the


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essential in the process of producing a modern China, here manifested as “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The allusion introduces an important contradiction. How can the Chinese subject be maintained as essence when capital is the main mode, or intention, of its reproduction? That is, what happens to the subject apprehending capital as both the mode and intention of its development? Utility bleeds from means to ends. This complication of intentions is indeed what Mazu Culture World in Miniature lays bare—one is tempted to say in miniature—over the entire field of reform and liberalization. To make this point clearer, we could look more generally at urban planning and reconstruction in Minnan during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The replacement of vernacular stone houses by the local color of holiday villas and Miniature Temples in Meizhou has an analogue in the widespread rebuilding of urban centers in the Minnan region. For example, I met a Mr. Chen on a ferry between Hong Kong and Amoy. He invited me to visit him on my way through Nan’an’s county seat. On my first visit, his family lived in a temporary structure built of bamboo, woven mats, and tin. He proudly took me to two construction sites, showing me his family’s flats under construction in new high-rises. The entire county seat, excluding a few historical sites and socialist neoclassical office buildings, was being demolished and rebuilt with foreign capital. Like new shopping districts along Quanzhou’s Bade Road, the new structures would incorporate local color into the form of their white-tile facades. In its opposition to Maoist class struggle, the postsocialist Chinese state has promoted nationality rather than class as the subject of history. Simultaneously, gaige kaifang has demolished more of the social landscape of domestic and public architecture than the GPCR, even if reformist rhetoric constantly vilifies the latter for its destructive excesses. Reform and liberalization disguises itself through opposition to the GPCR on the one hand and the self-evidence of ethnic culture on the other. As planners hoped, commemorative spaces of giant images, miniature temples, and exhibition fields that gathered Taiwanese pilgrims could channel this realization of a culture beyond “historical aberrations.” As in the garden of temple miniatures, culture became free to communicate the essential that one discovered beyond, rather than produced in, daily practices. In the process, history became flexible if yet normative. Susceptible to continual revision, it could adapt to China’s shifting futures. Mazu World in Miniature responded to the declining interest of Taiwanese pilgrims combined with Meizhou’s relative invisibility to

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other international tourists. The possibility that the garden could further stimulate and institutionalize competition among Taiwanese donors gave the concept some of its appeal for planners. Correspondingly, the miniatures project became a touchstone in discussions of ritual cycles and hopes for direct cross-Straits travel.3 When I asked an official on the provincial tourism bureau whether the project was feasible, given the declining number of Taiwanese pilgrims in 1992 and 1993, he replied, There has been a reduction in the number of Taiwanese visitors in the past two years, yet we need not consider this downturn a trend. Most temples have just completed three annual pilgrimages and so, in terms of the pilgrimage cycle, we have entered a “rest” year. But you should not consider this reduction a trend, because we have not yet been able to implement direct travel. Once the harbor for direct travel from Taiwan is completed, and direct cross-Straits travel has been implemented, visitors may come frequently just to worship. For example, businessmen about to embark on a particularly important venture may want to come to Meizhou directly, to gain Mazu’s full protection. All of our work on Meizhou must take into consideration present limitations but must be focused on the future situation.

When the Meizhou NTZ Management Committee and the Putian PPCC unveiled the miniatures project to Taiwanese donor temples, it met with a tepid response. For their part, members of Taiwanese temple committees feared the quality of the completed miniatures, their fixed positions, and the expense of continual maintenance. Major Taiwanese Mazu centers, such as Lukang and Peikang, had more interest in coordinating events on Taiwan rather than engaging in any building projects, however small, in China. By 1993, Lukang Tianhou Gong was committed to the construction of a large cultural building. When completed in 1998, the new complex housed a library, historical exhibits, performance space, and a hostel. As one of Lukang’s committee members told me in 1994, even the KMT was nativizing (bentuhua); after three years of pilgrimage, it was time to promote Lukang’s own distinctive folklore with more vigor. Several other major centers were engaged in, or had recently completed, similar construction projects. Museums and cultural events on Taiwan began to supplant mass pilgrimage to China as a field for competition among Taiwanese temples. This trend toward cultural events on Taiwan continued into the 2000s. With the miniatures project, the disparate intentions of groups previously complicit in the invention of Mazu Culture began to unravel. Unlike temple reconstruction, in which competition could be


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subsumed into finding historical truth, or pilgrimage, in which intentions could similarly remain attenuated, the miniatures project tended to amplify intentions. To potential Taiwanese donors, the miniatures project was obviously an attempt by Chinese officials (and not just the Zumiao Committee) to use competition among Taiwanese Mazu temples for their own political purposes. Additionally, the miniatures project, with its array of the world’s Mazu temples, pointed at competition so directly that rival temples could only perceive involvement in the project as an intentional fabrication. Unlike the earlier rebuilding project in which publicity could be made to cohere with the demands of human sentiment, the Mazu World of Miniatures project made the intention to publicize too visible. Faced with such a prospect, many in Taiwanese Mazu networks felt that the dangers of enrollment exceeded the possibilities.

The Horizon of Complicity Although the dispositions that would eventually cause most Taiwanese temples to transfer their competition back to a Taiwanese arena were already in place during Zumiao’s reconstruction, the failure of the miniatures project indicates a horizon of complicity. With the miniatures project, the economic intentions of Chinese planners, the competitive intentions of Taiwanese donors, and the unificationist intentions of the Chinese state failed to remain attenuated. The quotation of these intentions by pilgrims, “It’s only because they wanted . . .” is a charge against others for being duplicitous. One can only make such charges when complicity is unsuccessful. How did this horizon demonstrate anxieties concerning ethics and historical truths on Taiwan as China became a newly present Other? Discussions of pilgrimage in the Taiwanese media offer an approach to this question. Tachia’s 1987 pilgrimage to Meizhou and later involvement in reconstruction at Gangli Ancestral Shrine stimulated scholars and temple committees on Taiwan to explore the influence of Japanese colonialism on the generational hierarchies of Mazu temples. To partisans of Tachia, pilgrimage rectified relationships to Meizhou that colonialism had set awry. Inability to travel to the shrine to Mazu’s parents at Gangli had falsely inflated Peikang’s status as the holder of such a shrine. If we see Tachia’s commissioners as sincere, we also accept their critique: separation from China from 1895 to 1945 had severely damaged relationships among Mazu temples and by extension had ruined a Taiwanese ethics of locality realized in pilgrimage.

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Rectification of these relationships required pilgrimages to rework historical truths. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, those who strove to reconfigure a Taiwanese ethics of locality had also begun to question another colonial period: the KMT projects of representing China on Taiwan. Writings about pilgrimage presented these questions from an astonishing number of political standpoints, many “outside the party” (Weng Guangwei 1988). One of the most pervasive of these standpoints, which was also to influence the formation of KMT cultural policy during the 1990s, was nativism (bentu hua). Bentu cultural producers criticized the irreality of KMT attempts to represent China, the encoding of Chinese geography in street names, litanies in schoolbooks about returning to China, and a legislature stacked with representatives who were elected in China during the 1940s. They also mourned ignorance of Taiwan’s geography, history, and languages, an ignorance that was as systematic as it was extensive. Pilgrimage thus interested nativists, because it suggested a form that reproduced local histories and corresponding folklore. The horizon of complicity revealed in Taiwanese pilgrimage thus mediates two moments: one in which nativism was a challenge to KMT orthodoxy, another in which it was a normative practice of historical research. In an article on pilgrimage composed for an international conference held at Meizhou under the auspices of the Meizhou Mazu Research Foundation, for example, the Taiwanese scholar Chang Jung-fu (1992) argued an unpopular position at the conference: that most of the claims Taiwanese temples have made for direct filiation from Meizhou were false. Drawing on field and archival research on the system of temples filiated from Lukang, Chang argued that this network of places formed an icon of Taiwan’s frontier history (Chang Jung-fu 1992: 224). Threats to this network, he added, were an affront to a fragile historical truth held together through exchanges of incense and little else now that Lukang is no longer a major port. Unrestrained pilgrimages to Meizhou also threatened an underlying ethical standard embedded in places, which Chang hoped to repair. He directed his ire at Meizhou pilgrimages, which “apart from a few parts root searching, are in fact deeply flavored with commercialism” (Chang Jung-fu 1992: 222). Chang’s critique, which amplified pilgrimage boosters’ “commercial” intentions, did not merely charge those who initially appeared sincere with duplicity. His argument suggested another horizon, which relied equally on complicity. Historical truths require actors to attenuate footing at some point, even if in their initial construction they may precipitate intentions, whether pure or duplicitous. Chang’s work amplified


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participant roles in pilgrimages to clear the ground for a counterinvention. Bentu became normative through Chang’s critique of insincere actors; he showed that pilgrims could be sincere only if they directed their practices toward a set of objects that implicitly excise Meizhou. KMT cultural policy in the mid- to late-1990s mirrored this restriction of sincerity to nativist practices. China remained a referent of KMT cultural construction, but qualified through discussions of “localization” its discovery of Taiwan as a variant opposed to its continental cousin (CommonWealth 1992; see also Chen Ch’i-nan 1987). In this chapter, I have discussed attempts to glean from pilgrimage a shared culture beyond conditions of competition and political entrenchment. This work of composing and decomposing complicit relationships was not the task of writers, organizers of pilgrimage, or cultural producers alone. It also informed tactics that Taiwanese pilgrims employed as they approached the unsettled and unsettling realities of Taiwan undergoing post-totalitarian transition. As Taiwanese people recognized or failed to recognize structures such as the giant image or nativist discourses as (not) my history, they negotiated shifting conditions and horizons of complicity. Ultimately, these shifting horizons connected to a sense of the ethical hazards of enrollment. What can one do when the dangers of possible historical truths seem greater than the possibilities these truths afford? This question fretted away the reality of Mazu Culture even as it provoked new attempts to realize it.


7 Curiosity and Commitment

Rotting Beams I first visited Lukang in 1987, when I was a student at Tunghai University. My teachers told me that in Lukang I could encounter traditional Chinese culture firsthand. Aspiring calligrapher, tai-chi practitioner, and student of Chinese religion that I was, I could not miss it. I left the main commercial street (named for the Father of the Republic, Sun Yat-sen) and soon become lost amid narrow, twisting alleys. Reconstruction notwithstanding, Lukang maintained the qualities of “rot” that architect Bernard Tschumi (1994) has called the location of true architecture, built environments that contain the potential for dialogue, unlike monologic projects of place making, such as realizing Zhonghua (Chinese Civilization) through street names and historic sites. According to Tschumi, rot attracts tourist gazes and nostalgic reverie. Rot may appear picturesque, pastoral, or repulsive. However, the potential of rot to “bridge sensory pleasure and reason” places rot under proscription (Tschumi 1994: 77). Traces of human social practice, on language no less than architecture, incite nostalgic desire; but practices of folklore or historical reconstruction, which guide this desire into socially appropriate forms, generally erase these traces. Historical reconstruction valorizes an ideal history as the proper place of culture (Herzfeld 1991). Reconstruction classifies and administers rot. Historical preservation practices create value and coordinate a series of spatial representations, work that aims to secure commitments to collective action. According to one of the planners closely associated with Lukang’s reconstruction, one

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can evaluate an historical site according to its age and breadth of relevance. Planners can then tack the corresponding responsibility for reconstruction onto the system of administrative units within the nation state (Han Pao-te 1983: 13–14). The problem is not one of establishing shared meanings as much as consolidating a shared horizon against which competing meanings are intelligible. Thus, historical reconstruction absorbs rot referentially as it reduces diverging social practices and meanings to the status of perspectives on the objects of preservation practices. Otherwise, historical reconstruction recovers the past through ellipses. Historical Lukang, the space of Lukang’s alleys restored, does posit a type of anterior time, but an ambivalent one that never could exist. Although its mimesis reveals the truth of an historical, hence meaningful, past (Lukang’s eighteenth-century role as a major trading port), it is also contemporary. Lukang Time, the time of representing China on Taiwan, presents an odd form of simultaneity, a doubling of the meaningful past onto the present that elides intervening years of local memory. Lukang Time can never be the time of the life history of any particular person in town; by belonging to no one, this time becomes a moment of national memory. An attempt to overcome the fatality of lapsed time and lost republics, mimetic history would have truth emerge from underneath the rot. Mimetic history of the sort proposed for Lukang during the mid1980s was a component of the KMT routinization of failure. A product of engagement with émigré elites residing in Taipei, reconstruction carried the burden of representing their nostalgia and their loss, as well as the loss of the nation. Although elites were fortunate enough to find their nostalgia mirrored in KMT programs of cultural renaissance, Lukang Time would soon become unsettled. Lukang Time became anachronistic, an historical mimesis at odds with the revisionist history of nativism, which community-building projects under successive Lee Teng-hui administrations (1988–2000) would realize. Neither time—neither the time of recovery nor the time of recognition—could endure rot. As the location of true architecture, however, rot maintains a dialogue with these times as well as with the materials and practices of maintenance that give rot its particular tempo. Rot might thus have something to show us about cultural anxieties at the end of martial law. In this regard, rot is similar to a motivation that Taiwanese people often gave for their pilgrimages to China: curiosity. In this chapter, I look at narratives that Taiwanese pilgrims gave of their curiosity, examining its sources, pleasures, and frustrations. Unlike the two kinds of time with which I juxtapose it, curiosity does not insist on identity but often acts

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as a rhetoric, if not an ethics, of deferral. Like rot, curiosity bridged between opposed positions. It can index either sincerity or enjoyment. Entangled with arguments concerning historical truth that continued into the mid-1990s, curiosity was a mode in which complicity became a personal experience. In 1990, Historical Lu-Kang Town appeared, reconstructed in new red brick, darkly stained wood, and red-tile paving. A success perhaps; but Lokkang—as I will henceforth refer to the town in its local name to distinguish it from Historical Lukang—highlights the failures of mimetic history. Historical Lukang began as a project during the turn of KMT cultural policy toward cultural renaissance (wenhua fuxing) and corresponded with other efforts on the cultural field to supplement for the island’s increasing isolation as the PRC began to capture international recognition. Eventually, the preservationist project of Historical Lukang would run aground on shifts in the definition of history and its subject. Lukang could no longer represent eighteenth-century China once China was not the lost republic but Taiwan’s newly present Other. Yet, the practices of local memory in Lokkang produced inappropriate objects and truths that complicated and continue to undermine any simple representation of Lukang within Nationalist (or nationalist) narratives. In this context, the motivation for pilgrimages to Fujian—curiosity— articulated an ethics of locality that emerged in the crises of cultural confidence that marked late martial law Taiwan. At first, Lukang Time seems a simple problem for the history of planning in Taiwan. Critical planning studies, associated with the city planning program at National Taiwan University and the architecture department at Tunghai University, participated in the articulation between the political opposition (dangwai) and intellectual life on the island that began with the nativist controversies of the 1970s. An increasingly vocal critique of Historical Lukang as an “antiquity totem” imported from KMT cultural offices would seem another symptom of the formation of a coherent, ethnic Taiwanese opposition. However, this production of opposition as an object of our knowledge erases the complicit networks tying critical planning studies to the former model. One indication of this complicity is visible in the institutional affiliation of critical planning outside of the academe. The community development programs of the postmartial law state were, in fact, heirs of the Movement for Chinese Cultural Renaissance. The work of critics such as Hsu Pi-tsung (1984) represents, in a sense, contradictions within the discipline of planning itself, particularly in the interface between planning and its various constituents. Critical planning studies, while cataloging

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the distaste that locals had for reconstruction, could no more overcome this contradiction than its predecessor. Although it outlined extensive plans for embedding Historic Lukang within a nativist cultural polity, its actual prescriptions tended to exacerbate, rather than resolve, local controversies concerning culture.

Migration and Reconstruction Old Street, as the historical preservation district is called around town, has become a symbol of Taiwanese history to the media and tourists. Admittedly, the preservation district contains one of the few intact streetscapes dating from early Qing period (1680–1895) Taiwan. However, people in town no longer recognize the structures in the historic district as their own. Outsiders may see preservation and stasis in Lokkang’s red-tile-paved streets and brick walls. Locals see that the red tiles have replaced granite paving stones. Given the connection of historical preservation to the Nationalist routinization of failure, many Lokkangers attribute problems of preservationist projects to governmental incompetence and authoritarian policies. Nevertheless, the central government did not initiate historical reconstruction. Lokkang émigrés within the KMT bureaucracy pushed for reconstruction, but in their advocacy they worked largely as private citizens. In this regard, historical reconstruction demonstrates how the movement for Chinese Cultural Renaissance mobilized the nascent public sphere of Taiwan in the early 1970s, resonating across party and opposition circles. The first stirrings of historical reconstruction coincide with the first widely disseminated media depictions of Lokkang as a town literally disintegrating from the effects of labor migration. Nativist author Song Tse-lai (1988: 6) described the town as he encountered it in 1975 as desolate, “buried over,” and “smothered” in choking black sand that blew from the nearby ocean. Like the town, the family of fishermen living in Song’s neighborhood seemed to have survived a catastrophe, which was not only that of redundancy to the industrial economy but a stubborn forgetfulness. Song would later combat this forgetfulness in his oppositional literature, which, to Song, was both excavation and self-criticism. Hsin Tai, a Lokkang native, admitted that she was unable to return there. Nonetheless, the loss of stone-paved alleys gave her a feeling of abandonment (Yu Tseng-hui 1976). Through the sixties and early seventies, when Lokkang’s major product was still emigrants and not heritage, emigrant remittances funded


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several reconstructions in the town’s system of neighborhood temples. In 1962, for example, Pakthao’s Soo Ongia occupied a permanent structure, after 200 years of temporary accommodations provided by each year’s Master of the Censer. The fixed structure, Hongthian Temple (m: fongtian gong), solidified the role of the Soo Ong association among emigrants. It also provided a bus-accessible pilgrimage site. Hongtian Temple transformed Soo Ong from a locally circulating image to a neighborhood fixture, yet this neighborhood was the product of island-wide networks. More broadly, the irrelevance of Lokkang’s neighborhoods to economic production allowed the system of neighborhood temples constantly to reproduce neighborhoods as powerful representational spaces, places where emigrants and those remaining in Lokkang could reimagine social relationships attenuated by migration (Deglopper 1974: 66). Lokkang’s neighborhoods survived, not out of stagnation, but from an active nostalgia, an attempt, often on the part of emigrants returning to town, to imagine the town as existing beyond industrialization. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Lokkang’s system of neighborhood temples created these representations of Lokkang mainly for Lokkang people. As the KMT began to lose ground in its attempt to represent China internationally and institutions of representing China turned inward, engaging Taiwanese historic sites and folklore, media attention would expand the significance of the town until Lukang became Taiwan’s hometown, a process in which prominent emigrants would participate actively.

Living With “Renaissance” Among these emigrants was Ku Weifu, a member of a Lukang family enriched through decades of shrewd business under both Japanese colonial (1895–1945) and KMT regimes. The Ku family’s modern mansion, now the Lukang Folklore Museum, is emblematic of Lokkang’s complicated relationship with its emigrant families in Taipei. The year that the Ku family established the museum, 1973, followed on the heels of the ROC’s loss of its United Nations seat and the Nixon visit to the PRC. These events, combined with the island’s industrialization, exacerbated the crisis of representing China on Taiwan, which in turn precipitated shifts in KMT cultural policy. For example, in 1973, Chiang Ching-kuo, who had just become premier, made a highly publicized visit to Peikang’s Chaotian Temple while on an inspection tour of land reclamation and industrial projects in southern coastal Taiwan. Representations of the tour connect it closely with the ongoing project of cultural renaissance

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(wenhua fuxing). In Ku’s bid for recognition of his hometown as a valuable site for imagining Chinese culture on Taiwan, Ku explicitly translated Lokkang into the terms of this project: “It is certain that everyone has some sentiment toward one’s native soil; it is just that one is not always conscious of it. As for the antiquities left behind by our ancestors, we Chinese people originally understood how to cherish them, but in the recent past the social structure has been transformed and lifestyles have changed, so that these sentiments [toward the native soil] have weakened” (quoted in Yu Tseng-hui 1976: 33). Like many involved in the reconstruction movement, Ku places historical preservation in the context of industrialization. In keeping with wenhua fuxing, Ku implicitly situates Lokkang in a China whose culture is threatened on several fronts: not only by industrialization, but also by the Chinese Communist Party. In this sense, Ku responded, as did wenhua fuxing generally, to a contradiction within KMT narratives of national salvation between China as a source of value and Taiwan as the base for recovery. Still, the particular ethics of locality embedded in Ku’s work intimates a reconfiguration of the KMT project. The native soil is the focus of ethical work to produce proper dispositions (cherishing antiquities). Rather than a complete rejection of Taiwanese experience in the production of a Chinese cultural identity, Ku claims that attachments to the native soil will restore the threatened Chinese subject. Another local notable, Shih Wen-pin, made the connection between historical preservation and popular mobilization in the failing Nationalist cultural project more finely drawn: In recent years, the pace of economic progress in our province has quickened, and new, industrial urban form has transformed the older, traditional cultural atmosphere. Moreover, the government, concerned with carrying Taiwan into the list of developed nations, is hard pressed to divert its attention to taking care of these [Lukang’s] antiquities. . . . [B]ut should one day these disappear, it would not only be the shame of the single place Lukang [lukang yidi], it would also be a major loss for the nation [guojia minzu]. (Shih Wen-pin, quoted in Yu Tseng-hui 1976: 38)

Shih widens responsibility for preservation through a proprietary claim: the loss of Lokkang can only be a grave national loss if it belongs to the public as an historical resource. The state must concentrate on the problem of development; historical preservation is thus an imperative of civil society, which the quote hails into existence, just as other writings in the wenhua fuxing mode criticized Chinese residing in the Base for


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Mainland Recovery for a lack of civil spirit (gongde xin). The proprietary relationship and civil imperative underwrites, even demands, the erasure of Lokkang’s lived history (as Lokkang the single place [lukang yi-di] with its “shame,” or following Tschumi, “rot”). In this process of restoration, the removal of the rot of two centuries, Lokkang becomes Historical Lukang, representative of Chinese settlement in eighteenth century Taiwan.

Approaches to Historical Reconstruction I might have argued that reconstruction in Lokkang constantly parenthesized Taiwanese experience in its effort to produce Historical Lukang as Taiwan’s traditionally Chinese city. Such an approach, however, would obscure the real engagement of KMT institutions with local representational spaces during the late martial law period. It would also neglect connections between two diverging positions in historical reconstruction, which I will call culturalist and critical. The culturalist position derived from the project of wenhua fuxing. It employed motives of salvage and cultivation but did not neglect certain local performance practices that it valorized as cultural software, such as Lokkang’s venerable nanguan troupes. In opposition to the culturalist position, advocates of the critical position did not frame their project as engaging in salvage, as did the guardians of heritage. Instead, these urban planners approached reconstruction from larger issues of “life quality” and “city images” (Hsu Pi-Tsung 1984: 41; cf. Lynch 1992). Although built on very different premises, both positions instituted pedagogies of place. The position of cultural anxieties within each gave it its particular form. For the culturalists, this anxiety related to cultivation, for critical planners, recognition. Culturalists, with whom the Lokkang émigrés who initiated reconstruction were complicit, responded to contradictions within the KMT “time of national recovery.” Recovery articulated the KMT’s narrative of national salvation, in which scientific and civil progress were means of territorial and civilizational restoration. On the one hand, this time participated in critical modernism; the KMT conceived of its work to bring national sovereignty, democracy, and prosperity to China as revolutionary. Retreat from the mainland inflected the revolution with a second recovery narrative, one not aimed at anticolonial struggle, but territorial restoration. With the Korean War, the KMT further articulated the recovery narrative in Cold War anticommunism and development projects. A modernist time, recovery required the production of

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the present as preparation for a common future of unity and prosperity, known in KMT rhetoric as Da Tong, the Great Unity. In spite of this forward movement, however, the recovery narrative also froze time, producing an eternal present where the unfolding of national sovereignty and democracy was on hold.1 The “Temporary Provisions” of martial law suspended much of the constitution. Indeed, the KMT only permitted elections for the national legislature when mortality required “supplemental” seats to replace aged and dying representatives, all of whom followed the KMT from China. Notation of mainland origin (jiguan) on identification cards and litanies in school textbooks and the media reminding citizens of their true homes attempted to fix regional affiliations that otherwise informed daily life no longer. Through these and other institutions, the KMT formed appropriate subjects through reference back to the lost republic. In this narrative, return to the mainland took on messianic dimensions. It alone could restore relationships between the forward movement of scientific and industrial progress and identities frozen in exile. Lagging faith in mainland recovery thus threatened to reveal industrialization as corrosive force without a clear future. Wenhua fuxing gained force as a recovery narrative that would overcome these corrosive effects of industrialization and demonstrate the Republic of China’s international legitimacy as custodian of Chinese culture. As an ethical project, it compelled citizens to internalize the contradiction between progress and restoration within the recovery narrative as a cultural problem (of identity and cultivation). In keeping with this project, the culturalist position promoted appropriation of historical sites along the model of art appreciation. As Han Pao-te proclaimed in a 1991 editorial in United Daily News, “Only those who have attained cultural sophistication can truly appreciate the cultural value of historical sites” (quoted in Cheng Chia-lu 1993: 282). According to this model, appreciation of historical value reinforced the viewer’s cultural sophistication or diagnosed her cultural lack. Engagement with the historical site framed culture as a problem. The monument subsumed the personal culture of the viewer into history, to the end that the wenhua fuxing project of supplementing for the loss of the republic became immediate and personal. To return to Lokkang, the culturalists argued that Lukang people need not despair that the twentieth century brought little industrial progress to town. Although they may not have understood it, claimed Han, when the economy “left them behind,” it provided “intangible wealth,” a history that awaited restoration (Han Pao-te 1976: 29). Through the


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efforts of Han and other culturalists, the provincial governor became personally involved with reconstruction in 1979, and the town entered the list of major provincial projects in 1980 (Cheng Chia-lu 1993: 268–269). Han’s team drew up the list of protected areas and began reconstruction in 1986 (Yan Ya-ning 1986). The image of an ideal Chinese antiquity held by Han and his team led to his controversial choice of red-brick paving and dark-brown doors throughout Historical Lukang. Years later, red brick is a history that Lokkangers have yet to appreciate. 2 In contrast to culturalists, critical planners argued that local spatial practices produced the necessary spaces for self-recognition as a member of an urban community. Critical planners stressed that recognition emerged in self-conscious constructions of identity, alluding to the community of shared fate (mingyun gongtong ti) that figured so prominently in the community development projects for “managing Taiwan and building a new Zhongyuan”3 that cultural policy espoused during the second Lee Administration (Lee Teng-hui 1995). Correspondingly, critical planners demanded that planning consider the future development of public spaces, such as neighborhood temple courtyards, to meet contemporary needs for recognition in a multicultural (duoyuan) public sphere (Hsu Pi-tsung 1984). The second approach became dominant in the early 1990s. Although culture in the critical approach was local and oppositional, both culturalist and critical approaches promoted Lukang through the organization of spectacles. The annual Folk Festivals, beginning in 1978, were closely associated with historical reconstruction. To Han Pao-te and other culturalists, pairing architectural survey and reconstruction work with ideal images of folk arts marked Lokkang as representative of Chinese culture on Taiwan. Lukang Time was more than just a wall of wine pots or Longshan Temple, but poetry and operatic performances. In the critical mode, historical reconstruction continued to valorize staged performances of noisy-hot events or the likelihood of encountering naojiat in the form of pilgrimages or religious processions. It also situated folk festivals within pedagogical projects to popularize environmental and social concern. According to planners, the software of folklore (minsu) would run on the hardware of architectural structures to produce Lukang Cultural Heritage City (Yan Ya-ning 1986: 29). This stress on hardware and software promoted consolidation of performances and other activities into annual heritage festivals, which tourism bureaus could incorporate with promotional materials and journalists anticipate when planning stories. Felicitous from the standpoint of tourism, it has

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provoked controversy concerning spectacles generally. As people often remark in Lokkang, “It’s so naojiat. What a . . . bore.” Critical planners (Tunghai 1994; Hsu Pi-tsung 1984) were quick to point out that the culturalist penchant for monuments did not prohibit unimpeded development. Isolation of specific streets as historically valuable and their ensuing preservation permitted the demolition of entire neighborhoods. Old Street and the areas protected, but not yet preserved, under the second phase of reconstruction retain the form of narrow, twisting alleys. These alleys responded to a number of geographic factors, including the strong winds that blow into town during the winter and the need for neighborhood defense against local feuds (Hsu Pi-tsung 1984: 41; 54). In Pakthao, a celebrated but not protected case, the alleys followed the Eight Triagrams Plan of wily Eastern Han strategist Chu Ke-liang. Other neighborhoods had locked gates past which, said a local proverb, trouble would not come. Now the protected areas are the haunts of nostalgic tourists. Much of the rest of town, in response to pressures for improved transportation, has been shoehorned into a modern city grid. Where new roads have split neighborhoods, argued critical planners, public spaces such as temple courts began to lose their ability to serve as powerful condensers of neighborhood solidarity (Hsu Pi-tsung 1984: 103–105). Lokkang’s system of neighborhoods may have attracted attention to the town as representative of traditional Taiwan, but making Lukang historical has involved the gradual dismantling of the streets and alleys through which locals gave the neighborhood system form. At the very least, it removed uses of space thought inappropriate, such as a lively market with coin-operated rides that once stood at the mouth of Longshan Temple, a national historic landmark, not to mention the replacement of paving stones with red brick. If gated alleys and temple courts produced identity, Historical Lukang, with its fixation on monuments and elitist configurations of expert knowledge, reflected too well the KMT conception of history. So claimed critical planners through the 1990s. Critical planners shared the term identity/recognition (rentong) with opposition circles generally, for whom identity formed a central problem. In planning, as elsewhere, recognition required a thorough revisionism. This call for a new conception of history accelerated with democratization on Taiwan and the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe. Curiously, while critical planning endeavored to restore misrecognized places and practices to truth, its turn to the past corresponded with the flatness of a present in which internal demands for recognition mirror external risks to Taiwan’s sovereignty. This present did not open onto a progressive


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future of national salvation or development as much as it appraised a punctual future whose singularities indicate peril and, one hoped, the knowledge necessary to overcome it. The recognition narrative rejected the recovery narrative. It derided development and national salvation as the source of misrecognition, which now threatens Taiwan’s ecological and social viability. In short, proponents of recognition find the recovery narrative irresponsible to the environment and to Taiwan’s “four major ethnic groups.”4 Identity thus introduces a time as well as a critique. A series of paintings by Chen Lai-hsing from 1990 resonate with critical planning, giving definition to this time in a visual medium. Chen’s images of Taiwan’s contemporary urban life alternate between images of boredom and shock. Coarse, seemingly harried brushstrokes in garish reds, greens, and oranges fill the space, which lacks depth and movement. The subjects of these paintings pursue their pleasures or seek solace in an environment that strikes the viewer as both flat and volatile (see figure 7.1). In contrast, Chen completed another series of paintings of Lokkang’s Confucian and New Mazu Temples while at work on his images of urbanites at play, executing these paintings in an almost pointillist technique of short brushstrokes. In these canvases, human figures almost vanish into the ground. The architectural volume of the temples appears light, the swirling red and green roofs at times dissolving into the atmosphere. Chen’s choice of technique corresponds with an acute sense of loss. The urban paintings capture the flatness of the present, while his paintings of Lokkang want a lost past that appears in fragments, through the rot. In Chen’s “Lukang New Mazu Temple (1),” for example, the temple appears as a mass of red columns behind a large courtyard (see figure 7.2). In viewing the painting, one’s gaze either rests near the upper left of the painting on a bench in the courtyard where two people could be sitting (just behind the uniformed boy on the bicycle), or it leaves the space of the canvas through the roof of the temple. The temple, with its old men sitting under an open pavilion, resists our entrance. Both the children playing in the courtyard and the old men sitting in the pavilion attract our attention, but one seems never to be able to join them. At most, we may overhear their stories. Our vision can never quite enter the temple’s interior space. Meanwhile, our eyes rest tight to the wall beyond which power lines suggest an urban landscape just past the temple courtyard. The image tells us that our vision of the lost past has yet to account for the conflicting possibilities of recovery or recognition. Chen’s Lokkang is a Lokkang to which one can never return, the Lokkang of nostalgia. Lukang Time cannot supplement this loss but is

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Figure 7.1 Chen Lai-hsing, “Video Arcade,” Oil on Canvas. Taiwan, 1990. Used with permission.

a symptom of it, inasmuch as culturalist planning created Lukang Time to secure the reality of a Chinese subject, what critical planning rejects. For example, in a study of Historical Lukang produced by the Tunghai University Department of History (Tunghai 1994: 99), the authors argued that Historical Lukang was an “antiquity totem,” by which they draw


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Figure 7.2 Chen Lai-hsing, “Lukang New Mazu Temple (1),” Oil on canvas. Taiwan, 1990. Used with permission.

attention to the fetishism behind the culturalist position. Similarly, Hsu Pi-tsung (1984: 110) criticized planners. They lacked an understanding of Lokkang’s urban scope and the geographic and cultural meanings of the town’s 36 neighborhoods. To save the drama of arriving at the open public space of Pakthao’s Tionggi Bio, Hsu argued, planners should reroute major thoroughfares around Pakthao’s complicated system of alleys, providing resident parking in open spaces outside the neighborhood (1984: 109–112; 147). More than ten years later, the offending roads were not rerouted, and the open spaces were either replaced with new housing or slated for a planned municipal park. Eventually, in 1995, wide asphalt streets would cut across the Eight Triagrams Plan. One of my friends, alarmed by the increase of automobile traffic, moved to a newly constructed multistory apartment building in another neighborhood. His neighborhood was finished, he said, but perhaps the curse laid on the town when Old Mazu Temple was rebuilt 60 more paces distant from the ocean was gone. “More than 60 years have passed, and now Lokkang has a future,” he said.

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Whose History Is Being Reconstructed Here? Although it is a response to the excesses of reconstruction in the culturalist mode, the critical mode has exacerbated rather than ameliorated controversies over Historical Lukang. These controversies stem, in part, from the inappropriate objects of local memory in town. Visitors are often surprised if locals tell them that the town’s streets were not originally paved in red brick. In 1995, I met one such visitor, a student from Kaohsiung who had made recognition a personal dilemma. He desired to study history, but “identified with Taiwan” (rentong taiwan), a problem given the Sinocentric curriculum then dominant in most history departments. In his summer travel, he journeyed to sites of an obscured Taiwanese history, searching for the remains of a Shinto shrine on the grounds of Lukang Senior High and the small-gauge rail station and tracks that were part of the sugar industry’s infrastructure in Changhua County during the Japanese colonial period. The latter had been scheduled for demolition to make room for a subsidized housing project. The student advocated historical preservation while noting the need to balance expert knowledge and grassroots participation. Too often, historical preservation became a form of government interference. Wasn’t that the case in Lukang? Although aware of the distaste Lokkangers had developed for historical preservation, he did not see the red-brick paving as an imposition. In response, an elderly man who served at the town’s cultural foundation noted, “Oh, but you kids don’t understand. These stones were special. All of them were brought from Choanchiu [m: Quanzhou] as ballast for merchant ships. They were very precious; you cannot get stones like these in Taiwan. And they showed that our town was modeled on Choanchiu.” In his remarks, this man pointed out that paving stones that to outsiders may have seemed an index of Lokkang’s poverty and backwardness contained the memory of the grand merchants who once walked upon them from their brightly painted residences to their guild halls and to the naojiat events of the market, interneighborhood feuds, processions, weddings, and operas that the merchants patronized. For others, the stones bore traces of the hard work of porters conveying goods from the harbor to the commercial street. For all Lokkang people, the stones were the substance of an ethics that exceeded both wenhua fuxing and community development. This elder was not the only Lokkanger who would motion to me in such circumstances, asking me to confirm that Choanchiu’s streets looked like Lokkang before Lukang Time replaced grey paving stones with red brick.


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Wandering and Curiosity Lokkang’s rectangular gray paving stones were not icons of a place, but indices of relationships among places, mediated by the experience of ocean passages. Similarly, authenticity in the memory of paving stones is not the uniqueness of home, but the recognition of relationships (to Quanzhou, Manila, Japan) that interpolate home with an experience of wandering, networks that Lokkang people recapture in the repetitive movements of trade, pilgrimage, and festivity. Much as suggested in Bergson’s (1991) discussion of memory, local subjectivity forms in the interval between these repetitions, memories extending or contracting as people mediate shifting contexts of belonging and exclusion. Now the paving stones are gone, but they have an afterimage in the practice of Taiwanese pilgrims. I first asked people in Lokkang about their pilgrimages to Fujian in 1991, before I had gone to Fujian myself. In the summer of 1992, as I prepared for fieldwork in Quanzhou, people told me that Quanzhou would remind me of Lokkang before Old Street was restored. When I arrived in Quanzou to meet Mr. Lin of Lukang Tianhou Gong that September, he pointed out the stones to me, saying, “These are like our alleys were when I was a child.” I vaguely remembered Old Street before the restoration. Perhaps nostalgia, like misfortune, is contagious. Apart from the salience wandering may have for people who have left Lokkang in some period of their lives as students, soldiers, or labor migrants, passages from one place to another create for Lokkang people their specific sense of history. This historical sense is not far from religious beliefs and practices. A memory of past journeys, selected because of the particular relevance that they have for current social relationships (Sangren 1987; Sangren 1988) often forms the standard motivation Taiwanese people give for presenting incense, or pilgrimage, to China. When asked about why she was curious about Fujian, En-chhai’s mother, for example, explained why Quanzhou was such an important place to visit: Five generations ago, we lived in Choanchiu. But life on Tang Mountain [ThngsaN; i.e., China] was not so good for us [bo anne hose]; there was not enough to eat. So part of our family came to Lokkang to do business. The business was throwing oneself into the ocean [tho hai], every year going back and forth, from Choanchiu to Lokkang and back to Choanchiu, some staying some going. Tho hai living is very bitter. But Machoo [m: mazu] protected us, so that our family became wealthy, so we have a better life now.

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Another of my associates in Lokkang, A-Sian’s father, explained similar relationships between place and memory through the medium of his family’s domestic altar. In 1995, I had asked him about his participation in a pilgrimage to Quanzhou; in his description, the images come to embody relationships with places established through his sojourn in Kaohsiung and return home 20 years later. On stage right of the altar sit ancestral tablets. Beyond them, on the wall stage right of the altar table, facing the television, hang hand-tinted photographs of A-Sian’s grandfather and grandmother. Their images appear within an ink drawing of a splendid mansion overlooking mountain scenery. At the center of the nearby altar sits an image of Siongte Kong, flanked on stage left by Thaichu Ia and Mazu. To stage right of the Siongte Kong image is Ti Ongia, a deity for whom A-Sian’s brother, A-Tiong, has served as a medium. Beside the image rests a collection of shark-tooth knives, a sword, and other implements that comprise a medium’s set of weapons, or “five treasures.” Of the images, A-Sian’s father says, only the Mazu is of any antiquity. Although the gold leaf on the image is newly refinished, the small, black-faced image is more than 200 years old. A-Sian’s father suspects that the image was brought to Lokkang eight or nine generations ago. In contrast to the Mazu image, which is an artifact of a much earlier passage across the Taiwan Straits, the other images dated from the early to mid-1980s. Siongte Kong, now the master of A-Sian’s neighborhood temple, dates from the family’s return from Kaohsiung. A-Sian’s family acquired its domestic image of Ti Ong when the deity chose A-Tiong as a medium. In A-Tiong’s terms, he was an “atheist and had little connection with religion” before then. When his family returned from Kaohsiung, Ti Ong found him, causing him to fall into a trance in the courtyard of the neighborhood temple. Together, the set of images on A-Sian’s domestic altar captured his family’s relationships to home and to their experiences of wandering. Like A-Tiong’s vocation, however, A-Sian’s family perceived the curiosity that impelled A-Sian’s father to take a pilgrimage to issue from the deity. The images instantiated a relationship with Quanzhou and objectified a standard hagiography, a narrative of wandering, and an account of intervening generations and sojourns. More than objects of memory, images and paving stones mediated relationships. They incited curiosity, a mood that attenuated the agency of pilgrims even as it confirmed the reality of truths beyond the times of recovery or recognition. And that is why Lokkang people have little interest in the Lukang Time offered by either culturalist or critical planners.


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Curiosity as Attenuation When asked about their motives for pilgrimage, most Taiwanese pilgrims to Chinese sites mention “curiosity” (haoqi). A literal gloss of haoqi as “fondness for the strange or unfamiliar” suggests that curiosity involves evaluation as well as motivation. Haoqi thus combines an external motivation, the strange or unfamiliar element, and an internal compulsion that follows a positive evaluation, the response of being curious. Haoqi may lead to enjoyment; it is also a test of sincerity. The sincerely curious should follow haoqi with some action. In their explanations of their curiosity, pilgrims defer to a number of sources that fix curiosity as relatively constrained. They summon experiences of industrialization, the Japanese colonial period and its aftermath, KMT projects of inculcating Chinese Culture, and ambivalent relationships to China that have followed the disintegration of the KMT party state. Interestingly, pilgrims rarely describe their motivations as issuing from “interest” (xingqu h: hengchhu), a term that those with wider experiences of travel give to describe their journeys. Curiosity both situates their pilgrimages as different from other forms of travel and forms a screen between their motives and the production of knowledge about pilgrimage, which often embeds pilgrimage within a nationalist narrative. To those who would attribute political motivations, a national consciousness (or immaturity thereof), to their pilgrimages, pilgrims reply that they were curious. The grandson of one pilgrim formulated a particularly eloquent statement of curiosity when he said to me, “Pilgrims, like my grandfather, have a ‘legendary sentiment’ ” (chuanshuo ganqing). For example, Ng Tiongbo, a ritual exhumation master in Lokkang’s Chhiaboe neighborhood, took a pilgrimage to search for the ancestral temple of the Taichiong Ia temple beside which he has lived since his childhood. His motivation issued from a curious occurrence. A few years ago, Taichiong Ia appeared to Ng in a dream. In the dream, the deity showed him the ancestral temple and instructed him to go there to present incense. The temple he saw in his dream was very vivid; Ng said that he could easily draw it. He counted the number of doors and inspected the finely carved beams of the stage that faced the temple across the temple courtyard. Ng’s wife was not surprised when Ng told her about the dream. Because they have always lived beside the Taichiong Ia temple, their family has a connection (ian; m: yuan) with the deity. The dream further added to the conviction that their connection was an influential one. Perhaps now that two generations had passed since anyone in his family had traveled to Quanzhou, he needed to restore the ties between

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the local Taichiong Ia and the ancestral one to protect his family’s fortunes. However, in his travel to China, he did not find the temple. According to Ng Tiongeng, Tiongbo’s brother, their grandfather’s grandfather, who first came to Taiwan, took the incense ash that founded the Lokkang temple from Quanzhou. Ng wonders whether it would be possible to find the ancestral temple of his Taichiong Ia, given that much of the evidence he could use is not in writing, but embedded in parts of local structures that have been disappearing rapidly, like Pakthao’s Eight Triagrams Plan or the stone-paved streets of his youth. Ng’s grandfather, who taught Tiongeng and Tiongbo to exhume, examine, and rebury ancestral bones, grew up spending half of his time in Lokkang and the other half in Quanzhou, often transporting bones across the Straits. Under these circumstances, the family connection to Taichiong Ia became a particularly salient one. In Lokkang’s pantheon, Taichiong Ia is especially efficacious in settling and controlling ghosts. Among other responsibilities, the deity collects the souls of unworshipped dead at the end of their month’s reprieve during the seventh lunar month. Before the Japanese closed Lukang’s harbor, the Ng family would carry a Taichiong Ia image on the boat whenever they crossed the Straits. One of the Taichiong Ia images, Ng surmises, was probably the founding image of the Lokkang Taichiong Ia temple. Of note in the Ng’s brothers’ remarks on pilgrimage is a combination of attenuated motivations and ambivalent identification. Ng Tiongbo attributes his decision to look for the temple to a dream; likewise, Tiongeng feels curious because in his youth he heard stories of Quanzhou Kaiyuan Si’s twin pagodas and his grandfather’s annual travels. The Ngs would probably agree with a temple committee chair in Yunlin County, who considered pilgrimage valuable because historical structures and toponyms in Quanzhou offer clues with which one could reconstruct local history. “We have the life of belief, and they have relics,” he said of an Ongia temple in Quanzhou. For that reason, their pilgrimage to Quanzhou offered a chance to intuit features of local history that had been lost on Taiwan. Other pilgrims would note that the relationship between their temples and founding sites in Fujian was similar to dragon veins (longmai), a term from geomancy. Return to the presumed origins of Taiwanese experience in the originary wanderings of ancestral figures did not concentrate value in the originary site; rather, presenting incense valorizes wandering. Likewise, Taiwanese pilgrims restored originary sites to make the history of wandering clear, as a mai issuing from an ancestor. As in geomancy, presenting incense strengthened mai through which


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value flowed and collected, bringing prosperity to those who could correctly set up relationships among geographic features. Conversely, damage to the founding site or to the vein leading from the founding site to Taiwan could negatively affect the Taiwanese site and its worshippers. Restoration of, and pilgrimages to, the founding site not only produced memories of lost hometowns but also allowed value to flow back to Taiwanese sites through veins that had otherwise been disrupted. Curiosity does not completely capture this geomantic metaphor; with “legendary sentiment,” it suggests an emotion but not the peculiar relationships among places, the dispositions (se, m: shih) that objectify the source of the pilgrims’ anxiety. Paving stones condense these dispositions, or at least serve to index them. These dispositions, as well as the ambivalent intimacy that Taiwanese pilgrims feel in Fujian, distinguish pilgrimages from other forms of travel. Most pilgrims were in their middle age during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Many were born during or shortly after the Japanese colonial period. They had lived through the island’s resinification under the KMT and came to adulthood before the Taiwan miracle. One such pilgrim, whom I will call Mr. Lau, has traveled extensively in Europe, China, and Southeast Asia. With his brother, he owns and continues to work in a small factory that produces safety helmets. A photograph of Lau and his wife in front of Versailles occupies a prominent position in the living room of his house. Lau saw these experiences as a tourist as completely different from pilgrimage. Travel satisfied a “cultural interest” (bunhoa hengchhu), whose practices included museum visits, tasting exotic food, and “learning about the customs of a different society.” Lau also distinguishes between his pilgrimages to Fujian and other travels he has made in China. During the pilgrimage on which I met Lau, he purchased a set of hand puppets representing the three sworn brothers of the Peach Garden from the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms: Guan Gong, Liu Bei, and Zhang Fei. He displayed these puppets in his dining room in a glass case that also contained commemorative bottles of expensive liquors and crystal pieces. Nearby, Lau has hung a piece of calligraphy from Suzhou. The text of the piece is Su Shi’s “Red Cliff Notes,” which meditates on a famous battle recounted in the Three Kingdoms. From his youth, Three Kingdoms has been Lau’s favorite novel. Travel to the Yangtze River Gorges allowed him to see sites he had imagined from the novel. Lau attributes the Three Kingdoms with a pedagogical power to instruct while entertaining. Each episode contains deep knowledge of tactical skills to which Lau credits some of his own business acumen. For him, travel to places in the Three

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Kingdoms was connected with memories of his youth and implicitly with his struggles in Taipei to establish his business. Another book on Lau’s bookshelf is his family genealogy (zupu). Through the zupu, Lau’s family was able to determine at least the name of their ancestral house as well as the county and district. The genealogy records the migration of the family from Zhangzhou to Taiwan, and before that from the Central Plains to Fujian. If Three Kingdoms motivated his travel to historical sites in China, the zupu situated his pilgrimage to Fujian. It gave the pilgrimage a sense of intimacy that could not follow from cultural interest. It also made Lau’s pilgrimage a test of sincerity. Unlike the Three Kingdoms, which fostered a strategic sense and an almost curatorial interest in figures associated with the novel, the zupu fixed Lau’s commitment to a corporate remembrance. In fact, when showing me the zupu, Lau stressed that I would have to discuss the pilgrimage with his father, at whose insistence both Lau and his brother would take three annual journeys to Fujian. Lau’s father, who was in his eighties when I met him in 1995, situated his own curiosity toward Fujian in his experience of the Japanese colonial period and his own father’s desires. How Lau’s father remembered this desire is itself curious, however, and deserves some attention. In the mid-1980s, Lau had a cousin who established a shoe factory in Amoy. He had already run a shoe factory in Tali, a town in Taichung County, for several years; but rising labor costs in Taiwan compelled him to invest in Fujian. Because he was already in Amoy, he decided to travel to Zhangzhou on a combination of business and sightseeing. When he returned to Tali, his account of his trip to Zhangzhou caused Lau’s father to recall something that his father instructed him near the end of his life: if given the chance, he should visit their ancestral house in the PoaN-ah (m: banzai) district of Pinghe County. Lau’s father looked up the information in the zupu, then asked the cousin to search for the site on his next trip to Amoy. Once he discovered the site, the cousin used his connections in Amoy and Zhangzhou to arrange a tour. When Lau’s brother introduced me to their father, Lau’s father spoke briefly about the pilgrimage but said that I would not understand why his family thought the pilgrimage was important unless I knew about the Japanese colonial period (1895–1945). In the early 1930s, Lau’s father was preparing to leave for Japan to study law. His father (that is, Lau’s grandfather) wished him to make a pilgrimage to their ancestral site in Fujian, but soon the Japanese began the Kominka movement, which enforced Japanization policies. During the Kominka movement, it was difficult,


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if not impossible, to visit China; besides, the Chinese government often suspected Taiwanese people in China to be Japanese spies. The family, like many Taiwanese families during the 1930s, adopted a Japanese surname. Nonetheless, places for Taiwanese students in secondary and postsecondary schools were rare. Fear of military conscription and difficulties with advancement on Taiwan forced Lau’s father to take his law degree in Japan, reminding him that he was not Japanese but still a Zhangzhou person. Lau’s father’s desire to visit Five Beauties Hall, their ancestral home, followed the surname change and educational difficulties. Curiosity responds to this desire within the novel possibilities afforded by political-economic reform on both sides of the Straits. It attenuates the motivation of individual pilgrims, who attribute pilgrimage to paving stones, dreams, or a father’s wishes. It also locates these sources of desire within a field of ambivalent relationships rather than fixed identities.

Ambivalent Identification and the Discovery of China as Other Some of the objects that for pilgrims induced a sense of intimacy with ancestral sites in Fujian could also be manipulated to create distance. Although the zupu suggested enduring links of kinship, it could equally demonstrate the attenuation of kinship through succeeding generations. Moreover, as Taiwanese people encountered China as pilgrims, they often began to question the narrative of national recovery that had until recently dominated public space and history on Taiwan. Pilgrimage differs from tourism because of its relationship to an ancestral site that marks the pilgrim as belonging to a group with continuity through time. Nonetheless, pilgrimage also indexes differences and discontinuities introduced to filial continuity through the medium of wandering. These discontinuities introduce ambivalence into pilgrimage. For example, the Ng brothers point out the intimacy (qinqiegan) they feel when visiting Quanzhou but also deny substantial kinship, as in the following humorous narrative, which Ng Tiongeng heard from his great uncle: I have seen many votives and stelae in Choanchiu that concern Lokkang. Once I see these things, I always feel very intimate. But if one talks of kin or relatives, that’s a different matter. There are many false relations, always very kind. They gather around you and call you Grandmother’s Brother, Grandfather’s Elder Brother (Chik-kong, Pe-kong), but that is

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only loitering about looking for something, only wanting your money (loliloso nia, chi siuNboe ly e [makes hand sign for money] niania). Their surname is the same, but they are not your real relatives. Besides, to recognize your real relatives, you need a family genealogy. My grandmother, she was illiterate. Once we had a family genealogy, but one day, my grandmother had been drinking and got careless. Actually, she did not know what book it was. She wanted to start a fire, or . . . well, she took the family genealogy and burned it. That’s what my great uncle told me. Anyway, on Taiwan, there are relatives, and you do not always feel so close to them. China is so far away, would those relatives be close at all?

Taiwanese pilgrims who had interacted with distant relatives in China nearly always conveyed stories of inflated generational status, in which the zupu or its absence could defer claims of kinship. An apprentice image carver at a workshop near Hongthian Temple, for example, told would-be relatives that being the youngest in his lineage in Lokkang, he was not even written into the zupu. Perhaps his elders could recognize kinship, but he certainly could not. He suspected the would-be relatives of disordering kinship, for personal gain. Other narratives of travel to China demonstrate an emerging awareness that China did not correspond with the China depicted in national salvation narratives. Through the 1990s, Mr. Lau supported KMT candidates who opposed Lee Teng-hui’s position that relationships between Taiwan and China were those between two sovereign states.5 He often chided me for reading the Independence Evening Post, a newspaper then closely associated with the “green,” or Taiwanese Independence, opposition. Thus, I was surprised one evening when over our evening newspapers, tea, and television news, he pointed out a report of a recent flood in China. “The Mainland is an expanse of ruined land and bad earth,” Lao said: On the northeast coast of the Mainland is a Yellow Sea, where the Yellow River pours tons of earth, staining the ocean. From all the soil that flows down, the sea itself is yellow. And that soil, that soil around the Yellow River, nothing can grow there, nothing grows. That’s because China’s history is long. Humans have abused the region of the Central Plains for five thousand years, until nothing will grow there.

Ambivalence aside, Lau still believes that Taiwanese people should feel charity toward China as their ancestral home. His own depiction of China diverges from both the KMT recovery narrative and more novel unificationist narratives, which celebrate the coming of the Chinese Century. Taking his images from his pilgrimage, Lau situated China


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within a family history that opposed what he had previously learned in school or encountered in the media. In the past, Lau told me, the television and newspapers and even lottery tickets echoed the commonplaces of elementary and middle-school geography and history courses, which said that “the mainland’s material resources are the most bountiful in the world, the mainland’s wealth is great, the mainland’s rice is best.” Children’s songs in elementary school Mandarin textbooks of the fifties and sixties described the mainland as “our home” where bountiful fields, abundant livestock, and beautiful gardens had been overtaken by communist bandits. One only need fight to recover the mainland to overcome all poverty and homelessness. Taiwanese people, who lacked mainland identity, were the objects of pedagogy to remove the impurities of Japanese colonialism. Textbooks exhorted Taiwanese children to recover a home that could never be their own: Mother and Father said to me, Our Home is on the Mainland There, are the Five Mountains and Five Lakes, There, are the Yellow River and the Yangtze Mother and Father said to me, Our Home is on the Mainland There, are many friends and relatives There, are the fields we lived on for generations . . . (National Education and Translation Bureau 1966: 69, 70)

After taking the pilgrimage, Lau told me that he had to go to the mainland to realize that the earth there was no good. It had been abused so long, that nothing good can come of it. “So now I understand why my founding ancestor decided to come to Taiwan,” he said. “If he had stayed on Tang Mountain, we would have nothing to eat!” On hearing Lau’s remarks, his wife interjected, “Taiwan’s fruit, rice, and tea are all very good. It’s still Taiwan that’s better.” To clarify his wife’s remarks in terms of his above argument, Lau recalled the local legend that, during the Japanese colonial period, Japanese emperors ate rice from Fongyuan in Taichung County not far from Lau’s hometown. On one of his trips to Fujian, Lau actually brought seedlings of Taiwanese rice to PoaN-ah. But they do not seem to have grown.

Dispositions of Pilgrimage Nonetheless, pilgrims often consider their journeys to Fujian to have been successful. The idiom in which they discuss this success is often

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that of dispositions. In some cases, such descriptions are personal. Pilgrims often recount that their current prosperity derives from the protection of Mazu or other deities. Organizers of pilgrimage rely on a similar idiom when they note the relationship between pilgrimage and the renown of their temple. For example, temple committee members at a Siao Ongia temple in Yunlin County contrast the temple’s current value with threats to the region’s geomantic condition. Originally, a row of low hills protected Mailiao, strengthening a dragon vein that settled at the town, allowing vital energies to collect at the temple. During this period in the late nineteenth century, efficacious responses proliferated, and the role of the temple in settling local disputes gave Siao Ong a ruling position among deities in the region. In the incipient industrial development of the town, Japanese engineers designed a system of narrow gauge railways and irrigation ditches to augment the production and processing of sugarcane on the island. Japanese economic planners intended Taiwan’s sugar for export, particularly for consumption by Japanese industrial workers. Although the new systems of communication that the Japanese colonial government constructed in the early twentieth century further integrated Taiwan into an emerging global economy, the cutting of new irrigation ditches harmed Mailiao’s dragon vein. In the same year, several deaf-mute children were born around Mailiao; changes in the geomantic configuration of the town necessitated reorientation of the temple structure. In contrast with this negative contraction of value experienced in the industrialization of agriculture under colonial administration, presenting incense reinvigorated wide-ranging networks through which wealth circulated. Temple committee members attributed these networks to the generative efficacy of Siao Ong: I believe that whether one considers our presenting incense or their [Quanzhou Fumei Gong’s] tour of Taiwan, both have been very successful. When we went there, the event was a huge one with a procession. They came and saw that our temple was impressive and imposing, and they expressed their admiration. They saw that the temples separated off from our Siao Ong are numerous, coming each year to present incense. In Taiwan, belief [in Siao Ong] prospers, so that they felt both pleased and satisfied. They were satisfied, because they knew that in the past our temple was merely a grass hut but is currently a large structure—how could this be but for the efficacy of Siao Thai Hu? So they were satisfied. Our Ongia’s imposing efficacy manifests itself throughout Taiwan, so they were pleased. This is why I say that both were successful.


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The dispositions of pilgrimage differ from the claims of identity issuing from narratives of national salvation or recognition. Nonetheless, they are complicit with these narratives. The Siao Ong temple whose committee members attributed the transformation of a grass hut into an imposing temple were aware that codification of this knowledge within historical accounts was both a method of intertemple competition and embedded in successive projects of cultural renaissance and construction that issued from the provincial and central governments. They would also comment negatively on the connections between Quanzhou Fumei Gong and the local state in Quanzhou. Indeed, these connections became too difficult to ignore when Taiwanese authorities rejected the application of one of the members of the tour, the head of the Quanzhou City Taoist Culture Research Association. He was, as they knew, an official semiretired from the United Front Bureau. Likewise, pilgrimage networks centered on Lokkang have become emblematic of the town’s status as a capital of Taiwanese folklore. The status of popular ritual practice as “culture” has intensified these rituals significantly because it has also led to the rehabilitation of rituals discontinued under Japanese colonial and KMT governments. When pilgrims attribute their motivations to curiosity, they displace the claims of identity that impinge on their practices. Curiosity is thus a technique of complicity. Images, paving stones, and other objects often enable such techniques. Take, for example, iconography. In autumn 1995, I visited Mr. Kho, an image carver in Lokkang, who asked me a rhetorical question. All Mazu images on Taiwan wear crowns modeled on those worn by emperors of the Tang and Song period. “Why do you suppose,” he asked, “that Mazu images wear these crowns, with beads hanging down in front of the face?” I assumed that the pendant beads veiled the noble face of Mazu from unclean human eyes. However, the image carver disagreed with this interpretation. Instead, Kho pointed out, common people designed the crown. In the I-Ching there is the saying: One who espies the fish in the depths is inauspicious. The crown expresses the meaning of this quote. It is to cause the emperor or the deity not to see us so clearly, so that s/he will be more tolerant of our faults. So, the crown was made so that when officials or superiors would look down at their inferiors or the common folk, they would not see clearly. It is only when they do not see so clearly that their rule is a good one. Among us common people, there are few who are perfect. If s/he would see clearly, then s/he would complain and become too severe. The beaded crown forces the one in a superior position to lose

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the power to supervise, causing her/him to be less severe. So that when we come into the temple, one of us may be secretly laughing, the other secretly eating something.6 But she will not see our faults, and we will hear her say, “It matters not, child.” The common people do not want her to see us so clearly, so one of us created this crown. It’s not that officials said, “Our face is too fine, and person too noble, so that we will not allow you to see us.” If you interpret it that way, you are wrong. This is a crown that causes them to see vaguely. It is for the sake of the common people.

Kho described the crown as a sign of social investment. The crown increased the image’s overall visibility while, on the other hand, like embroidered robes, golden votive pendants, and carved altar pieces, intentionally obscured it: people have multiplied additions to the image until it vanished within its accessories. Ironically, the process that seems to make the goddess invisible was the process of adding visibilities. During pilgrimages a similar process made specific crowds invisible. Hagiography and naojiat crowds formed screens on which pilgrims could project their motives. In this fashion, they could attenuate their motives or amplify them. In contrast, the new image that Tachia procured in its 1989 pilgrimage and the colossal statue of Mazu on Meizhou Island seem overdetermined. As for Tachia’s New Meizhou Mother, the youth and freshness of this image embodied the flattened hierarchy that would follow if all Mazu sites were directly filiated from Meizhou. It also threatened a corresponding erasure of historical verities, for unlike the Black-Faced Mothers of Lokkang or Peikang, Tachia’s New Meizhou Mother did not bear the traces of a relationship to Meizhou complicated through intervening years of pilgrimage and ritual filiation on Taiwan. One might say that Tachia’s new Meizhou image, like many claims to identity circulating in postmartial law Taiwan, Chinese or Taiwanese, fascinated but also indicated the ethically corrosive effect of a changing social field in which “identity crises” prevailed. The colossal image on Meizhou was the product of Taiwanese donorship but demonstrated a horizon of complicity where a common practice that bracketed out opposed ends and motivations—in effect mediating between two differently constructed worlds—became increasingly difficult to sustain. In the late 2000s, Taiwanese pilgrimages to China lack the fervor of the mass pilgrimages of the early 1990s. A call to send off Lukang Tianhou Gong’s pilgrimage to Meizhou during the summer of 2008 barely gathered enough palanquin bearers from Hongthian Kiong to


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guide Lukang’s image as she moved from her temple to the bus idling near Hongthian Kiong’s courtyard. The bus was only one-third full. Awareness of the horizon of complicity indicated by this change brings us to the conclusion of this book, alerting us to the possibilities and dangers, the utopian imagination and negative connotations of complicity. Complicity affords recognition of a common practice and hence some shared ethical horizon, often in the context of extreme difference and entrenchment. That it does so in the language of value and not of procedure makes it an interesting counterexample to the stress on rationalization in theories of modernity. Complicit actors do not meet each other as impersonal agents but as persons marked with difference, creating places that encode relationships to and through the other. The places created by pilgrim crowds or other complicit actors thus highlight an ethics of locality, an ethics in which places serve as the focus of ethical work and mediate relationships to diverse and divergent communities. Created with modern technology and often postmodern sensibilities, these places defy an argument that nonplaces—places lacking historical associations and “where the status of consumer or solitary passenger implies a contractual relation with society” (Augé 1999)—have come to dominate life in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In this regard, the complicity of Taiwanese pilgrims and their Chinese hosts has implications for how we think about modernity and conflict resolution. In addition to the possibility of composing a shared practice, complicity presents dangers of betrayal and flattening. It is possible that, once complicit actors have built together the objects that ground their own and opposed arguments, they begin to see divergences in the light of duplicity and betrayal. Betrayal is thus one of complicity’s possible countercontextualizations. Moreover, complicity might externalize precisely those ends that people feel necessary to ground themselves as subjects. Anxiety about images that flatten out the complications of their production expresses a realization of this sinister facet of complicity. To take a comparative example, in the United States, ongoing arguments about the military “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy suggest both the possibilities for a shared practice and a sense that complicity leads to self-betrayal or at least personal inauthenticity. When ends and values excluded from a practice become too important to externalize, because they have a dominant status in other domains and organize relationships among those domains and the practice, practitioners can no longer adjudicate between internal and external goods. They may wish to continue the practice, but only if practitioners situate formerly excluded goods as

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internal ones. Often these arguments about how to balance certain goods as internal and others as external appear under the rubric of “identity,” a structure of feeling closely related to betrayal. Thus, complicity presents ethical peril as well as possibility, retaining a critical ambivalence. Understanding the form this ambivalence takes across social contexts presents an important problem for future ethnographic work. This ambivalence suggests that identity and its demands of authenticity maintain a troublesome relationship to complicity and its ethics of deferral. For Taiwanese pilgrims and promoters of pilgrimage, recognition of similarity and difference between Taiwan and Fujian was one of the few means to locate the object of Taiwanese culture. In China, meanwhile, Taiwanese pilgrim crowds were one of the few guarantees of certainty in a field where the vitality and value of history remained fragile. As a result, Taiwanese people have been complicit with institutions of managing the “Taiwan Problem” as they, along with their Fujianese hosts, produce objects that ground opposed arguments. In this regard, complicity presents a paradox: a powerful means to make historical truth normative, it grounds identity through a practice shared with those who find other truths self-evident or who may envision an opposed future. Nonetheless, complicity is vulnerable to identity’s claims. I think that one reason for this paradox is that identity is generally an administrative category rather than an ethical one; it is a substrate of the nonplaces described by Augé (1999) and the precipitate of “constitutive deals” made in nation-states as they represent communities (Kelly and Kaplan 2001). As I have shown above, the curiosity of pilgrims, like naojiat, often affords them an escape from fixed identities. On Taiwan, where people have found themselves entangled with projects of national identity, either imposed by colonial administrations or generated through democratization, popular ritual practices, including pilgrimage, have engaged with these projects. Yet, they may equally screen out or disavow their implications. Embedded in objects like a family genealogy burned by a drunken grandmother or goddesses that conjure spaces of wandering rather than those of origins, curiosity should inform a theoretical caution for anthropologists, who are too often apt to rely on identity as a rubric, particularly in attempts to examine the social production of place. Because complicity frustrates or runs aground on identity, as well as engaging it, complicity provides a vantage to examine the grip of identity politics and to observe lives configured, like those of Taiwanese people, by a need to confront both an excess and lack of identity. For people in Lokkang, complicity provides an ethics in which they can stage such a confrontation. One can hear this facet of


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complicity in local anxieties about the “culture” of Lukang Time. It also resounded through Taiwanese pilgrimages during the years of the island country’s democratic transition and initial encounters with China.

Disappearing Ghosts, or the Coldness of Culture During the 1940s, A-Sian’s neighborhood of Lunah Teng, which abutted the town’s largest cemetery, had but a few dim electric lights. Where Democracy Road now cuts through the neighborhood, there was once a narrow alley that opened into a small square in front of Khianchheng Kiong, the neighborhood temple. An old banyan near the temple stood beside a local store. At least that was how A-Sian remembered his neighborhood to me, based on his father’s recollections. Today the paved road is not a major thoroughfare, but at least it is well lit, as are most of the neighborhood’s alleys. When the neighborhood lacked the halogen glare of today’s Lunah Teng, one would often encounter strange emanations. Pale greenish mists took human shape and wended along the neighborhood alleys. Now with more light, A-Sian told me, the ghosts were less visible. One did not see the kinds of things these days that his father experienced firsthand. One would think that the new roads and electric lights had made Lokkang more naojiat. Is not A-Sian’s description of the ghosts who used to haunt Lunah Teng a description of the coldness and desolation of the neighborhood during his father’s youth, those limitations that forced his father to leave for Kaohsiung? Conversely, while there seem to be fewer ghosts, naojiat events have cooled off in recent years. At least the rhythm of gathering and dispersal has been reconfigured in ways that seem inappropriate. The Amhong, an exorcistic procession carried out at night in the coldest, most severe manner possible, has now become a noisy-hot spectacle. A-Sian described the photographers and tourists who crowd the event: “This is what happens,” said A-Sian, “when something becomes culture.”


Notes

Introduction


1. KMT institutions of representing China were peculiar, involving those of a nation-state engaging as a partner in the Cold War (i.e., those that derived from decolonization in China) and a colonial apparatus that systematically devalued Taiwan except as a base for recovering the lost metropole. 2. This situation bears comparison to Faubion’s discussion of metalepsis in Athens. Faubion (1993: 84) notes that monuments “were robbed of their status as paragons, an essentially atemporal status, the more that they are exposed as representatives merely of a time past. Dated, transformed into metonymic shreds and patches, they tend all to fall victim sooner or later to what Bloom speaks of as metaleptic ‘meta-reduction’: the diminution of a totalistic figure into partiality and partitivity.” Rather than connecting the metaleptic act to problems of modernity, in this work I am interested in its connection to post-totalitarian transition. 3. See Dirlik (1994, 1995), Dirlik and Meisner (1989), Verderey (1996). See also Brenner (1997), Swyngedouw (2004). 4. In this process, culture has become an object that cannot be a local production, even if it points toward localities. If, as Marshall Sahlins (2000) has pointed out, culture is not a “disappearing object,” it nonetheless hides a collective history in which its contemporary deployments differ, in the networks they form, from those which were the object of an anthropology more comfortable with the term. 5. Curiously, this claim holds whether the theory in question is positivist or constructivist. 6. In other words, minjian xinyang was an “immutable mobile” (Latour 1990). 7. See, for example, Callon and Law 1982; Latour 1996b, 1999, 2000a, 2000b; Law 2002, Law and Mol 2002, Michael 2000. 8. Similarly, Latour (1996a) and Thevenot (2002) have demonstrated how technical projects group multiple problems, enrolling their respective advocates as they attempt to convince them that the project forms a global solution to a series of local problems.

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Notes

9. As Tarde (1969) noted in his alternative to Durkheimian sociology, only one side of any given subject or object is available to coordination, leaving other sides (or object positions) able to proliferate. 10. Here it is good to recall Wagner’s dialectic of conventional symbolization and obviation (Wagner 1981). 11. See Michael (2000) for a discussion of “road rager” and “couch potato” as hybrid subjects created for the purposes of critique and intervention. 12. Latour’s symmetry, which collapses human and nonhuman agency, may obscure something of anthropological interest. I do not wish to repeat the oft-heard objection that only humans give meaning to objects, that only humans have agency or intention; rather, my contention is that much work goes into how these intentions and powers are invested and appear (or remain obscure). One way of looking at this problem, which I attempt in chapter 2, is to note the shifts in agency that occur in talk about images: the work needed for the image itself to have agency versus the work of making the image a representation of a deity who in turn is an allegory of virtues. 13. Marcus’s model of complicity is promising, but elides some of the most troubling (and hence promising) aspects of complicity. For one, Marcus poses a model in which the ethnographer remains in control of fieldwork design. His definition of ethnographic projects situates the ethnographer as a monadic subject traversing positions in the network with no transformation of politics, intent, or identity. As such, his model of field relationships seems to reproduce, albeit from a different set of premises, the synoptic vision that critics of Latour and Callon have perceived in ANT (Lee and Brown 1994, Lynch 1996, Strathern 1996).

1

Heat and Noise

1. Although these two processes of reform have distinct histories and diverging ends, I will refer to both as “post-totalitarian transitions.” 2. In this regard, it is notable that the phrase “to settle accounts” (m: suanzhang) connotes friendship-ending conflicts. 3. Sworn brotherhood is reminiscent of the classic novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms where it is related to the central heroes. 4. The parody is even more serious when, as in some versions of this narrative, White Impermanence decides to return home to fetch an extra umbrella for Black Impermanence, lest his friend catch a chill from the rain. 5. As Fernandez (1986: 265) notes concerning folk parades and kayak festivals in Asturias, Spain, it is in moments when Asturians present themselves as they do not really believe themselves to be that the question of what they can become is left open. 6. Gell’s attempt to explain disequilibriating rites and swinging devices as at the center of a relationship between normal and abnormal types of subjectivity in relation to the world, however, begs the question as to the normal integration of actions and their consequences. The abnormal conditions Gell so admirably describes may be—and as I hope to suggest, often are—marshaled to underpin, or even produce,

Notes

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the values on which the normal rests. Victor Turner’s (1977) now classic work on structure and antistructure in ritual is thus instructive in its insistence that “gaps” in structure are crucial points for its reproduction and representation. 7. The allusion to Durkheim is intentional. Brad Weiss (personal conversation) responded to my talk about naojiat, calling it a type of “autodidactic Durkheimianism.” I am inclined to agree with him but equally inclined to inquire how this vernacular criticism informs ethical formations that do not map easily onto Western conceptions of modernity or its others. 8. In introducing this “Rabelaisian” public, I am attempting, like Susan Ossman (2002: 75) to “analyze how it is that certain spaces have been adopted as icons of opening epics, while others less clear in their disentanglement of public and private, have been ignored.”

2


1. Lee’s article is reprinted, with criticism from Ponkang Mazu Educational Commission (funded by Peikang Chaotian Temple), in Tsai Hsiang-hui, ed (1990a). 2. In 1987, the ninth day of the ninth lunar month, given in hagiography as the date of Mazu’s apotheosis, fell on October 31. 3. The state institutionalizes certain power relationships in the form of a regime, yet it also consolidates its rule through intensifying those power relationships that remain beyond it, which it mobilizes as dispositions. What we observe as the retreat of the state from certain realms during processes of posttotalitarian transition is actually the work of composing those dispositions as actual, autonomous, and efficacious. 4. In his work on ethics, Foucault (1990: 26) defined ethical substance as the part of the self that is constituted as the “prime material of [one’s] moral conduct.” I have extended the definition of ethical substance to include objects that ground (or complicate) the self as an ethical subject. As in Taiwanese pilgrimage, these objects serve as the object of ethical practices. 5. Steven Sangren makes this argument most forcefully in Sangren (2000). 6. For a discussion of blackboxing, see Latour (1991, 1999) and Law (2002). The claim that relationships become partible and subject to transfer through objects, particularly in exchange, is derived from the sociology of Mauss. See the discussion of such processes in Strathern (1988: 171–308). 7. This distinction mirrors Confucian ideals, particularly as filtered through the KMT movement for cultural renaissance. I am thankful to an anonymous reviewer of this chapter for pointing out this similarity. 8. She demonstrated her choice by becoming improbably heavy. 9. In fact, several Mazu temples in Taiwan do have such evidence. Usually the photograph is of the entire temple complex taken from a beach beneath the site. These photographs date from 1910–1926. During the early 1920s, there was an explosion of Taiwanese pilgrimages to Meizhou. These pilgrimages were greatly dissimilar from recent ones, however, as we will discuss in chapter 6.

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Notes

10. And beyond Mazu circles; see, for example, the Taiwan television special on Tachia’s pilgrimage (Taiwan Television Service 1992). Tachia Zhenlan Temple is also infamously engaged in KMT factional politics in Taichung County. 11. Guo Jin-lan (1988: 118) provides a similar version of this narrative. 12. A similar statement appears in Jiang and Zhang (1988: 52). 13. In 1987, reports of mainland fishing boats coming within sight of land and, in one case, even entering Taichung harbor raised suspicions of active involvement of Taiwanese fishermen in smuggling mainland products, on the one hand, and of mainland attempts to test Taiwan’s defenses, on the other (De Xia 1987; Lin Mei-chung 1987; Ho Jui-hsiung 1987; Pan Fu-chien 1987; Huang and Jiang 1987; Yao Zhu-qi 1987). Mainland fishermen engaged in what had become a maritime black market (or, so claimed some Taiwanese fishermen, a mild form of piracy) brought what had been a very distant neighbor suddenly close (Lin Mei-chung 1987: 7).

Vignette

Remembering a Movement

1. This account of removing paper from big character posters to sell to a recycler is a stereotypic one, even appearing in post-Mao literature.

3 Reluctance and Conversion 1. Weller (1999) argues against this model. 2. The pagodas have come to stand for this history, even though the visits of these two maritime adventurers precede the construction of Kaiyuan Si’s stone pagodas by two centuries. 3. Chen Yunluo reported in his “Recalling antiquities in Quanzhou” (1982 [1969]: 34) that in 1938, when he left Quanzhou for Singapore, the forecourt of Tianfei Gong still retained the image for locals to worship. 4. There is still reason to accept Malinowski’s definition of myth as charter. 5. In a work on traditional Chinese painting, Wu Hong (1996) has focused on the screen painting as occupying a dominant position. According to Wu (1996: 10–14), Chinese painting focuses on the contradiction between framing (hierarchical, metaphoric, and having to do with the establishment of places and political differentiation) and patterning (metonymic, continuous, contiguous, and repetitive). Moreover, the screen as “medium and representation” poses this problem at the boundary between inside and outside, private and public (Wu Hong 1996: 134–139). Although Wu does not make this suggestion, the screen could be usefully extended as a metaphor for the Chinese notion of culture. This metaphor seems especially felicitous in that it insists on the hybrid material-ideal quality of culture as an object and a term through which crises of the public figure circulate. 6. I am indebted to Mary Scoggin for pointing out the role of writing as a token through which literary community extends and consolidates. 7. Taichiongia himself was also involved in the process of restoration. Lin claims that the structure was restored as it appeared in the late Ming because the

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committee had asked Taichiongia through divination blocks whether they could expand the temple structure; Taichiongia refused. Moreover, Lin agreed to join the restoration effort because of a personal relationship with the deity, involving a personal account of efficacious response (which I have agreed not to divulge). 8. This inscription was the “Stone Record of Reconstruction” from Qing Kangxi 36 [1698], also known as the “Stone Record of the Balinese Patron.” See Qingjiao Ciji Temple (1992: 6–7; n.d.). 9. An otherwise unremarkable account of Taiwanese pilgrimage to Meizhou (Li Da 1988: 151) also mentions electrification: “It was until 1987 that Meizhou had electricity; As for the road to Wenjia [the site of the ferry to Meizhou], it was until 1987 before it was any sort of road at all. So one can see the influence of the temple on the entire island’s development.” 10. Aware of Shi Lang’s connection to Lukang, he hoped that Lukang Tianhou Gong would be interested in restoring the site, adding that of all sites in Putian, Pinghai was of the most value. Given the negative opinion most Taiwanese people have of Shi Lang, only Lukang, where Shi Lang is at least respected for having brought to Lukang the Meizhou Foundation Mother and where the Shi are one of the most powerful surname groups, would be likely to fund reconstruction of Pinghai.

4


1. Another temple in Shishan associated with the residence of Guangze Zun Wang before his apotheosis was included in the Fengshan Scenic District Administration. The Guanze Zun Wang pilgrimage circuit includes his father’s tomb, his birthplace, and Fengshan Si. Dean (1993) gives an historical account of the development of this pilgrimage circuit in early modern China. 2. yijian; in China, “opinions” can fell any potential project. It is best if bureaucrats do not have them. 3. The TCRA and Guandi Miao’s committee, although sharing members, are not the same body. Both are para-state organizations, but the TCRA is more closely aligned with the state than the temple committee. The TCRA was established in 1985, three years after the city government encouraged reappropriation of temple structures. That year, the Licheng District, which had been the Quanzhou city government, was reorganized within the greater Quanzhou municipality. Originally, there had been a religious affairs bureau within the Quanzhou city government. When the greater Quanzhou municipality was established, Licheng was left without a bureau administering religious affairs. Because it formed according to national guidelines governing religion, the new municipal bureau was only concerned with Buddhist temples, Islamic mosques, and Christian churches, all bodies with professional clergy. There could be no association within the religious affairs bureau to manage folk belief, which accounted for most of Quanzhou’s popular temples. In response, a retired bureaucrat from the United Front Office was assigned to organize the TCRA along with other members of the Guandi Miao committee.

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Notes

4. In spite of this argument, the actual composition of Tianfei Gong as a museum happened by accident rather than design. The cultural bureau acquired the structure by default. In 1981, restoration as a museum seemed the only safe means to restore the temple. Even with support of the city government, it took three years to begin restoration. It was 1987 before the site achieved national recognition. 5. More than one committee member at Lukang Tianhou Gong told me that one could consider the current Quanzhou Tianfei Gong shared from Lukang on the basis of one of its images and the pattern of donation. 6. See Hatfield (2001). 7. If critical of these policies, we must also inquire about the violence our liberal society visits upon those whose election is not sufficiently private (Faubion 2001). 8. Baosheng Dadi and Taitoo Kong are other, more popular names for Wu Zhenren.

5


1. Blount (1975) makes a similar argument concerning disputes concerning genealogy in Africa. 2. In his discussion of ritual performance, Webb Keane (1997: 20) has observed, “Indexes are of particular importance in linking representations to their contexts and conditions of possibility. Like the signs of charismatic authority, they seem ‘natural,’ that is, not the result of intentional action. So, one effect may be that the more natural a sign of charisma seems, the more irresistible the authority of its bearer, to the extent that people take it to manifest that person’s real essence. Conversely, to the extent that people recognize that a sign is a symbol, they may be more prone to seek out the intentions and agency of a sign user.” 3. The four modernizations included modernization of agriculture, industry, technology, and defense. 4. At any rate, suggestions of the economic role of tourism on Meizhou could only remain implicit in the absence of large numbers of Taiwanese pilgrims. Instead, Meizhou Bao’s reports of “mainland fever” (dalu re) stressed that Taiwanese interest in making visits to China had its origins in the “popular will” (minzhong yuanwang) of Taiwanese compatriots, now frustrated by restrictive KMT policies (“Gua Dalu”; “Taiwan Chuxian”; “Taiwan Xingqi”). 5. These dimensions become clearer once we decompose jiaotong into its constituent morphemes. Jiao refers to a wide variety of contacts and communications among people, including those of friendship, as in the terms jiao pengyou, to make a friend; jiaopei, which connotes sexual coupling; or jiaoyi, contacts of a commercial nature. Tong is found in compounds including goutong, meaning to communicate or convey, and tongda, meaning to arrive at. 6. Unlike most of the pilgrims we discuss here, Chou is from a family of post-1949 immigrants. 7. Limited direct flights between Taiwan and China only began in 2008.

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8. In 1987, that meant travel through Japan. Tachia’s commissioners were concerned that KMT interests were too strongly felt in Hong Kong. Only in 1988 did Hong Kong emerge as the most important pilgrim/tourist hub between Taiwan and China. 9. Taichung. The reader will recognize that I am giving the name of the high school in its Japanese pronunciation to stress the context of Cheng’s high school days. 10. See Margery Wolf (1972) for a discussion of ritual work and life stages among Taiwanese women. 11. As cybernetic systems, they often tend toward instability as differences proliferate and singularities fail to pull these differences back into their orbit (Delanda 2000).

6


1. Goffman (1981) defines footing as a person’s “alignment” or projected self in relationship to that person’s words and the surrounding social situation. In Goffman’s work, actors develop and manipulate footing primarily through speech. Although Goffman’s work often amplifies an essential self behind presentation, decomposition of participant roles permits an investigation of how parts of the self become subject to others. Indeed, I would suggest that the part of the self that shifts in footing attenuate becomes an ethical substance, that part of the self that is the focus of ethical work. 2. Later Lin was also commissioned for the construction of a similar image of Baosheng Dadi at Ciji East Temple. 3. Direct cross-Straits travel only became a possibility in 2008.

7


1. I am indebted to Harold Harotoonian for a vivid description of modernist time, which stimulated my thinking on the KMT time of recovery. 2. Han Pao-te left the reconstruction project in 1991 amid rumors of corruption, leaving behind angry editorials that rebuked the populace for a lack of cultivation. Han’s involvement in the project spanned more than 15 years of planning and promotion. Han began work in Lokkang in 1973 with a focus on the Buddhist Temple Longshan Si. 3. The Zhongyuan refers to the Central Plains surrounding the Yellow River, the ur-location of Chinese civilization. 4. Usually these “four ethnic groups” are defined as Indigenous, Hoklo, Hakka, and “New Taiwanese,” meaning those Chinese who followed the KMT to Taiwan after 1949. 5. His frequent travel to China and Taiwan’s threatened international status caused him to change his political position after the 2000 election season. He now holds that Taiwan and China are already sovereign states, albeit dominated by the same major ethnic group, and hence should be considered a single “nation.” “One nation, two states,” he said. 6. “Secretly eating” or “stealing a bite” could also mean “having an affair.”


Glossary

aiguo 国 (patriotic) A-Ko 阿姑 (father’s sister) A-Po 阿婆 (mother’s mother) baide haowan 拜得好玩 (worshipping for fun) baofa hu 暴 (explosive wealth household, i.e., nouveau riche) Baosheng Dadi 保生大帝 bentu 本土 (native, native soil) bentuhua 本土化 (nativist) bianzao lishi 編造歷史 (fabricated history) biokhao 庙口（廟口）(temple mouth) bo gikhi 無義氣 (has no sense of righteousness) bu tuodang 不妥當 (inappropriate) bunhoa hengchhu 文化興趣 (cultural interest) CCP 中国共党 (Chinese Communist Party) cheng 靜 (quiet, peaceful) chham hiuN 參香 (participation in incense) chhiam 籤 (divination poem) chinhiuN 進香 (present or advance incense, i.e., pilgrimage) chhit ia 七爺 (gentleman seven) chhit tho 跳 (play, fool around) chuanshuo ganqing 傳說感情 (legendary sentiment) chun-ah Ma 船仔媽 (boat mother) dalure 大陸熱 (mainland fever) Datong 大同 (the Great Unity) di yuan 地 (geographical ties) duoyuan 多元 (multiple, multicultural) eng 勇 (bravery, fierce virility) fatong 法統 (legitimacy, authenticity, particularly of a political sort) fengjian mixin 封建迷信 (feudal superstition) fuxing jidi 復興基地 (base for recovery) gaige kaifang 改革放（改革開放）(reform and openness) gongde xin 公德心 (civil consciousness) gongfei 共匪 (communist bandit) GPCR 大无文化革命 (great proletarian cultural revolution, cultural revolution)

252

Glossary

Guangze Zun Wang 廣澤尊王 gunthang ma 銀同媽 (tong’an mother) guoyu 國語 (national language, i.e., mandarin Chinese) haijian 海建 (coastal construction) haixia heping nüshen 海峡和平女神 (goddess of peace across the Straits) haoqi 好奇 (curious, curiosity) hen haowan 很好玩 (very fun) hiuNkhe 香客 (incense guest, i.e., pilgrim) hiuNkhi 香旗 (incense pennant) hiuNtiao 香條 (incense notice) ho hiaNte 好兄弟 (good brothers, i.e., ghosts) ho khoaN 好看 (attractive) huigui zuguo de huaibao 回祖国的抱 (return to the embrace of the fatherland) hui niangjia 回娘家 (returning to mother’s old home) jiao 醮 (ritual of cosmic renewal) jiaotong 交通 (communications) jiguan 籍貫 (ancestral home) jinbulai, zhubuxia, chibuliao, labubian, goubudao, xingbutong, chubuqu 不来，住不下，吃不了，拉不便，不到，行不通，出不去 (official litany about Meizhou) jincheng 人情 (human sentiment, reciprocity) jingshen qiaoliang 精神梁 (spiritual bridge) kaifa 開發 (develop, development) kengchu 境主 (master of the territory) khai kong 開光 (open the eyes to awaken an image) khoaN naojiat 看鬧熱 (watch naojiat) KMT 國民黨 (Kuomintang, Nationalist Party) kua hiuN ket hoe 刈香割火 (cutting incense and separating fires) laiwang 來往 (comings and goings, reciprocity) leng 靈 (generative efficacy) leng 冷 (cold) leng 令 (command) leng khi 令旗 (command pennant) lengchhengchheng 冷清清 (cold and lonely) lenggiam 靈驗 (narrative of efficacious response) loliloso 囉理囉唆 (loitering, hanging around for something) lookha 爐 (those “under the censer”) loochu 爐主 (master of the censer) Mao wei 毛偽 (maoist imposter, i.e., PRC government) mai 脈 (“veins” of ancestry or geomancy) Mazu wenhua 祖文化 (Mazu Culture) meiyou wenhua shuiping 没有文化水平 (lacking culture, has no education) men 悶 (stifled, congested) mingyun gongtong ti 命運共同體 (community of shared destiny, gemeinschaft) Min Tai Tong Yuan 閩臺同源 (Minnan and Taiwan Share One Source) mixin 迷信 (superstition) minjian 民間（popular, civic)

Glossary

253

minjian jiaoliu 民間交流 (popular interchange) minjian xinyang 民信仰（民間信仰）(popular belief) minjian xinyang de chongxin kaifang 民信仰的重新放 (reopening or liberalization of popular belief) minjian zai nao 民在 (stirred up by the populace) minnan 閩南 (southern Min, i.e., southeast Fujian) minsu de chuanqi renwu 民俗的奇人物 (legendary personage of folklore) minzhong yuanwang 民愿望 (民願望) (popular will) minzhuhua 民主化 (democratization) mu bushi ding 目不丁 (cannot tell a from b, illiterate) naojiat 鬧熱（鬧烈） (hot and noisy, crowd time) naoqu 鬧區 (bustling district) neibu ziliao 内部料 (internal documents) NTZ 国家旅游度假区 (national tourism zone) ongia 王爺 oo botiong 烏無常 (black impermanence) oo bin ma 烏面媽 (black-faced mother) pe botiong 白無常 (white impermanence) pe ya 八爺 (gentleman 8) PRC 中国人民共和国 (People’s Republic of China) qin min 親民 (close to the people) rentong 認同 (identify, identification, recognition of identity) ROC 中華民國 (Republic of China) saihui 賽會 (competitive assembly, temple festival) se 勢 (disposition, power) SEZ 特区 (special economic zone) shehui zhuyi jingshen wenming 社会主精神文明 (socialist spiritual civilization) shen yuan 神 (divine ties, religious ties) shishi yiyi 事意 (substantial meaning) SiaN Ong 圣王 (efficacious king, popular name for Guanze Zunwang) suzhi 素 (quality) Taibao biancheng daibao 台胞變成呆胞 (Taiwanese compatriots become “duh” wanese compatriots) tai ma 太媽 (first mother) Taitoo Kong 大道公 Taiwan wandanle 台灣玩（完）蛋了 (Taiwan’s played out) tan qin 探親 (visit relatives) tao naojiat, 湊熱鬧 (compose, or add to, naojiat) ThngsaN 唐山 (Tang Mountain, i.e., China) ti 体（體）(body, subject) ti-yong 体用 (essence-utility distinction, as in “Chinese learning as essence”) Ti Ongia 池王爺 tianxia wei gong 天下為公 (all under heaven for the public) tho hai 投海 (“throwing oneself into the ocean,” wandering to make a living) unleng ma 溫嶺媽 (warm hill, i.e., quanzhou mother) u tanpoe taioan bi 有淡薄兮台灣味 (Taiwan flavored)

254

Glossary

wan 玩 (play, enjoy) wang ben 忘本 (forget one’s roots) wang zu 忘祖 (forget one’s ancestors) wenhua caichan 文化 (文化財產) (cultural property) wenhua gucheng 文化古城 (ancient cultural city) wenming 文明 (civilization, civilized) wulin 武林 (martial world) wu yuan wenhua 五文化 (culture of five ties) Wu Zhenren 吳真人 yinshui siyuan 飲水思源 (when drinking water remember the source) xiang qian kan 向前（）看 (forward looking, puns with looking for money) xiaotiao 蕭條 (desolate) xietiao (coordinate, coordination) xingqu (h: hengchhu) 興趣 (interest) xiushen 修身 (self-cultivation) xun gen 根 (尋根) (search for roots, root searching) yao ji 遙祭 (venerate at a distance) youguan danwei 有位 (related unit) you qiu bi ying 有求必應 (all requests will be answered) zhengquedi renshi shenhua de shishi yiyi 正地神的事意 (correctly recognize the substantial meaning of mythology) zheng xin 正心 (upright heart/mind) zhengyi 正義 (sense of righteousness) zhidao 指 (guide, guidance) zhidao sixiang 指思想 (guiding philosophy) zhong xiao jie yi 忠孝節義 (loyalty, filial piety, thrift, and righteousness) zhonghua wenhua fuxing tuixing yundong 中華文化復興推行運動 (movement for Chinese cultural renaissance) zhu 主 (host, subject, main item of importance) zonghexing 合性 (comprehensive) zumiao 祖廟（祖庙 ) (ancestral or founding temple) zupu 族譜 (ancestor book, i.e., family genealogy)

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Index

A-Sian, 24, 41, 47, 228, 241 actor network theory (ANT), 12–13, 116, 185, 244n13 Ai Hai, 156 allegories, diffused, 6–9 alter-publics, 21, 89, 92, 96–100, 103–104, 110–112, 124–125, 131, 152, 160, 180 ambivalence, 20, 37–39, 89, 96, 101–113, 229–235, 240 Amoy University, 18–19, 82, 89–90, 98, 103, 139, 163, 195, 198 Amoy, 1, 6, 19, 36, 82, 95, 98–100, 111, 119, 136, 180, 198, 207, 232 Anagnost, Ann, 7–8, 125 Anderson, Benedict, 134 Augé, Marc, 239–240 author interviews and conversations: Cheng (patron), 90–92, 96–97, 176–179, 181 Kho (image carver), 237–238 Lau (pilgrim), 231–235 Lin (historian), 97 Ma, Ms. (temple chair), 105–109, 112 Song, 81–83, 89–90, 95, 198 Su (patron), 93–95 Wang, Mr. (temple chief of operations), 55–57, 61, 72 Wang, Ms. (donor), 98–100, 112 Yang (patron), 94–95

Zheng (assistant manager of tourism agency), 104–105 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 26, 33, 45 Baosheng Dadi, 90–94, 98, 100, 136, 139, 248n8. See also Wu Zhenren Barthes, Roland, 45 Bateson, Gregory, 30 Be Family Alley Chihe Gong, 92–93, 95–96, 110–112 bentu, bentuhua (native, nativist) 3, 74, 181, 208, 210–211 Berger, Peter, 10 birthday celebrations of Mazu, 36, 70, 168, 170, 200–201, 206 Black Faced Mother image (Oo Bin Ma), 62, 80, 238 Black Impermanence, 37–40, 244n4 blackboxing, 54, 154, 245n6 Blount, Ben G., 248n1 Boat Mother image (Chunah Ma), 59, 62 Booth, Wayne, 40 boundary objects, 12, 152–155, 160, 166, 180–181 bravery (eng, iong), 42–43 Buddhism, 29, 49, 62, 82, 90–92, 95, 98–100, 112, 115, 133–134, 194 Burke, Kenneth, 39 Cai Lihua, 139 Callon, Michel, 12, 123, 244n13

268

Index

Canetti, Elias, 33 Catholicism, 87, 133 Cave of Apotheosis, 60, 62, 77, 161, 163–165 Chang Hsuan, 71 Chang Jung-fu, 210 Chang Wen-ping, 74 Chao Mu-song, 74 Chaotian Pavilion, 61, 163–166, 169 Chen Ch’i-nan, 211 Chen Chuicheng, 132–133 Chen Guoqiang, 101–102, 156, 160, 168 Chen Jia-lu, 49 Chen Lai-hsing, 223–224 Chen Ta-tung, 66–67 Cheng Chia-lu, 200–201 chhiam (divination poems), 129–132, 36, 139 Chiang Ching-kuo, 4, 48, 50, 57–58, 63–70, 73–74, 79, 217 Chiang Kai-shek, 4, 6, 48, 62–63, 65, 67 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 65–66, 91, 134, 218 Chou (Taipei businessman, 171–172), 248n6 chronotopes, 26, 32, 43–44 Chu Ke-liang, 222 Chun, Allen, 5, 50, 52 Ciji East Temple, 135, 139, 249n2 civil or popular interchange (minjian jiaoliu), 3, 118, 124, 139, 158 commemorative stamp of Mazu, 198, 200–203 competitive gatherings, 30, 32–36, 40 complication, complicity as a condition of, 11–15 complicity: as a condition of complication, 11–15 ethics of deferral denoted by, 15–17, 143–149 horizon of, 209–211

techniques of, 15, 21, 181–186, 237 use of the term, 11–15, 185 constitutional protection, 115 contagious modes and ideas: good fortune, 109 misfortune, 28, 37–40, 227 naojiat and, 44, 70, 135 nostalgia, 227 palanquins and, 41 value produced through, 51 corporatism, 86–87 critical planners, 215, 218–219, 221–228 cross-Straits: art trade, 82, 95–96, 111 relationships, 1–3, 9, 18, 76, 79, 116, 126, 172, 180 travel, 208, 249n3 crowds. See naojiat (noisy hot) Cultural Revolution. See Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) culturalism, 219–228 curiosity, 177, 214–215, 227–233, 237–240 DeBernardi, Jean, 34, 37–38, 41, 51 Debord, Guy, 7 deferral, ethics of, 15–17, 143–149 Deglopper, Donald, 217 Delanda, Manuel, 13, 249n11 Deleuze, Gilles, 13, 15 democratization, 3, 5, 25, 44, 49, 63–64, 69, 222, 240 Deng Xiaoping, 8, 86, 117, 156, 171 differentiating discourse, 49–56, 62, 71 differentiation, 161–162, 165, 186–189, 194, 246n5 disputes, 20, 59–63, 58, 71, 86, 159–161, 173, 179–180, 248n1 culture and, 97–98 images and, 52–55 rhetoric of, 48–52, 55, 73

Index divination poems (chhiam), 129–132, 136, 139 Durkheim, Émile, 10, 244n9, 245n7 efficacious response (lenggiam, lingyan), 41–42, 51, 101, 104–107, 110–111 Eight Virtues, 66 Eighteen Lords, 78–79 eng (bravery, fierce virility), 42–43 ethics: of deferral, 15–17, 21, 143–149, 215, 240 Foucault on, 245n4 of locality, 3, 51, 209–210, 215, 218, 239 naojiat and, 37–39 of self-cultivation, 98 use of the term, 15–16 ethnography, 11, 16–19, 147, 240, 244n13 failure, Nationalist routinization of, 3–6. See also Nationalist Party (KMT) Farquhar, Judith, 7, 83, 87 Father’s Sister image (A-Ko), 58, 60 Faubion, James, 86, 243n2, 248n7 Fengshan Si (temple), 117–121, 124, 138–139, 247n1 Fernandez, James, 244n5 Feuchtwang, Stephan, 30, 37, 51 feudal superstition (fengjian mixin), 8, 90–94, 108, 118, 136–139, 143, 157. See also superstition (mixin) Filial Son’s Nail (relic), 63–64, 67–70 First Mother image (Tai Ma), 62, 199, 204 folk belief. See minjian xinyang footing, 185, 194–195, 210, 249n1 Foucault, Michel, 15–16, 245n4 Foundation Mothers (images): blackboxing and, 54

269

Meizhou First Mother, 62, 1 99, 204 Meizhou Foundation Mother (Lukang Second Mother), 52, 55, 58–63, 79–80, 187, 247n10 Ponkang Foundation Mother, 48–49, 79, 128, 164 Tachia Zhenlan Gong Third Mother, 174–175 founding temple. See zumiao Four Modernizations, 157, 248n3 Fox, Aaron, 23 Fu Jingxing, 36 Fujimura, Joan, 12 fuxing jidi (base for recovery), 4, 6, 218, 243n1 gaige kaifang (reform and openness), 3, 6, 20, 83, 102, 116–117, 123, 126, 131, 143–144, 155, 159, 183, 204, 207 Gell, Alfred, 42, 244n6 Gellner, Ernest, 134 gender ideologies, 98, 111–112 Gentleman Eight, 37–38. See also Black Impermanence Gentleman Seven, 37–39. See also White Impermanence ghost month rituals, 35 Goddess of Peace Across the Straits (Mazu), 157, 163, 165–166, 196, 198 Goffman, Erving, 185, 249n1 Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR), 59–60, 66, 77, 82–83, 87–89, 96–97, 101–102, 105, 107, 122, 207 Greisemer, James, 12, 152 Grooming Tower, 163, 165 Guangze Zun Wang , 117, 119, 247n1 Guattari, Félix, 13 Guo Jin-lan, 72–73, 175, 246n11

270

Index

Guo Ruiming, 118 Guo Youwen, 156 Habermas, Jürgen, 26, 44–45 Hacking, Ian, 3, 9, 12, 16 Han Pao-te, 214, 220–221, 249n2 Handler, Richard, 134 Hanks, William, 185 Harotoonian, Harold, 249n1 Hart, Gillian, 258 Hastrup, Kirsten, 19 Herzfeld, Michael, 35–36, 213 historical reconstruction, approaches to, 219–225 historical verification, 49–52, 59, 161–165 Hoklo, 13, 23, 38, 47, 79, 137 Hong Kong, 6–7, 75, 122, 171, 207, 249n8 Hou Renzhi, 169 How to Have the Best Time, 144–146 Howell, Jude, 87 Hsiao Hsin-huang, 74 Huang Bingyan, 124, 126 Huang Mei-ying, 30, 71, 73, 191 Huang Tianzhu, 137 Hutcheon, Linda, 40 images: blackboxing of, 54 commemorative stamp of Mazu, 198, 200–203 disputes and, 52–55 enrollment and, 58 ethical contours of truth and, 52–55 giant Mazu at Meizhou, 163, 165–166, 196–204 new, 195–209 stolen, 58–63 See also individual image names incense, 12–14, 41, 58–63, 70–73, 78–79, 89–90, 106–109, Z 129–132, 176–181,

188–195, 202–204, 230, 236 incense censer, 50, 90, 128, 176, 189 incense guests, 13, 162–164, 177, 181, 187–188, 192, 200, 203–204 Inconstant Uncle, 37–38, 40. See also White Impermanence indigenization, 3, 74 Jiang Su-hui, 59, 61, 77, 118, 246n12, 246n13 Jiang Weidan, 104, 183, 198 jiao (ritual of cosmic renewal), 33–35, 40, 248n5 jiatong (communications), 166, 248n5 jincheng (renqing, human sentiment, reciprocity), 25, 35. See also reciprocity Johnson, Marshall, 5, 79 Jullien, François, 184 Kaplan, Martha, 249 karaoke, 1, 23, 34, 82, 110, 117, 145, 146, 177 Keane, Webb, 248n2 Kelly, John, 249 King of Hell, 37–38 Kipnis, Andrew, 36 Kockelman, Paul, 185 Ku Weifu, 217 Kuanyin, 91, 98, 133 Lai Jing-chao, 65 Latour, Bruno, 11, 13, 243n8, 244n12–13 Law, John, 12, 14–15, 33, 116, 159 Lee Hsien-chang, 48–50, 245n1 Lee Teng-hui, 4, 33, 63–64, 214, 221, 234 Lefebvre, Henri, 41 leng (cold), 29 leng (command), 188–189 leng pennants, 188–189

Index lenggiam, lingyan (efficacious response), 41–42, 51, 54–57, 101, 104–107, 110–111 lengchheng (cold and lonely), 28, 162 Li Pi-hsien, 61 Li Weisi, 163 Liao Lanquan, 138 Lin Chun-yuan, 74 Lin Mo-niang, 55, 59, 164. See also Mazu Lin Qiqian, 126 Lin Qiquan, 126, 158 Lin Wenhao, 104, 157–158, 197–203 Lin Yinxin, 140 Litzinger, Ralph, 8 Liu Kang, 87 Liu Su-yu, 74 Long Yao, 74 “Loving Care of the Mother Country, The” (poster), 2 Lozada, Eriberto, 87 Luckman, Thomas, 10 Lukang: Historical, 214–226 Hongthian Temple, 217, 234, 238–239 KMT cultural renaissance and, 217–219 Lunah Teng neighborhood, 241 migration and reconstruction in, 216–217 planning and, 213–216 rot in, 213–215 Tianhou Temple (Tianhou Gong), 53, 59–61, 75–76, 126–127, 161, 164–165, 176–178, 186–187, 208, 227, 238, 247n10, 248n5 Lukang Time, 214–215, 221, 223–224, 226, 228, 241 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 16, 147 Mandarin Chinese, 4, 17, 38, 62, 92 Mao wei (Maoist imposters), 65

271

Maoism, 1–2, 9–8, 65–66, 74, 197, 207 Marcus, George, 18, 244n13 marketplaces, 31–32 martial law: Chinese tradition during, 64 cross-Straits relationships during, 1–2 cultural anxiety during, 214–215 end of, 2, 73–74, 78, 214 KMT institutions and, 219–220 late era of, 215, 219 Temporary Provisions of, 220 truth and commitment during, 48, 63 Master of the Censer (loochu), 14, 93, 112, 188, 190–191, 217 McGinn, Michelle, 12, 152 Meizhou Bao, 102, 155, 200, 202, 248n4 Meizhou Mazu Ancestral Temple (zumiao), 33–34, 59–61, 101–104, 124, 131, 151–152, 155–156, 159–169, 175–176, 178–180, 193, 199, 202, 204–206, 209 Meizhou Mother (image), 62, 77, 80, 175, 199, 238 metrorail system (MTR), 25–26 Ming dynasty, 88, 97, 125, 168, 246n7 Miniatures project, Mazu World of, 204–209 minjian jiaoliu (civil or popular interchange), 3, 118, 124, 139, 158 minjian xinyang (folk or popular belief): ambivalence and, 101–113 as a boundary object, 12, 152–155, 160, 166, 180–181 coordination attempts and, 117, 123–141 interference and, 101–113 object positions of, 21

272

Index

religion and, 132–136 syncretism of, 133 as tourism, 138–141 value of, 136–137 minzhuhua (democratization), 3. See also democratization Movement for Chinese Cultural Renaissance, 50, 60, 64–67, 74–75, 179, 190, 194, 214–218, 237, 245n7 Mueggler, Erik, 87 Munn, Nancy, 51 Myers, Fred, 153 naojiat (noisy hot): activists and, 46 agency and, 46 anthitheses of, 27–29 atmosphere of, 25 as a chronotope, 26, 32, 43–44 competitive gatherings and, 30, 32–36, 40 composition of time and, 27 contagious ideas and, 44, 70, 135 vs. crowds, 27 as culture, 45 dangers of, 36–37 deities and, 148 emotional value of, 25–26 enrollment and, 46 GPCR as, 82–83 historical verification and, 50 indeterminacy and, 32, 36–37, 39 irony and, 30–33, 40, 44–45 khoaN naojiat (watch naojiat), 39–40 in marketplaces, 31–32 Mazu’s birthday as, 70 as metacommunicative, 30 moral ambiguity and, 37–39 planning and, 35–36 photography and, 169–170 potential for, 36 social relationships and, 29–30 truth production and, 79

uniforms and, 187–188 use of the term, 20, 23–24 value and, 21, 128–129, 149, 187 National Buddhist Association, 115, 134 National Day, 69, 145–146 Nationalist Party (KMT): antisuperstition campaigns of, 35, 45 China’s United Nations slot filled by, 4 Chinese Cultural Renaissance of, 50, 60, 64–67, 74–75, 179, 190, 194, 214–218, 237, 245n7 national recovery narrative of, 4, 6, 64, 219, 233 routinization of failure of, 3–6, 64–65, 73, 214, 216 searchlights of, 2 National Tourism and Vacation Zones (NTZ), 156, 159–160, 164–167, 170, 205–208 Ng Tiongbo, 229–230, 233 Ng Tiongeng, 230, 233–234 object positions, 12–14, 21, 51, 60, 116, 123, 125–126, 130, 141, 152–154, 163, 180, 244n9 Oceanic China hypothesis, 6 Ongia, 37, 78, 90, 93–95, 111, 236 Ossman, Susan, 245 Overseas Chinese Affairs, 93–96, 99–100, 110–111, 118–122, 125–126, 135 palanquin, 24–26, 35, 41–46, 60, 76, 108, 175, 187, 189, 238 para-state organizations, 7–8, 20, 85, 97, 117–124, 147, 167, 172, 183, 192, 247n3

Index patrons of temple reconstructions, 7, 20, 85–101, 106, 109–112, 115, 118–122, 148 Peikang Chaotian Temple (Peikang Chaotian Gong), 48–49, 63–64, 67–75, 163, 217 pennants, 13, 179, 188–189 People’s Political Consultative Conference (PPCC), 101–103, 107, 112, 133, 157–160, 163, 165, 171–174, 197, 200–203, 108 People’s Republic of China (PRC), entrance into United Nations of, 4, 65, 79 photographs: 57, 62, 100, 127–128, 151–152, 164–165, 169–170, 176, 178, 202–203, 228, 231, 241, 245n9 popular interchange, 3, 118, 124, 139, 158. posters, 2, 35, 81–82, 246n1 practices and virtues, 16–17, 146–149 Price, Huw, 54 public action, 26, 43–44, 83 public figures, 83–85, 92, 100, 112, 246n5 public space, 4, 6–9, 82–85, 119, 138, 141, 221–222, 225 Qing dynasty, 48–49, 59, 66, 103, 216 Qingjiao East Temple, 93–94, 98–100 Quanzhou: Fumei Gong, 121, 124, 236–237 Huaqiao Gong, 98, 122, 135 Kaiyuan Si, 88–89, 138, 170, 230, 246n2 Tianfei Gong, 88, 123–133, 138, 174, 246n3, 248n4–5 Taoist Culture Research Association (TCRA), 19, 98, 121–123, 131–132, 135–137, 237, 247n3

273

Tongwei Guanyue Temple (Guandi Miao), 119, 122–123, 131, 247n3 Quemoy Islands, 1–2, 89–90, 172–173 Quemoy Tongan Mother image (Gunthang Ma), 62 reappropriation of temple sites and structures, 7, 18, 85–87, 100, 119, 122, 247n3 reciprocity, 25, 35–36, 38, 40–41, 45, 203–204 reform and openness (gaige kaifang), 3, 6, 20, 83, 102, 116–117, 123, 126, 131, 143–144, 155, 159, 183, 204, 207 Relationship of Taiwanese Folk Belief and Chinese Cultural Renaissance, The, 66 religious affairs bureaus, 86, 115, 247n3 renqing (human sentiment), 25, 36, 95 Riles, Annelise, 15 Romance of the Three Kingdoms (novel), 34, 231–232, 244n3 root searching (xungen), 76, 86, 118, 138–140, 147–149, 180, 210 rot and architecture, 213–215 Roth, Wolff-Michael, 12, 152 routinization of failure, 3–6, 64–65, 73, 214, 216. See also Movement for Chinese Cultural Renaissance rush hour buses, 27–28 Sahlins, Marshall, 243n4 Sangren, Steven, 14, 24, 35–36, 41, 51, 191, 227, 245n5 school textbooks, 4, 220, 235 Scoggin, Mary, 246n6 screen paintings, 246n5 screen, culture as a , 90–96, 100, 122 Second Mother image (Lukang Meizhou Foundation Mother),

274

Index

52, 55, 58–63, 79–80, 187, 247n10 Shang, Xiaoyuan, 87 Shenzhen, 6 Shi Lang, 59–60, 79, 103, 247n10 Shi Youyi, 101 Shih Wen-pin, 218 Shishan Township, 117–120, 139 SiaN Ong, 119. See also Guangze Zun Wang Silvio, Teri, 47 sincerity, 16, 25, 38–44, 57, 64, 144, 148–149, 153–154, 173, 177–178, 184, 186, 191–192, 202–203, 209–211, 215, 229 Song dynasty, 237 Song Hulin, 205–206 Song Tse-lai, 216 special economic zones (SEZ), 6, 143, 156, 164 Stafford, Charles, 30, 35, 50 Star, Sarah, 12, 152 Su Minghui, 139 Su Shi, 2331 “subjects and objects,” language of, 12–13 superstition (mixin), 50, 55–58, 67, 85–87, 130–132 belief and, 55–56 Tachia Tainhou Temple, 72 Tachia Zhenlan Temple (Tachia Zhenlan Gong), 33–35, 50, 71–80, 151 Taichiongia Temple (Taichiongia Bio), 82, 96, 246–247n7 Taitoo Kong, 94, 136–137, 248n8. See also Wu Zhenren Taiwan: as Base for Mainland Recovery, 4, 6, 218, 243n1 incorporated into the Japanese empire, 4 “miracle” economy of, 5, 48, 231

as played out, 47–48, 79–81 “return” to China, 4 Taiwanese compatriots, 68, 108, 122–123, 138, 162, 197–198, 202–203, 248n4 Tang dynasty, 122, 237 Tang Mountain (ThngsaN), 111, 227, 235 Tang Xiaoke, 157 Tang, Xiaobing, 8 Taoism, 62, 98, 115–116, 121–122, 131–138, 145, 194 Taoist Culture Research Association (TCRA), 19, 98, 121–123, 131–132, 135–137, 237, 247n3 Tarde, Gabriel, 244n9 temples. See individual temples Thevenot, Laurent, 116, 152, 243n8 Ti Ongia, 93, 228 Tiananmen Square, 168–169 Tongwei Guanyu Temple, 119 tourism and tourists: bureaus, 115, 125, 133, 140, 159, 171–172, 174, 193, 195, 205–208, 221 infrastructures, 138–141 minjian xinyang as, 138–141 Tsai Hsiang-hui, 49, 64, 68, 70, 245n1 Tschumi, Bernard, 213, 219 uniforms of pilgrims , 179, 186–189 unifying discourse, 49–57, 62–63, 68–75, 184–186 United Front Bureau, 86, 118, 120–121, 125, 133, 171–172, 237, 247n3 Vico, Giovanni , 10 virtues: ethnic, 57, 67, 136, 147, 183 national, 69 practices and, 16, 146–149. See also Eight Virtues

Index Wagner, Roy, 244n10 wan (play, enjoy), 47, 144–148 Wan Weisheng, 202 Wang Mingming, 36 Wang Mo-lin), 77 Wank, David, 86 Warm Hill Mother image (Unleng Ma), 62 Warner, Michael, 45, 134 Weiss, Brad, 245n7 Weller, Robert, 37, 78–79, 112, 246n1 White Impermanence, 37–40, 244n4 White, Gordon, 8, 87 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 10 Wolf, Margery, 58, 249n10 Woolgar, Stephen, 152 Wu Hong, 92, 169, 246n5 Wu Hsiang, 163 Wu Hsien-chung, 63 Wu Liangyong, 169 Wu Zhenren (Baosheng Dadi), 19, 90–94, 98, 100, 135–139, 147, 248n8

Xiang Hongxia, 145–146 xinyang (belief), 55–56 Yan Ya-ning, 221 Yan, Yunxiang, 36 Yang Zhenhui, 206 Yao Tianji, 156–157 Yu Zhong, 102 Yunlin Jubao Gong, 162, 180–181 Zeng, Xiuhua, 139 Zhang Guo-li, 59, 61, 77, 246n12 Zhangzhou, 49, 96, 145, 232–233 Zheng Guodong, 119 Zhou Lifang, 136, 138 Zhu Hepu, 197–199 Zhu Tianshun, 103, 183, 198–199 Zumiao. See Meizhou Mazu Ancestral Temple

275

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