Organizer and Chair: Murray A. Rubinstein, Baruch/CUNY
Discussant: Joseph Bosco, Chinese University of Hong Kong
The people of Taiwan are wrestling with the problem of defining their ethnic/national identity. The world press has recognized this: On July 20th The New York Times' China hand Edward Gargan devoted a half page of section one to the issue. The debate rages in the Taiwanese press and in the island's universities and academic think tanks and also manifests itself in the political process. The practice of foreign policy on Taiwan is affected as well: The subtext of the ROC/Taiwan's attempt to reenter the UN is the issue of national/ethnic identity.
The spiritual realm that is Taiwanese popular religion is yet another arena of discourse where ethnic issues and the problem of defining Taiwanese identity have risen to the fore. Here the discussion takes substantive reality in the form of conflict over issues of religious philosophy, issues of temple hierarchy and primacy, and the issues related to reestablishing ties to the major cult's tsu-miao in the mother province of Fukien. Each of the authors of the papers in this panel deals with the problem of identity but each approaches that problem from a different perspective.
Chang Hsun examines issues of local identity as they are intertwined with the process of religious pilgrimage and the worship of Taiwan's most popular deity, Ma-tsu. Paul Katz examines a key set of texts, morality books and shows how these reflect norm-creation by an elite and a sense of Taiwanese identity as a crucial moment in the island's complex history. Lin Mei-rong deals with the issue of ethnic identity head on focus on the problem of whether Ma-tsu can be seen as a "Chinese" or as a Taiwanese deity. Finally Murray Rubinstein examines the issue of identity-local, Taiwan-wide and Minnan-within the context of a discussion of patterns of temple rivalry and temple conflict. And the discussant who will assess these essays, Joseph Bosco, has written essays and presented papers on the question of Taiwanese identity.
Following the Needle of Guidance: Morality Books and the Creation of a Taiwanese
Identity
Paul Katz, National Central University
Morality books (shan-shu) are an invaluable source for the social historian in that they represent elite attempts to formulate and transmit a set of values to both their peers and members of the general populace. In the case of Taiwan, while numerous scholars have emphasized the Confucian systems of morality of Three Religions doctrine expressed in these texts, few have paid attention to the ways in which their contents demonstrate efforts at formulating a sense of Taiwanese identity. My paper will explore this phenomenon through a detailed study of two morality books produced during spirit-writing sessions by members of the Palace of Guidance (Chih-nan Kung), a popular temple to the Taoist immortal Lü Tung-pin located in the mountains south of Taipei. Originally a small shrine to Lü founded in 1891, the Palace of Guidance now features Taoist, Buddhist, and Confucian temples as well, and has grown into one of the main pilgrimage centers on the island.
The first morality book produced by the temple, The Golden Needle of Guidance (Chih-nan chin-chen), compiled from 1903 to 1904, reflects the effort on the part of the leaders of the temple committee (also members of the local elite) to come to grips with the tumultuous changes following the Japanese occupation of the island in 1895. The second morality book, No Boundaries (Wu-chiang), compiled in 1980, shows how the temple committee members/local elite of that time were attempting to gain both popular support and state approval, as the text portrays Lü Tung-pin as both an efficacious immortal yet also an "orthodox" deity who embraces proper Confucian norms. Both these works represent elite attempts to define themselves and the values they believed in. However, an examination of other written sources such as dramas and novels, as well as fieldwork, suggests that the extent to which the values expressed in these texts gained acceptance among non-elite members of the community is highly problematic.
Dajia Migrants and the Dajia Mazu Pilgrimage
Chang Hsün, Academia Sinica
This paper explores the ways in which migrants from the town of Dajia (Taizhong County) attempt to maintain their identity as members of their home community. Since the 1950s, about 300 Dajianese a year have moved to the major cities of Taiwan, where their hard work has often enabled them to achieve considerable success. Every year during the third lunar month, these migrants organize "incense groups" to participate in the annual Mazu pilgrimage, which goes from Dajia to Xingang (Jiayi County) and back. Informants from among these migrants gave two main reasons as to why they participated in such pilgrimages: one was that they wished to visit their home town and relatives there; the other was that they had to repay a fulfillment of a vow.
These migrants establish their connections with Dajia, and thereby maintain their identity as members of the community, in two ways. The first, common among Jilong and Taizhong migrants, is to construct a branch temple of the main Mazu temple in Dajia and establish a "division of incense" (fenxiang) relationship with it. The second, common among Taibei, Fengyuan, and Pingdong migrants, is to organize incense groups and raise huge sums of money in order to compete for the honor of being able to place sticks of burning incense in the temple's censer upon the pilgrimage troupes' return.
Steven Sangren has argued that participating in annual pilgrimages allows Taiwanese to reconstitute themselves as a meaningful social group, while Kristofer Schipper has pointed out that rituals performed by fenxiang groups allow them to establish their identity as community members. In the Dajia case, we see that migrants maintain their ethnic identity and status as Dajia natives through worshipping their town's goddess Mazu and by participating in her pilgrimage. In these ways, Dajia people throughout the island, be they migrants or not, maintain an identity as members of a social group.
Taiwanese Ma-tsu or Chinese Ma-tsu?
Mei-rong Lin, Academia Sinica
The goddess Ma-tsu, the most popular deity in Taiwanese folk religion, has become an important symbol for people attempting to establish different forms of identity. On the one hand, her cult has been promoted by local leaders as a source of local pride and used as a means to attract tourists and pilgrims. On the other hand, she has become a symbol for Chinese communist officials who advocate the reunification of China and Taiwan. The Chief Secretary of the KMT even went so far as to support the PRC position by claiming that one reason Taiwan may be considered a part of China is because the cult of Ma-tsu originated in Mei-chou, on mainland China.
What does the Ma-tsu cult mean to the Taiwanese people? And what of their voice regarding the highly-charged issues of folk belief and local/national identity? In this paper, I will examine the Ma-tsu cult from socio-cultural and historical perspectives, particularly those related to the performance of pilgrimages. I will also demonstrate how local worshippers attempt to establish a religious empire for individual Ma-tsu cults by organizing pilgrimages on the behalf of the locality.
Being enshrined and worshipped locally, Ma-tsu is intimately bound with her local worshippers, both ritually and symbolically. At the same time, each local cult to Ma-tsu has the potential to expand beyond the locality to cover a much larger region. Ma-tsu's popularity has even prompted some to label her as a so-called "national deity." However, the debate between members of local Ma-tsu cults in neighboring areas over issues such as pilgrimage routes, historical precedence, or orthodoxy, also illustrates the her cult will never be a metaphor for national identity, whether the nation referred to is Taiwan or China.
Forging Identity/Fomenting Conflict: Time, Space, and Word and the Process of
Inter-temple Rivalry in Taiwan's Ma-tsu Temple Community
Murray A. Rubinstein, Baruch/CUNY
One of the constants one finds when examining the community of temples devoted to the goddess Ma-tsu is the inter-related processes of temple rivalry and temple conflict. The major temples on the island can be studied in-and-of-themselves but it is more useful to examine them in the context of their relationships with the mother temples-the three tsu-miao-on Meichou in P'u-t'ien County, Fukien, in the village of Kangli in P'u-t'ien, and in the city of Ch'uanchou, their relationships with their own client temples and their relationship with their major rivals on Taiwan. The problem of rivalry is one closely tied to that of identity and to the multi-leveled nature of identity one discovers when examining temples involved in formalized dyadic and triadic patterns of relationship and rivalry.
In this essay, building upon the work of such scholars as Steven Sangren, Huang Mei-yin, and my fellow panelists, Chang Hsün and Mei-rong Lin, I begin laying out a schema of analysis-one involving what the concepts of "time, space, and word"-that allows us to focus both on rivalry itself and also the way that those who administer these temples deal with questions of local, Taiwan-wide, and greater Minnan identity. I then discuss the triadic relationship of three key Ma-tsu temples, those in Peikang, Hsinkang and Tachia, in terms of the schema and its descriptive/analytic categories and in terms of the issue of multiple levels of identity.