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Capitalism and Religious Change in Taiwan
Organizer: Wei-ping Lin, Dept of Anthropology, National Taiwan University, Republic of China
Chair: Robert P. Weller, Dept. of Anthropology, Boston University
Discussant: P. Steven Sangren, Dept. of Anthropology, Cornell University
Since the industrialization of Taiwan started in the 1970s, religious practices in Taiwan have experienced enormous changes. However, whether and how contemporary religion in Taiwan is fundamentally different from the past are still debatable questions. This panel will approach this issue by looking at the relations between capitalism and religion. We will address two categories of questions: first, what kind of capitalist logics, such as urbanization, commoditization, consumerism, time and space discipline, have combined and contested with traditional religion? Second, what kinds of new religious forms have emerged? What are their features?
Jen-Chieh Ting’s paper looks at a collective trance movement to show how religious practices of local communities can be transformed into a format which helps them to adapt to modern situations. Avron Boretz discusses how the consumerist culture that emerged in the late 1980s has affected Taiwanese popular religion and highlights how a sense of “entrepreneurial creativity” is conveyed in the particular kind of production featured in religious operations. Wei-ping Lin examines how a village temple and religion in southwestern Taiwan have been reshaped by migrants who have implemented entrepreneurial policies since the 1970s. Together, these papers expect to illuminate the dynamics of religion in contemporary Taiwan.
The chair and discussant, Weller and Sangren, are long-term Taiwan experts who started their research in the mid-1970s. Bringing them to a dialogue with the panelists whose research focuses more on the period since the 1990s will enable us to understand more clearly the historical change of religion in Taiwan.
A Collective Trance Movement in Taiwan, "Converging with the Spirit-Mountain": Transformation and Re-embedding of Folk Religion Under De-territorialization
Jen-Chieh Ting, Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Republic of China
The process of modernization produces a standardized time-space experience. It disrupts the social activities and relations particularized to territorial contexts. As a result, de-territorialization appears, and the plausibility of Han people’s traditional territorial folk religion is weakened. Nevertheless, as religious practices of local communities face the challenge of de-territorialization from the mechanisms of modernity, it is possible that through some analogous mechanisms folk religion can be transformed into a format in which it can adapt itself to modern situations. In the present paper, the case of Converging with the Spirit-Mountain, a collective trance movement becoming popular in Taiwan since the mid-1980s, may help us to shed light on these issues. This movement is led by thousands of group leaders coming from the “Private Temple.” The purpose of the participants’ religious practices is to spiritually converge with specific “Mother Deities” residing in the so-called “Mother Temple,” and through this process be healed as well as attain ultimate salvation. Even with richly produced texts and furthermore a systematic doctrine, this movement remains a form of folk religion, in the sense that it is without any formal organization or sectarian activities. Three elements of this movement -- a concept of “the Precedent Heaven Soul,” “Private Temple,” and “Morality Book” -- are discussed intensively. The internal dynamics of folk religion across time in Taiwan also are examined.
Marketing Ritual: The Changing Relations of Production in Taiwanese Popular Religion, 1990-2005
Avron A. Boretz, Dept. of Asian Studies, Univ. of Texas at Austin
From storefront spirit healers to corporation-sized pilgrimage temple-amusement complexes, popular religion—including the provision and management of ritual spaces, services, and paraphernalia—has long been a major component of Taiwan’s shadow economy. Yet the microlevel relations of production within such “enterprises” have remained largely unexamined. On the one hand, the myriad private shrines, neighborhood temples, and pilgrimage hotspots are established, operated, and expanded in ways that resemble Taiwan’s ubiquitous small- and medium-sized enterprises. What, then, sets the ritual sphere apart from the other sectors of the underground economy? In this paper, I examine the ways that the consumerist culture that emerged at the end of the 1980s has affected the practice and ideology of Taiwanese popular religion at the local level. Drawing on fieldwork in Taiwan from 1990 through 2005, I suggest that the particular kind of production featured in religious/ritual operations favors a kind of “entrepreneurial creativity” popularized in Taiwan’s version of the global technology-consumer economy. One consequence has been an increase in prestige and status for younger men and women who provide expertise and initiative. I illustrate my findings with a focus on three cases: a small temple cult with underworld links in southeastern Taiwan; a private shrine master who manages a procession troupe for hire in Zhanghua; and an enterprising, up-to-date Taoist adept in Taoyuan who makes innovative use of computer and internet technology in his new “business model” for religious ventures.
Temple Development in Taiwan: Deity’s Efficacy, Migration, and Entrepreneurial Management
Wei-ping Lin, Dept. of Anthropology, National Taiwan University, Republic of China
This article explores the relations between religion and capitalism by using a case of temple development in San-liau-wan, a village in southwestern Taiwan. I emphasize a historical perspective to analyze their relationships. First, I investigate how the power of the temple deities has built up since San-liau-wan was established. The cultural mechanism of the deities’ efficacy is discussed. Second, I examine how village religion and the efficacy of deities have been reconfigured by migrants and capitalist culture. Located in saline and infertile soil, San-liau-wan has experienced migration since the Japanese period and the pace of migration has rapidly increased since the industrialization of Taiwan starting in the 1960s. In the 1970s, the temple also started to recruit successful city entrepreneurs and well-connected literati as its leaders and committee members. These migrant leaders have implemented many new policies leading to several important reforms, including rebuilding and upgrading the temple, and adopting commercial and entrepreneurial strategies. The original relations between the deities and the local people have thus loosened and been reshaped. By examining these historical processes of the temple’s development, I discuss how village religion is combined with and contested by capitalist logic.