Stephan Feuchtwang
Fang-Long Shih
Paul-François Tremlett
This paper has two sections. The first constitutes a reflection on anthropological analyses of religion in Taiwan. We try to demonstrate that a shift has occurred in the conduct of these analyses that reflect engagements with the notion of “orientalism” and debates about the concept of “culture”. We argue that the formation of the category “religion” in anthropology served a specific function: to signify the pre-modern. We outline the breakdown of this idea of religion in light of orientalism and the critique of culture as a bounded unit of analysis. We then argue that the strength of contemporary approaches to religion in Taiwan lie in their acknowledgement that studying religion provides new ways to examine processes of place-making and representational practices. The second part of the paper is an interview with Stephan Feuchtwang who has been writing on religion in China and Taiwan for over thirty years.
1. Introduction—outline of a problematic1
The first section of this paper constitutes a reflection on the social and cultural anthropological analysis of religion in Taiwan. We will not be presenting any ethnographic or empirical materials, but will rather try to demonstrate, archaeologically (Foucault 1974), that a shift has taken place in how religion is studied in Taiwan, a shift that reflects both debates over Said’s notion of orientalism (1995) and important recent debates about the concept of “culture” in anthropology that has resonance for area studies more generally (Gupta and Ferguson 2001; Feuchtwang 2004). However, permit us to begin elsewhere, by reflecting on an essay by Alfred McCoy (1982) on “animist religion” in the Philippines as a means of identifying one function of the category “religion” in Philippine studies.
McCoy’s essay outlines a number of “animist”—and we will here side-step the issue of this word, its history, connotations and problems—beliefs and practices not only from the Philippines but all over Southeast Asia. This is because McCoy does not use “animism” to signify particular experiences, kinds of intellectual speculation or types of social practices specific to the Philippines but rather to a pan Southeast Asia, in particular region-wide and region-specific cosmological conceptions, values, sentiments and embodied modes of being.
The conception of a pan Southeast Asian religious or animistic worldview or framework of beliefs and practices has conventionally been reconstructed upon the evidence of the influence of Indic-derived religious and philosophical ideas on the region as a whole, influence adduced from, among other things, the physical remains of temples and temple inscriptions, as well as linguistic borrowings. The Philippines, however, possesses no physical remains of temples or cities or ancient documents or texts that might attest to, for example, the influence of “Hindu” and/or “Buddhist” ideas and practices upon the archipelago.
However, philological evidence suggests that Hindu and Buddhist ideas did have an influence upon the archipelago and its peoples. Indeed, there is a preponderance of Sanskrit-derived loan words for religious concepts in the Tagálog language. Given this, and the already well-documented influence of “Indian” beliefs and practices upon other parts of both maritime and mainland Southeast Asia, McCoy argues for a high degree of similarity between cosmological notions, spirit beliefs and ritual practices across the region, such that pre-Hispanic religion in the Philippines “conforms to the general pattern of Southeast Asian animism” (1982:355) and that “spirit worship” in the Philippines can be seen as part of “a systemised world view with many of the qualities of a ‘great’ religion” (1982:341) (see also Francisco 1971; 1985 & Ileto 1999). McCoy asks us, then, to imagine a Southeast Asia united and defined by a body of cosmological or religious conceptions, beliefs and practices. However, the imagining of Southeast Asia as a whole is in fact a recent phenomenon and one beset with problems. Emmerson writes:
Some names, like “rose”, acknowledge what exists. Others, like “Unicorn”, create what otherwise would not exist. In between lie names that simultaneously describe and invent reality. “Southeast Asia” is one of these. Some who study the region treat it as if it were . . . a reality existing independently of its name. Others would agree . . . that an observer of “Southeast Asia” who uses the name incautiously risks . . . projecting homogeneity, unity, and boundedness onto a part of the world that is in fact heterogeneous, disunited, and hard to delimit (Emmerson 1984:1).
The term “Southeast Asia” was originally coined to denote those areas south of China under Japanese control during World War II. Prior to that, the region was viewed as being divided between Sinicised Vietnam, the Hispanicised Philippines and the other countries of the region which were held to share a common cultural debt to India. This differentiation was unsatisfactory for a number of reasons. Tagálog—the language of the politically and economically hegemonic linguistic group in the Philippines—has in the region of three hundred root words of Sanskrit origin suggesting some level of Indic influence on the archipelago. Moreover, Chinese cultural influence is not limited to Vietnam but extends across the entire region. Further, the influence of Islam on Southeast Asia—like the internal diversity of the region, which is home to numerous minority peoples and languages—was not registered at all (Anderson 2002; King and Wilder 2003).
For complex reasons—not least among them the covert and overt anti-communist operations carried out across Southeast Asia by the U.S. during the post-colonial period—it became possible and necessary to think Southeast Asia as a whole and one function of the category of animism or religion in McCoy’s paper is to signify this whole. Since Durkheim, “wholes” have been useful thought-constructs: particularly as pre-modern social or cultural “wholes” defined by religious conceptions and representational practices, pre-scientific mentalities, and pre-individualist subjectivities and collective identities. The precious narrative of modernity demanded that one think of non-industrial, non-literate or non-modern cultures and societies in this manner. It is here, in the power/knowledge nexus of modernity that the idea of religion as a signifier for the pre-modern was formed.2
2. The study of religion in Taiwan
We shall now turn our attention to Taiwan, for there is a cognate issue in the study of religion in Taiwan. In the 1950s and 1960s, anthropologists in Taiwan typically directed their attention to Taiwan’s minority peoples. These scholars sought to link non-Han populations to their alleged Han origins as part of a broader project to unify China’s multi-ethnic populations through the disclosing of a common origin. Archaeology and ethnography were as such used to support a theory of diffusion. The study of religion was considered the means through which the assertion—that the minority peoples of East Asia and the South Pacific are descendents of the ancient Chinese—could be proved.
However, the next generation of scholars shifted its attention away from the religious beliefs and practices of Taiwan’s minority peoples to the study of domestic religious practices (Nadeau and Chang 2003:283-286). In the 1970s, social and cultural anthropologists—who among others were largely forbidden from conducting research in mainland China during this period to preserve the Cultural Revolution from contamination by decadent Westerners—entered Taiwan, an island ruled by the Guomingdang (KMT) party that at the time actively represented itself to outsiders as guardian of the authentically Chinese.
For many reasons—partly political, partly the theoretical fashion of the day—Taiwan was manufactured as a sign and simulacrum of the mainland. Enquiry into religious beliefs and practices was thought to be the skeleton key with which to unlock an underlying Chinese-ness such that the unique historical experiences of the island of Taiwan and its peoples tended to be disavowed. Again, the function of religion was to indicate an underlying cultural unity or solidarity. In order to understand the signifying capacities of religion in Taiwan studies from the 1970s on, we will begin by reviewing five texts which constitute moments of reflection on anthropological research in Taiwan: Maurice Freedman’s essay “On the Sociological Study of Chinese Religion” (1974), Stephan Feuchtwang’s essay written in memory of Freedman “A Chinese Religion Exists” (1991), Catherine Bell’s review article “Religion and Chinese Culture: Toward an Assessment of ‘Popular Religion’” (1989), Stevan Harrell’s essay “Lessons from the Golden Age of ‘China’ Ethnography” (1999) and Murray and Hong’s critical overview of what they term “social science” research on Taiwan, Taiwanese Culture, Taiwanese Society (1994). We will deal with each of them in turn.
The purpose of Freedman’s essay is to indicate “some broad lines along which the sociological study of Chinese religion might develop” (1974:19) and pivots on his re-reading of C. K. Yang’s Religion in Chinese Society (1957), which, according to Freedman, was an attempt to “characterise Chinese religion as a whole and in relation to the society within which it was thought and practised” (1974:19). Freedman regards Yang’s project as a sure indicator of how the sociology of Chinese religion should proceed. The flux and ephemera—perhaps even tumult—of Chinese religious beliefs and practices, do, despite first appearances, signify. “Behind the superficial variety there is order” (1974:20) asserts Freedman. He goes on to claim:
The starting assumption made here is . . . that there is some order—of a kind that should allow us . . . to trace ruling principles of ideas across a vast field of apparently heterogeneous beliefs, and ruling principles of form and organisation in an equally enormous terrain of varied action and association. Ideas and forms need not be uniform to be common; they may be reflections, perhaps misshapen reflections, or idiomatic translations of one another, as in their transmission back and forth between social strata, between sect and “church”, between “church” and “church”, between text and living language, between the cultivated and the popular. Their Chineseness lies in a basic stock upon which complex social and intellectual life works and elaborates variety (Freedman 1974:20-21).
Order as Chinese-ness and as a whole Chinese society or culture and as ethnic identity—note the use of the word “stock” in the quotation above (Feuchtwang 1991)—that transcends multiple geographical instances, is a necessary presupposition according to Freedman. Otherwise, there can be only, in Freedman’s words, “stunned resignation before a mass of non-aggregative facts” (1974:20). The alleged necessity of holism as a theoretical and methodological point of departure, then, emerges not to get the researcher closer to “reality” (whatever that might be), but rather as a panacea to anthropological despair. This leads Freedman to engage in a re-reading of both scholarly and non-scholarly works on Chinese religion to, as it were, provide this presupposition of wholeness with a lineage and a tradition and with, in short, ancestors. As such, Freedman spends much of the rest of the essay reviewing de Groot’s encyclopaedic The Religious System of China (1892-1910) and Marcel Granet’s The Religion of the Chinese People (1922). And, once Freedman’s exegesis of these two works is done, their place on holism’s ancestral tablet is assured: “De Groot and Granet”, writes Freedman, “have pointed the way to an understanding of how in modern times the vast hierarchised society of China might be seen to display a single underlying religion taking many guises” (1974:34).
The real purpose of this lineage-building exercise is for Freedman to suggest to his reader an alternative to what he calls “the rather tired intellectual world of the Great and Little Traditions” (1974:37). Indeed, Freedman counters Redfield’s approach by arguing that élite and peasant religion in China “rests upon a common base, representing two versions of one religion that we may see as idiomatic translations of each other” (1974:37). Thus, Freedman can assert that religious variation in China has beneath it a hidden grammar of “basic conceptions, symbols and ritual forms” (1974:40).
Freedman’s essay can, perhaps, be read as a kind of manifesto. Perhaps it constitutes a poor choice for an essay such as this, given Freedman’s at least partly polemical intentions. However, we would suggest that it marks an important moment in the anthropology of Chinese religion. And, we want to stay with Freedman—at least indirectly—by turning to Feuchtwang’s essay “A Chinese Religion Exists” which was composed in memory of Freedman’s contribution to anthropology generally and the anthropology of Chinese-speaking peoples in particular.
If in Freedman’s essay “holism” as a theoretical and methodological point of departure is still seeking hegemony, in Feuchtwang’s essay the reader is not asked to choose between rival positions but merely to assent to holism as, if not the theoretical and methodological paradigm of today then at least the theoretical and methodological paradigm of Freedman’s day. For example, one of the first points the reader is expected to digest is that both Freedman and Wolf accepted that “there is a framework (‘a country’ or ‘a society’) within which both . . . coherence and . . . differentiation exist” (1991:140). The purpose of this statement, we suppose, is to place Freedman at the centre of theoretical and methodological debate in the anthropology of Chinese religion, and to suggest that, regardless of the academic debates and positions taken by rival scholars, Wolf and Freedman were at least agreed on the importance of contextualising their data socially and culturally. Given that this has been a sociological axiom at least since Durkheim, the level of agreement seems rather small. Moreover, in retrospect it is clear that the problem was not that they contextualised their field work data, but that they did not develop a theory of context. Thus, China as a whole country or society, a whole culture or ethnic unit of identity was uncritically assumed to be a “natural” or given context rather than a political choice and/or contingent construction.
Much of Feuchtwang’s article is given over to a lengthy disquisition on Freedman’s approach to religion in China. Identity as Chinese-ness and a whole Chinese society or culture is specified in Freedman’s work along more or less Durkheimian lines. Thus, according to Feuchtwang, “religion”, for Freedman, “directly (if never completely) represents, expresses and records the most internal region of human life: shared subjectivity” (1991:144).
Feuchtwang is well aware of the problem of holism and charitably suggests that Freedman understood the assumption of social-cultural-ethnic holism not simply as a given but as a task and as a challenge to be worked out. As such, anthropologists were concerned with cultural variation and local differences, and indeed they conducted detailed studies on villages and communities in Taiwan, documenting temple practices, pilgrimages, ghost worship, and healing practices in the process. Moreover, Feuchtwang is clear that Freedman’s holism is no longer a credible position:
As long as the study of Chinese religion is still bound into a reading which wishes to see through them a China or many Chinas as yet unknown, the ethnography of China will remain parochial (Feuchtwang 1991:158).
Elsewhere Feuchtwang argues, contra-Freedman, that Chinese religious practices are metaphors constructed from “historical references”, “similes” and “political protocols” and which refer not to a single underlying order but to multiple and contesting “authority claims and conferrals” (Feuchtwang 1993:35-36). Feuchtwang, then, de-centres Freedman, suggesting that religious rituals are complex performances of recognition legitimating a plurality of claims to authority and possible centres.
Catherine Bell’s essay begins by asserting that there has been a shift in the study of Chinese religion, whereby the terms “popular religion”, “local religion” and “popular religious cultures” have replaced the notion of “folk” and “élite” religions and “great” and “little” traditions. Bell sets out to interrogate to what extent this terminological shift merely repackages old assumptions or actually transcends them. Bell anticipates her own conclusions, arguing that more recent studies of Chinese religion explore “religion as fully embedded in society and culture” (1989:36), the suggestion being that earlier studies tended to study Chinese religion without fully explicating the links between religion and socio-cultural mechanisms and practices.
Bell then complicates this sketch, by claiming that the term “popular religion” had been deployed to emphasise socio-cultural unities—unities fundamentally denied by the élite-folk model—while the notion of “religious cultures” is used to recognise “how a society produces both differences and unities within its cultural categories and social organisation” (1989:39). The category “religious cultures” emerges, then, as an attempt to synthesise previous terminologies in order to recognise difference and similarity within the same socio-cultural context. This so-called “third-stage position” emerges through Bell’s brief discussion of Natalie Zemon Davis’ article “From ‘Popular Religion’ to Religious Cultures” (1982), and suggests, according to Bell, a new way to think about culture or context:
The holism of culture is not a shared level of social interaction nor a diffused set of normative ideas. Culture, it implies, is neither a single ideology or a single social group identity disseminated across the society to unite diverse communities. Rather, culture is presumed to involve the internal generation of both distinctions and unities, and its holism is described as a function of either underlying structures of some sort or the imposed limits of geography as they moderate the degrees of similarity and difference. From this perspective, culture comes to be described as the relationship of the parts to the whole, the “production” of meanings, or the “construction” of history and community. Unity and diversity become intrinsic to the dynamics of cultural holism. Third-stage approaches do not isolates religious institutions—or religions per se—as the data of analysis; rather, they focus on symbols and rituals in which they see the dynamics of culture played out. Thus, this third-stage approach presupposes a particular perspective for the definition and understanding of religious phenomena and, correspondingly, implies a distinct theory of religion as a fully embedded cultural system (1989:42-43).
Certainly, the privilege of hindsight allows us to see that this third position construes culture as a dynamic and shifting context. Yet, it critically reproduces the notion of culture, no matter how internally contested, produced, manufactured, dynamic and so on, as a bounded unit of analysis and of religion as a “system” with all the implications of closure the word suggests. The consequences for studying Chinese beyond the mainland—in Singapore, in the Philippines, in London, even in Taiwan—remains unexplored and un-thought, even though several of the texts Bell selects for review deal precisely with religion in Taiwan.
Stevan Harrell’s essay “Lessons from the Golden Age of ‘China’ Ethnography” is a self-conscious and self-critical assessment of the anthropology of Taiwan/China, similar to that undertaken in the UK as functionalism’s hegemony came to an end. Indeed, Harrell seeks to develop the same kind of “critical perspective so fruitfully applied to the earlier deconstruction of British social anthropology” (1999:213). As such, Harrell’s choice of categories is a familiar one: “cultural holism”, “adaptationism” and “synchronism”. The first assumes the presence of a whole Chinese culture, society or identity. We have said enough about this already.
Adaptationism, according to Harrell, points to a strategy of explanation whereby cultural variation is understood in terms of adaptation to local conditions. The top or surface may vary from locality to locality: the underneath, the deep logic or grammar, however, remains the same. Thus, there is an underlying Chinese-ness that does not change and has the quality of the eternal about it—hence Harrell’s final charge of synchronism. As such, Harrell takes issue with one of the central assertions about religion in Taiwan, namely that the gods were modelled on an image of an imperial bureaucracy that ceased to exist in Taiwan in 1895 (for example, Wolf 1974; Feuchtwang 1974). According to Harrell, it had seemed perfectly natural, at the time, to assume that people in twentieth century Taiwan would worship gods-as-imperial-bureaucrats from a bygone era. Why and how the Qing dynasty—which exercised only limited jurisdiction over Taiwan (1684-1895) until the Japanese occupation—should be symbolised in the religious rituals of another state a century later was never questioned.
Interestingly, Harrell locates the agency that brought about the questioning of anthropological assumptions not among anthropologists themselves but among his research subjects, who, as he returned to Taiwan to conduct further research “no longer tried to figure out what I was doing there, but in fact helped me design and carry out my survey research. It was simply no longer possible to write about anything except as an aspect of change, of history” (1999:224). Taiwan, by that time, had torn itself from under the militarised dictatorship of the KMT. Around the same time, Western anthropologists were allowed onto the mainland. Given these dramatic changes in circumstance, we think anthropological writing about Taiwan and about religion would have had to have worked hard not to change.
If Harrell’s essay is a rather good-natured and fundamentally friendly critique of past assumptions, Murray and Hong’s critical overview of what they call “social science” research on Taiwan has somewhat more bite about it (see Nadeau and Chang 2003:282). It constitutes an attack on holism through which, according to Murray and Hong, Taiwan was uncritically assumed to be a sign or simulacrum of the mainland. By focusing on social science a potentially politically charged argument is partly transformed into an academic one about empirical data and the accurate representation of, in this case, a Taiwanese “reality”. For example, they attack Arthur Wolf’s early writing on marriage in Taiwan. According to Murray and Hong, Wolf’s research found high levels of uxorilocal residence which contradicted traditional patterns of patrilocal residency typical of the mainland. Despite this evidence for cultural differences between Taiwan and the mainland, Murray and Hong claim that Wolf continued to promote “a view of a single Chinese essence” (1994:19).
Just as anthropological studies of kinship and lineage presumed that evidence from Taiwan could signify a greater China such that empirical studies of Taiwanese villages and towns were assimilated to Chinese ethnography, so the study of religion in Taiwan tended to assume, according to Murray and Hong, that traditional Chinese religion had been preserved in Taiwan. Like Harrell, they find the notion that the Taiwanese spirit world is in some way a translation of the Qing imperial bureaucracy worthy of special mention, if only for, in their eyes, its wild implausibility:
The pantheon of a “Chinese religion” … is supposed by some specialist researchers to mirror a real political structure. In the Durkheimian tradition, cognitive structures in general and religion in particular, are reflections of society. … in the anthropology of religion on Taiwan, however, it is an earthly power that never exercised effective control on Taiwan and which surrendered responsibility for Taiwan nearly a century ago—that is, a political order which is beyond the recall of anyone actively involved in contemporary Taiwanese worship (Murray and Hong 1994:27).
At first sight, these debates about the interpretation of ethnographic-empirical data on religion in Taiwan might appear somewhat parochial. But, as we have attempted to indicate by beginning this paper with some references to the Philippines and Philippine studies, debates in Taiwan studies reflect similar debates taking place in area studies generally. Moreover, we suggest that these debates (about context) themselves require contextualisation.
3. Orientalism
There is no need here for any lengthy exposition of Said’s thesis of orientalism (1995). However, we note two criticisms: firstly, Said’s inconsistent use of Foucault (see Clifford 1988), and the monolithic and mono-logic status Said ascribes to orientalism (compare with Clarke 1997). However, these criticisms do not, we feel, substantially undermine Said’s basic thesis that—across a wide range of academic disciplines and literary genres—there is a regularity of statement formation that reproduce the sensuality, indolence, passivity and irrationality of “the Orient” and which implicitly manufacture “the West” in terms of discipline, purposive activity and rationality.
Critically, social theory can be shown to be, at least in part, dependent upon the formal separation and hierarchisation of East and West while religion is similarly called upon to perform a dividing task to distinguish modern, rational societies from so-called pre-modern societies, such as through Marx’ analysis of the historical forms or modes of production and Weber’s analyses of so-called world religions in terms of rational social action (Marx 1974; Turner 1991; Weber 1968 and 2002).3 Here, we would like to return briefly to Stevan Harrell’s article to which we referred above.
To briefly re-cap: Harrell conceives of the shifts that have taken place in the study of Taiwan in terms of three categories: “holism”, “adaptationism” and “synchronism”. Moreover, he links this critique to that which deconstructed the so-called British functionalist school. No mention here of orientalism. However, that which Harrell is politely and self-consciously writing against is not “British functionalism” (or any other variety, for that matter). Instead, he writes against orientalist and orientalising assumptions that structured inquiry into Taiwan and religion and the assimilation of Chinese speaking people, wherever they are located in time or space, to a single, racial or ethnic category or identity with fundamental characteristics which, regardless of cultural or social differences between groups are united by an essence of some obscure kind and, lastly, that these peoples/societies exist outside of history, stagnant and petrified at least until contact with Western powers. Critically, religion plays a key role: religion is both the key for unlocking the assumed underlying unity, grammar or essence, it is the code through which difference is expressed and finally it is simultaneously the insidious obstacle to history and the means through which Chinese-speaking peoples remain frozen in time.
4. The critique of culture
The critiques of holism articulated by Feuchtwang, Harrell and Murray and Hong are simultaneously a critique of traditional anthropological conceptions of the categories “culture” and “religion” and a problematizing of context. Until relatively recently, anthropologists worked within what might be called a patch-work quilt theory of culture. This theory envisioned a globe made up of distinct and even mutually incommensurable cultures. Cultures were associated with tribes and nations, and provided a basis for comparison so that it would be possible to develop generalising theories from case studies of different cultures. Cultures were defined in terms of linguistic variation or difference and by particular ways of thinking about and acting in the world, specific values and sentiments, conceptions of self, modes of embodied being and so forth. The notion of culture as collective representations and as a text to be read suggested the analysis of discrete and clearly demarcated systems of meaning that generated particular subjectivities and identities. Structural-functionalist and interpretive readings—Durkheim’s social solidarity produced through participation in collective rituals (1915), Lévi-Strauss’ pensée sauvage (1969) and Geertz’ notion of culture as a domain of inter-subjectively shared meanings (1973)—between them generated a notion of culture that emphasised social order and equilibrium, and which did not question, for example, the class or gender dimensions of culturally encoded systems of rank and hierarchy and therefore did not countenance the possibility of social conflict and largely ignored the question of social change. (However, it should be noted that anthropologists employing political-economic approaches long insisted on a global interconnectedness that tied the most isolated localities into a global economic system, while scholars working along Marxist and feminist trajectories consistently sought to interrogate questions of power and authority both within and between societies). Nevertheless, the ascription of stasis and boundedness onto the cultures, societies and peoples beyond the borders of the West cast these same cultures, societies and peoples outside of history as the alter-egos of Western modernity. The linking of place, culture and identity as fixed and determined in advance was not problematized, and difference was naturalised rather than understood as the outcome of complex identifications and processes of inclusion and exclusion.
By contrast, Gupta and Ferguson (2001) suggest that, as anthropology moves away from the notion of cultures as discrete, bounded, a priori entities, it should start to focus on questions and processes of place, placing, place-making, identity and power. In the study of religion in Taiwan this might be read in the following way: instead of treating religion as a special signifier to a cultural or Chinese whole or an ethnic or pre-modern mentality or subjectivity, it can be understood and analysed as a site or as an occasion for action by the state or by individuals and groups through which claims on space and identity are made, claimed and contested:
The … point is not simply the claim that cultures are no longer (were they ever?) fixed in place. Rather, the point … is that all associations of place, people, and culture are social and historical creations to be explained, not given natural facts … and the implication … is that whatever associations of place and culture may exist must be taken as problems for anthropological research rather than the given ground that one takes as a point of departure; cultural territorialisations (like ethnic and national ones) must be understood as complex and contingent results of ongoing historical and political processes. It is these processes, rather than pregiven cultural-territorial entities, that require anthropological study (Gupta and Ferguson 2001:4).
However, Feuchtwang (2004) argues that Gupta and Ferguson’s breaking of the link between territoriality and cultural identity is “no longer enough” (2004:17). He writes > We should instead think about what the making of a territorial place represents. One answer is that it represents a desired if never accomplished unity of association. Territorial place is a desired if never fully accomplished mastery over a territorially defined place and of a self-identity pinned to that place. It is a project of minor sovereignty. What exercises that mastery, a state or an association of people who live near each other, will make a great difference. They are likely to conflict with each other, the result being a provisional, negotiated compromise, reappropriations by one from the other, and so forth (Feuchtwang 2004:17).
Feuchtwang is in particular concerned to stress not processes of deterritorialisation popular with theorists of globalisation but rather of reterritorialisation as related to complex processes of nationalist development, urbanism and capitalist expropriation. Feuchtwang argues that the state needs to be understood as a central locus of place-making in the context of local practices of identification and a globalising capitalism.
Thus far, we have outlined the importance of the orientalist critique to the theoretical shift that has taken place in the study of religion in Taiwan, a theoretical shift that also reflects a change in the way anthropologists conceptualise culture or context. Further, we have tried to show, through reference to essays by Freedman, Feuchtwang and Bell—and through the critique of early anthropological studies of China/Taiwan during the 1970s and 1980s undertaken by Harrell and Murray and Hong—how orientalist assumptions and presuppositions defined research on religion in Taiwan and how the patchwork quilt theory of culture was reproduced. We will now, through brief reference to Robert P. Weller’s book Alternate Civilities show how Weller’s recontextualisations of religion in Taiwan shatter any assumption of pan-Chineseness. We will also review the position taken by P. Steven Sangren in his writings on religion in Taiwan (1987; 2000) and his sophisticated defence of holism.
5. Contemporary approaches
At the beginning of his book History and Magical Power in a Chinese Community (1987) Sangren informs his reader of his predisposition to holism. He writes of his effort to “construct a holistic view of aspects of Chinese culture from an analysis of the relationship between history and ritual in a particular locality” (1987:1). Later, the reader discovers “RELIGION” IN ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES OF TAIWAN 51 that the part or locale in question is in Taiwan. Once again, it is assumed that Taiwan and religion are windows through which a greater China and a pan-Chineseness can be brought into view. Yet, there are important differences between Sangren and previous scholars whose ethnographic observations remain seminal yet whose theoretical positions are today considered untenable (the distinction is remarkable).
Sangren argues that “Chinese collective representations” are both “products of social institutions and their preconditions” (1987:2). This statement betrays Sangren’s interests in social reproduction which he later frames in the following manner:
My argument goes beyond conventional structural analysis of symbols, however, and attempts to re-incorporate the undeniable connections between religion and social institutions. Social institutions do, as structuralists emphasise, embody basic symbolic contrasts and values; religion does constitute, in Marxist parlance, an ideological support for structures of social authority; and religion does, in structural-functionalist terms, reflect social categories. But it is not enough to show how institutions embody the values constituted in the logic of symbols; one must describe the process by which institutions and collective representations constitute a larger reproducing system (Sangren 1987:4-5).
In the essays that make up Chinese Sociologics (2000), Sangren further refines this position arguing that “culture is best regarded as the organisation of social production” (2000:2) and that the “essence of Chineseness” is to be found “in this meta- or encompassing socio-logic that establishes both sociological and ideological connections between and among state, localities, families and individuals” (2000:3). Sangren allies himself with “practice-oriented theory”, rejecting the charge of “functionalism” by arguing that endogenous and exogenous social change can only be satisfactorily theorised through the rigorous explication of linkages between (and among) institutions, groups and individuals (2000:10).
Sangren is explicit about his theoretical leanings throughout (Marxist; structuralist) and his use of the word “construct” (1987:1) is an acknowledgement that facts do not speak for themselves; they acquire meaning or significance precisely through situated interpretation and, therefore, facts, meanings and significances change under differing forms of (historical) inquiry. In which case, the idea of a whole Chinese culture or, in Sangren’s words, “Chineseness”, is both a contingent presupposition and an effect. As such, we note that the one linkage or connection or relation that Sangren does not subject to rigorous analysis is the power/knowledge nexus within which his—and our—work is implicated and that assumes that China/Taiwan are objects in need of disciplinary explication (Foucault 1982).
In Alternate Civilities, Weller is seeking to write against the grain of conventional accounts of democracy and civil society which have tended to focus on the emergence of rational individuals pursuing their private, rational interests, individuals that have all too naturally transcended parochial or local patterns of thought and action. According to Weller, such accounts “simply fail to capture how individual identity comes into being and how identity shapes the creation of broader social groups” (Weller 1999:135). Passing quickly over his perhaps unfortunate use of the word “capture”, let us note that Weller also emphasises the importance of looking at informal sectors of society.
Weller’s approach, which contrasts field work materials from Taiwan, Hong Kong and mainland China, and which recognizes the quite different historical and cultural experiences of each, is as such not interested in tying religious beliefs and practices in Taiwan to any pan- or pre-modern Chinese-ness, but rather in relating contemporary religion in Taiwan to processes of localisation, globalisation and modernity. Thus, Weller shows that temple organizations provide spaces for local leaders and for localisation that obstruct nationalism and political centralisation through providing “an alternative vehicle for social capital and political transformation” (1999:83). He argues that temples “continue to be among the clearest symbols of local identity and among the only community-wide social organisations outside the government” (1999:85). These local forms of organization were, according to Weller, particularly important during the martial law period when the KMT attempted to occupy the entirety of the social.
Weller complicates this picture of religion in contemporary Taiwan by juxtaposing localising tendencies with groups and movements more generally associated with secularisation: the growth of religious groups—or, in sociology-speak, New Religious Movements (NRMs).4 On the one hand, Weller contrasts the non-communitarian and secularised religiosity of individuals seeking personal transformation and, on the other, popular Buddhist movements whose membership is voluntary but which bring together individuals who share common beliefs, values and sentiments in order to engage in varying forms of social action. As such, Weller notes the increasing popularity, in Taiwan during the 1980s, of ghost worship. Ghosts—as outsiders shorn from any ties of debt and reciprocity—became popular with individuals seeking the granting of private wishes and desires. Thus, according to Weller, ghost worship “tends towards utilitarian granting of individual desires, dissolving the local community interests of temple-based religion” (1999:88). He also notes the emergence of new Buddhist movements such as the Ciji Merit Association and the increasing role of women in religion as “defining new kinds of communities no longer based on local geography” (1999:88).
Nothing here is essentialized. Culture, identity, society, religion—these “things” are not objects passively awaiting anthropological description, but are the contested sites of human social action. In Weller’s Taiwan—a Taiwan that cannot be assimilated to the cultural and historical experiences of any elsewhere—religious beliefs and practices emerge as vehicles for different kinds of social action and identification, whereby what emerges is not the playing out of a code or deep structure, but rather the active and contested making of culture, place and identity by agents with varying access to sources of economic, political and symbolic capital and power.
6. Conclusions
In this first part of our paper, we attempted to show that the category “religion” that formed in sociology and anthropology had a specific function: to signify the pre-modern, in particular a certain kind of subjectivity, mentality, identity, society and culture. Thus, religion equalled, in crude terms, a non-individuated and collective identity marked by a mode of thought that worked by analogy and metaphor dividing and classifying the world into sacred and profane realms in societies typically low in technical sophistication and marked by a basic social structure. We have suggested that such orientalist and orientalizing assumptions—in attenuated form—were constitutive of early anthropological accounts of religion in Taiwan wherein Taiwan was taken to be a sign or simulacrum of mainland China. However, we have also outlined the breakdown of this idea of religion, and religion’s possible re-configuration as a site or occasion for struggle, place-making and identification.
7. Interview with Stephan Feuchtwang
Q. How do you think anthropology has changed over the last thirty years?
Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986) marked a sea change that has made a huge difference. Ethnography is much more self-conscious. Theorizing has to include where it comes from. It was preceded by a growing acceptance of and reference to the political critique of anthropology in which Talal Asad and I took part (Asad 1973). I would now summarize our critique as an argument for the introduction of political history to anthropology. By “political” I mean recognition that what and how we wrote contained an implicit politics. Ethnography should include a dynamic element, namely an indication of what is possible and what is not, whereas too often the realism of ethnography and its analysis was already a politics in the sense of saying what is has to be so, and therefore of ruling out what could be so. By “historical” I mean two things. One is that we write in an historical moment, in which there are a number of different forces at work and theoretical positions to choose, each with a political direction. Our choice is made in the context of our relationship to our subjects and of their relationships to each other. The other thing meant by “historical” is that we write in and of a moment that is dynamic, in processes of transformation. This should be made known in the writing, so that the context of writing and of encounter must be included and must have a temporal dimension. In our conception—long before the sociological formulations of practice, agency and structuration (Bourdieu and Giddens)—that meant and still means treating our subjects as both active and passive, contributing and responding to change. This conceptual ambition was taken from Marxist thought: we are dealing with structural transformations that come from social relations on various scales and have various kinds and strengths of force of domination, exploitation, inclusion and exclusion. Compared to this and to the anti-imperialism we and others before us had taken up—including attacks on anthropologists’ complicity with U.S. neo-imperialist manoeuvres and intelligence gathering—Writing Culture was far less political, despite its overt claims. But in a discipline that is notoriously neutral that was its strength.5 Writing Culture persuaded everyone—even those who rejected the narcissistic self-consciousness of some of its authors or of those that followed them—that it is necessary and desirable to build into any ethnography the relation of the ethnographer to the subjects of the ethnography. There are other criticisms of the stands taken in Writing Culture. For instance, it is dishonest to believe that a book in which the final decision rests with a named author can be truly multi-vocal, as some of its contributors claimed it should and could. What is produced instead is, at best, a work proceeding in many registers including long passages of different enunciations and sources. But Writing Culture did ensure that ethnography from then onwards necessarily provided what I have called an historical dimension, as well as a multitude of registers in an arranged, dialogical collage. Along with this change has been the practice of establishing a life-long relationship to our subjects through repeated visits. Add to this the fact that there are now anthropologists of the same language groups and countries as those of our subjects.
The effect of it all is that we write (and film) knowing that what we produce is open to a much greater range and depth of criticism. We write in the anticipation of criticism. We subject what we eventually publish to the scrutiny of “native” co-researchers. But the odd thing is how little such criticism actually occurs after publication. Because of the pressure to publish, there is little attention to critical exchange, involving thorough reading. We read in order to teach and in order to cite, but not to criticize. There may also be another reason for this lack—the turn to a radical anti-empiricism, which has been called post-modern. Taking up thinkers from France, such as Derrida, who paid detailed and exquisite attention to the texts they were re-reading and re-offering to readers, writers about culture have too often failed either to exercise this attention or to use capacities that exist in anthropology to compare, juxtapose, and generalize. Instead, a small amount of ethnographic description or cultural product is turned over and over in a dialogical play of voices. The ambivalences and indeterminacies of what people made, said and did are well worth expounding. But the refusal to say or to risk saying anything that can be challenged empirically is a kind of cowardice—a retreat from grand theoretical narratives to no theory of reality at all. On the other hand, anthropology on the boundaries with psychology, linguistics, biology and genetics has continued to theorize on the grandest scale, of universals (theories of the human species).
Some anthropologists, such as Eric Wolf, Sidney Mintz and most emphatically Marshall Sahlins continued with the work of empirically based and historical cultural anthropology. Others, younger and equally committed to critical and empirical anthropology have followed. I hope that more will be prepared to risk empirically based theoretical accounts of structural transformation and historical comparison on the lines of what used to be known as a critique, in the sense of a critique of reality, and engage in some serious debate about the adequacy and validity of each account.
Q. How do you think the study of Taiwan has changed during the same period?
The biggest is the change in anthropology and history in and by residents of Taiwan. In my academic life, anthropology in and of Taiwan has moved from a small activity of what was rightly labeled Ethnology, consisting of the four-field (cultural, linguistic, physical and archaeological) study of native peoples and re-studies of the materials of Chinese archaeology, to the social and cultural anthropology of all parts of Taiwan and including recent histories of localities. The expansion of anthropology, with postgraduate and doctoral programs at several universities in addition to the Institutes of Ethnology, Sociology, History and Taiwan Studies at the Academia Sinica, has transformed anthropology in Taiwan both qualitatively and in the number of anthropologists and their works. Most Taiwanese anthropologists working in Taiwan received their doctorates in foreign universities and can challenge what foreign anthropologists write about Taiwan on equal, peer terms. They can and do also challenge what we foreigners write on the grounds of our being outsiders.
There has been a concerted attempt to “nativize” or “indigenize” anthropology, both in Taiwan and on the Mainland. Its results are not visible in any engagement in transnational discourse, bringing to anthropology in general new concepts and approaches. They are much more visible in an espousal of concerns that are peculiar to the responsibilities of a local anthropologist. In Taiwan this has been in line with the ethical turn in anthropology, responsive engagement with the subjects of research and engagement in providing the research materials for a history and understanding of what is peculiarly Taiwanese. It has affected foreign anthropologists of Taiwan such as me in subjecting us to criticism for the deficiencies of our sensitivity and response to Taiwan as a special place in a particular history and political conjuncture. I have reflected on this elsewhere (Feuchtwang 1999), so I will not say more here.
Unfortunately, the responsibility of Taiwanese anthropologists to “Taiwan” has militated against engagement with anthropology outside Taiwan. Allen Chun (2001) has rightly pointed to an institutionalized compulsion to conduct ethnographic field research, largely done by junior researchers and research assistants, at the expense of theoretical work and specialization. I think he is right in saying it is an institution of nation learning (guo xue) and nation building, which has of course changed from “China” to “Taiwan”. But there are other anthropologists “RELIGION” IN ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES OF TAIWAN 57 of Taiwanese origin who have included Taiwanese subjects and have engaged, along with the many foreign anthropologists of Taiwan, in a more expansive anthropology.
First there has been expansion to include fieldwork in both the Mainland and Taiwan. This has been a major development. For many Taiwan-based anthropologists it has been a further exercise in indigenized ethnography. But for others it has involved a more open-ended and out-turned comparison. At first sight there appears to be a convergence between the flourishing of Taiwan’s local cultures with growing prosperity and revitalizations of pre-Revolutionary institutions on the Mainland. Both are affected by fast economic growth, infused with globalized capitalist projects and consumerism. It has, for instance, been possible for Mayfair Meihui Yang to study the autonomy of ritual economies within both capitalist economies and their state supports. It has also been possible for Susanne Brandstaedter to compare the political economies of kinship and the emergent economic power of women in island fishing communities in both the PRC and Taiwan. Similarly it was possible for Charles Stafford to study institutions of separation and reunion in the far Northeast of China and in southwest Taiwan (Stafford 2000), and more recently to study the uses of numeracy in Taiwan and southwest China. Wang Mingming and I compared local leadership in a basically shared, Quanzhou cultural tradition in a township in Anxi, Southern Fujian, and a township in Taipei County, Taiwan (Feuchtwang and Wang 2001). I am now engaged in a further comparison of the transmission of loss through state violence in the same two places. But the appearance is deceptive. These comparisons do not depend on close convergence and I think that when eventually these comparative studies reach publication we will see that the appearance of convergence has to be seriously modified because the politics, political history and state-led political economies are so different.
Of more general anthropological interest has been another expansion, the breaking out of Taiwan-based studies from regional boundaries of interest. Obviously the great and fast-growing economic powers of the PRC and of Taiwan as markets and competitors, as well as the strategic importance of the tensions between them, have drawn local studies of both to the attention of larger audiences. But I am referring to something else, the breakthrough into general anthropological debate and the raising of topics for anthropology in general on the basis of Taiwanese ethnography. I will mention three examples only. Allen Chun has been using studies of Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore to engage in questioning globalization and the divisions it engenders, including not only those of national state projects but also of transnational class and other shifting but stark divisions. He promotes a long-term history of globalization for which Taiwan is a key case to ask what is specific to the various processes that make up the present and could produce new transnational polities, for which again Taiwan may be a key example (see Chun 2002 and the references in it to previous publications). Steven Sangren has used his studies of ritual and myth in Taiwan to find grounds to reject Foucauldian usages in favor of a unique combination of Marxist and Lacanian theories. From them he has produced a theory of social totality and its reproduction, including a concept of alienated subjectivity (Sangren 2000). Third is the work by Charles Stafford (2000), already mentioned, in which he introduces into anthropology a whole new theme, that of separation.
It is too early to say what impact these interventions in transnational anthropology will have. But the openings and examples have been set, and I hope and expect they will be followed by Taiwan-based anthropologists’ ethnography and theory.
Q. Your work on religion has been strongly influenced by what may be termed “the French school”—including Durkheim, Mauss and Lévi-Strauss—which approaches religion as representational practices. However, to what extent are Marxist approaches to religion compatible with the approaches of Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss?
First a word about the reception of what I have published. Published writing is out of authors’ hands. People can read and see in them habits of thought, to summarize or to dismiss them, according to their own intellectual trajectories, often from the need to have a straw figure and to introduce their own work as if it were completely new, whereas they are just making something that is somewhat new.
My book on popular religion in China used “the imperial metaphor” in the title. Because of this, it has been understood to support a notion of the correspondence of religion to social structure and of popular religion reflecting political rule whereas I think I was producing an argument for something quite different, almost the opposite. I am currently trying to write some papers that elaborate the theory of religion I tried to suggest in that book. I am writing them not just in order to re-assert my own reading and then leave it once more in the public domain. I am trying to be more definite about what I think Chinese local temples, festivals, forms of worship and divination do. I treat them as an example of something that is true of a great deal of religious practice: they suggest to me that religious ritual is the performance of “RELIGION” IN ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES OF TAIWAN 59 excessive communication, not only the outgoing invitation or pledge to an invisible agency, but also the response of that agency and its generosity. There is more to it. But it is enough to say that I think religious practice is a form of poetic action, a rhetoric of vast asymmetries and intimate recognitions, which is not simply ideological, nor simply structural. You can see that I am trying to get at an idea of religion as something that is relatable but not reducible to politics or social structure.
I used “metaphor” in the same way that Lévi-Strauss meant in his account of Totemism, as a series of related and classifiable objects in one realm separated from a series of objects in another realm so that each could stand for the other. Dealing with “religion” means that along with metaphor, you are also dealing with metonymic relations of contiguity and connection, epitomized by offering and sacrifice. I wanted to follow Lévi-Strauss to see how metaphor can also be metonymic. In the Chinese case, it is an historical metaphor. Selected people who are dead are treated not only as heroes but as gods in a parallel realm to the world of the living. They stand for the living world. But their world is not in correspondence with the lived world. It is an idealized version of the lived world, including both positive and negative capacities, for generous blessing and fearsome destructiveness. Its denizens are treated as are the “natural” categories in totemic rituals, as protectors. But they are unlike totemic beings because they are not members of categories. They are persons, divine persons. They and the lived world are hierarchically arranged, but not as a classificatory paradigm. The reason why they can stand metaphorically for relations of power and authority in the lived world is that they exist in a transcendent, archaic imaginary world that is quite unlike as well as containing elements that are like those of imperial China. They are unlike historical China, but sufficiently like it, so they are not entirely mythical. In one crucial respect their parallel realm is not like the reversible, structural time of myth. Their realm is co-present as at once a mythic and an historical past. The practices of “history”, which include the tracing of genealogical connection, the issuing of orthodox correction, the promotion of new heroes, the alternative and unorthodox selection of more demonic but equally heroic reputations, have to be included as religious, metonymic, practices.
I do not agree that such religious practice can, as Sangren would have it, be encompassed in a theory of total social reproduction and the alienation it requires. They offer alternative, charismatic, possibilities of action and other conceptions of cosmological force than those conveyed by the orthodoxy of the time. Structural and Marxist analysis on their own exclude this dynamic element and possibility.
Nevertheless it is true that I have worked through the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss, and of semiotics in general, concurrent with an early fascination with phenomenology and the philosophical writings of Marx, followed by a preference for his work on capitalism. By “working through” I mean finding them deeply attractive for increasingly political reasons (to which phenomenology is peculiarly unsuited), as ways of understanding the world we live in and its possibilities for horror (in particular the horrors of racism) as well as emancipation. I looked in them for possibilities of action and thought. It was in this last respect that I eventually found both structuralism and the totalizing claims of Marxist theory, including the theory of capitalism and class struggle, to be inadequate. They cannot accommodate the unintended outcomes of intended action, nor the subjectivity and emotional forces of mobilized action, nor creativity, ordinary creativity not just artistic, including political struggle. They clamp the outcomes of policies and intended actions, those outcomes including the emergence of new intentions and forms of action, as well as other disastrous or beneficial consequences, into a post hoc explanation.
It is true that my first publications were more structuralist and Marxist. It is also true that what I learned from reading Lévi-Strauss and Marx remain with me as habits, useful habits, of critical and analytic thought. But now in my writing I try to leave room for unintended consequences and for the subjective forces of actors without pretending they can be told from their positions in a social formation.
As for Durkheim and Mauss, I have always maintained a critical respect. I would preserve the themes Mauss introduced, of gift, of techniques of the body, and more. But I reject the context of universal history of social evolution in which he introduced them. Similarly, I have rejected Durkheim’s idea of an essential holism, sealed by solitary representations and sentiments, while wishing to retain the concept of collective representations. What I value about the concept is that it refers at once to the enactment of symbols and the fact that they are learned throughout life, from infancy. They must be treated in relation to each other, in structures of symbolic signs including their ambiguities and shifts in relation to each other. At the same time, they are also interjected where they gain the force of affect (feelings of love, hatred, and so on), inadequately called “sentiments” by Durkheim. They are interjected selectively, with feelings unique to each person who also projects onto them new meanings according to life experiences, yet they “RELIGION” IN ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES OF TAIWAN 61 are inter-related like a language. The two sets of dimensions, external inter-relatedness and internalization and projection, are simultaneous and need to be kept so in analysis. I think this can be done without the assumption that they bind into a solitary whole. Durkheim demands, instead of an assumed answer, two questions. In what ways are signs, utterances, symbolic actions, representations in short, bound up with each other, and how are they acted upon by the people who have internalized them and who recreate as they reproduce them? How are people differentiated from other people by their learned representations? These are questions asked by anthropologists and I am still devoted to anthropology.
Q. You have, at different times, responded to the strong criticisms made against you by Murray and Hong to the effect that, regardless of the theoretical model within which anthropologists were working, anthropologists nevertheless did do detailed field studies of localities in Taiwan. Do you think that Taiwan can ever escape placement in the gravitational field of China studies?
Murray and Hong were right that others and I treated as “Chinese” what we found in Taiwan. We did not appreciate how Taiwanese it was. On the other hand, I do not accept that we should have treated it as uniquely Taiwanese.
In my dissertation on religious practices in Shiding, I was careful to locate them in a history of northern Taiwan. But at the same time I was insufficiently able to deal with the changes they had undergone in their transfer from the Quanzhou region to Taiwan and the subsequent history in which I set them. I felt I had first to see in them a structure of meanings, of symbolic practices and their variant interpretations. I would then be able to treat historical change as structural transformation. That is, ideally, what I still demand of myself. In my first publications, I put what I had found in the context of more generally Chinese rites, those of Daoism and those of the imperial state cults. I did so by means of local historical research on Taipei and on the local gazetteers of Ningbo, in Zhejiang province on the Mainland. I still think that this proved that I had indeed found some basic, unchanged structures. But I had not paid attention to variation and historical change and therefore to how these basic structures varied in Taiwan.
For The Imperial Metaphor I continued in this vein, very careful about generalizing to the whole of China, reading as much as I could about the existence in many very different parts of China of the institution of temples and festivals to gods that protect and celebrate territorial locality. The first edition contained the odd observation of change. But it was only when for the second edition I added the longest, last chapter that I dealt systematically with the changes that had occurred in Taiwan and how they differed from the changes that had occurred on the Mainland.
Murray and Hong were at the beginning of a great movement of assertion and exploration of Taiwanese history and of what is peculiar to Taiwan. Everyone, including me, has learned a great deal from it and will continue to do so. I am, for instance, keen to learn more as more histories appear about the Japanese colonial era, particularly the wartime, and about the crucial post-Japanese and early KMT period before the civil war between KMT and Communist forces ended in 1949 in the stalemate in which we are still living. These are periods that most problematically mark out Taiwan from the Mainland, with awkward and inconvenient elements for the celebration of Taiwanese identity and the 2·28 martyrs, such as the existence of Communist organization in Taiwan. Comparison with, as well as differentiation from the Mainland remains appropriate, indeed inevitable. The bulk of Taiwan’s population speaks Chinese languages, traces its ancestry to the Mainland, and tours or trades and invests in the Mainland more than anywhere else. It is also true that the Austronesian peoples of Taiwan who preceded the Chinese have much in common with various Southeast Asian peoples. Intermarriage and assimilation between them and Chinese invaders and settlers certainly affected what the settlers brought with them. But this is also true of the southern Chinese Mainland. So, my answer to your question is that Taiwan cannot escape the gravitational field of China studies. But that does not exclude attention to the history that has made Taiwan different.
Q. What do you think the anthropology of religion/Taiwan will “look” like thirty years from now?
To answer this I will draw on the implications of what I have already said, rather than try to jump thirty years into the future.
So much is changing in Taiwan or rather the East Asian region, with the Mainland as its main economic potential. It is becoming so central to global strategies that both Mainland and Taiwanese studies will be increasingly central. They will not be held at an exceptional and exotic margin of other more powerful centers. They will be at their own, very powerful centers demanding attention elsewhere. I hope “RELIGION” IN ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES OF TAIWAN 63 and expect that anthropologists based in Taiwan and the Mainland will develop theories of what has happened and of preceding changes and challenge existing concepts of state, nation, emergent political entities, person, relatedness, history, senses and ways of belonging and global processes of exploitation, unification, distancing and differentiation. The changes occurring in both the Mainland and Taiwan are great and varied, local studies in both will be of increasing importance and will have to be historical. The challenge is to treat that history as open-ended, not just as post-something or leading up to a “present” that everyone competes to define.
I wonder what will constitute units of comparison. But I am sure, because it is already happening, that there will have been increasingly competent, less teleological and less Euro-North American-centric comparisons of long-term processes of change. Among them I hope and expect there will be theories of the different ways in which people deal with death, helplessness, rage, self-realization, recognition, answers to why we are here and what “here” is, utopian expectations and invocations of transcendental life—in short “religion”. It may well be that the new kinds of religious institution created in Taiwan, the great foundations and lay memberships of in-the-world Buddhism will have completely replaced the much more local and territorial senses of belonging to which I have devoted most of my attention. Or else they will have been completely taken over by centralized cultural projects and politics of community. I wonder how much the new Buddhism of Taiwan will spread to the Mainland, or be joined by similar institutions growing there. In any case, it seems to me to be a relatively non-sectarian and benign form of religion, boding well for the future.
Along with many other topics of enquiry, “religion” faces anthropology with itself as a moral practice. Comparison of religions necessarily includes moral judgment, to the extent that some religious representations and practices are more likely to encourage generosity towards strangers than others; some are more self-important, evangelical and exclusive than others. I hope academic freedom will have been preserved sufficiently and used by anthropologists to face this fact. I hope that academic life will, by at least some, be treated as a preserve for critical enquiry rather than succumb to noncommittal play with endless possibilities.
I also hope that academic life will not have been entirely taken over by the short-term practicalities and earning power of “business” and of service to political and religious loyalties. It is quite likely that the occurrence of ecological change, political irresponsibility and violent intervention, and the imminence of ever-greater disasters will take precedence over everything else. But that would, in my view, make even more urgent our keeping open the moral practice of an engaged and theoretical, critical anthropology.
Stephan Feuchtwang
Department of Anthropology
Houghton Street
London School of Economics and Political Science
London WC2A 2AE
UK
Fang-long Shih
Asia Research Centre
Houghton Street
London School of Economics and Political Science
London WC2A 2AE
UK
Paul-François Tremlett
Study of Religions
School of Oriental and African Studies
Thornhaugh Street
Russell Square
London WC1H 0XG
UK
Notes
- We are grateful to the Tsao Yung-Ho Foundation for funding this research paper, and for providing us with the opportunity to engage in this project. We would also like to extend a debt of gratitude to Stuart Thompson, chair of the London-Taiwan seminar, whose comments on the first draft of this paper were incisive and valuable. We would also like to extend our thanks to Stephan Feuchtwang for his contribution to this project and for his support throughout. A number of other individuals have contributed to this paper in discussions about Taiwan, in particular Tim Barrett, Bernard Fuehrer and Charles Stafford. As such, we would like to acknowledge them and indeed all those who have contributed to the London-Taiwan seminar series which has been a wonderful forum for intellectual stimulation and dialogue. All mistakes and errors remain our own. ↩︎
- Talal Asad (2003) argues for “an anthropology of secularism” (2003:1). Asad engages in a genealogical analysis of secularism as embedded representational practices linked in complex ways to modernity and “the West” that illumines the formation and function of the category “religion” in the modern period: “It is right to say that ‘modernity’ is neither a totally coherent object nor a clearly bounded one, and that many of its elements originate in relations with the histories of peoples outside Europe. Modernity is a project—or rather, a series of interlinked projects that certain people in power seek to achieve. The project aims at institutionalising a number of (sometimes conflicting, often evolving) principles: constitutionalism, moral autonomy, democracy, human rights, civil equality, industry, consumerism, freedom of the market—and secularism. It employs proliferating technologies (of production, warfare, travel, entertainment, medicine) that generate new experiences of space and time, of cruelty and health, of consumption and knowledge. The notion that these experiences constitute ‘disenchantment’—implying a direct access to reality, a stripping away of myth, magic and the sacred—is a salient feature of the modern epoch. It is, arguably, a product of nineteenth-century romanticism, partly linked to the growing habit of reading imaginative literature . . . so that images of a ‘pre-modern’ past acquire in retrospect a quality of enchantment” (2003:13-14). Molendijk (1998), on the other hand, seeks to map or locate “the most important intellectual and socio-historical factors that contributed to the rise of the scientific study of religion” (1998:1). As such, Molendijk acknowledges numerous possible points of departure: Deism, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, colonialism, secularism, modernity and scientific advances, according to Molendijk, were all essential both to the formation of disciplines which could take “religion” as an object enquiry, but also to the formation of the category “religion” itself. ↩︎
- Karl Marx’ notion of the “Asiatic mode of production” and Max Weber’s twin concepts of “prebendalism” and “patrimonialism” are founded upon distinctions between Eastern and Western societies and their modes of social organization. Marx’ notion of the Asiatic Mode of Production constitutes all Oriental societies—from Egypt to China—as existing in a state of stagnation. Marx emphasizes the importance of climate and geography to social, political and economic relations in non-Western states. According to Marx, the rise of states in desert regions is linked with the necessity of developing and managing public irrigation systems. In order to administer such systems the state takes ownership of the land, meaning that social classes based in ownership of land and property do not emerge. The absence of privately owned property means that there is no catalyst for struggle between opposing social groups or classes. Marx, of course, understood struggle between social classes to be the motor of historical change. Thus Marx can claim that Asia is marked by an absence of history. In Weber’s comparative sociology and in his attempt to explain the emergence of rational capitalism in the West and nowhere else, Weber similarly opposes a dynamic West to a passive and history-less Orient. According to Weber, the prebendal form of land-ownership in Islamic states results in a highly centralized form of government, and prevents the formation a property-owning class. Weber characterizes the oriental state as a patrimonial state whereby power is exercised by a royal household through a bureaucratic apparatus that functions under the direct, personal control of the ruler. Weber also notes that cities did not emerge in Oriental societies as centers of trade able to operate with a degree of autonomy from the state as they did in Europe. Rather, oriental cities were imposed on the countryside as sites of political and military control. According to Weber, the political systems of the Orient inhibit social change producing stagnant and frozen societies. ↩︎
- As to the significance of NRMs in modern societies, sociologists are far from agreement. Compare Stark (1999) and Bruce (2002). ↩︎
- For a recent review of the critical positions of Chandra Jayawardena in the “ethical turn” in anthropology see Robinson (2004). The compilation by Dell Hymes (1969) includes the main politically critical US anthropologists. ↩︎
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