GENERATION OF A NEW SPACE: A maiden temple in the Chinese religious culture of Taiwan
Excluded from the ancestral lineages that give the Chinese dead a home, women who die unmarried are believed to become restless, polluting ghosts who bring misfortune on their families. At the Sam-giap maiden-temple in northern Taiwan, such spirits are instead ‘adopted’: their incense-ash is carried in red sachets and, once a year, mixed into the temple goddess’s own burner. Drawing on fieldwork begun in 1995, this article shows how the ritual substitutes community for kinship and equality for hierarchy, generating a space in which maiden-spirits are neither ghosts nor ancestors but ‘the disciples of the maiden-goddess’.
Read more