Fang-Long Shih
This paper addresses a significant gender issue in the Chinese religious culture of Taiwan. The exclusion of deceased maidens from family and ancestral lineages leaves relations between the living and the dead disordered. People believe that homeless maidens become restless, polluting ghosts after death who will bring misfortune to their family and others in society. The case study examined here is a correction to the exclusion/pollution/homelessness of maiden-spirits through ‘adoption’ in the maiden-temple of Sam-giap. I will analyse how spirit-adoption in the Sam-giap maiden-temple constitutes an attempt to correct that disorder and pollution. I will also argue that one result of the Sam-giap corrective practice is the generation of a new space for maiden-spirits in which a new category that disrupts the opposition of ghosts and ancestors emerges.
Keywords: gender; death; disorder; transformation; Taiwan
This paper addresses a significant gender issue in the Chinese religious culture of Taiwan; namely, the exclusion of unmarried women (maidens)1 from the ancestral order. It is a distinguishing characteristic of Chinese culture that the world of the living impacts upon the world of the dead, and vice versa (Feuchtwang 2001, 1–26; Wolf 1974a, 6–9). The ‘Chinese family, as a category, refers to a group of males all descended from one common ancestor and their wives’ (Baker 1979, 49). To be considered a socially complete person in living Chinese society it is necessary to achieve the status of an ancestor in the world of the dead. According to the rules, exclusions, divisions and prohibitions peculiar to the Chinese patrilineal system, to be accorded ancestor status, one has to be born either as a man or as a woman who must marry and have sons.
A daughter, from her father’s point of view, is an outsider. She is only a temporary member of the family and lineage into which she has been born. At the time of marriage her temporary membership in her natal family comes to an end and then she becomes a member of her husband’s lineage, which is able to grant her a secure ancestral place. A woman thus should be married and die in her husband’s house and not remain single and die in her father’s house (Ahern 1973, 126–128; Wolf 1974b, 146–147).
Women who die unmarried die without a husband and thus without connection to a male line. As such, these women fail to achieve ancestor-to-be status and this results in an end to any form of social continuity for maidens after death. I describe maiden-death as ‘biological and social death’. Maiden bio-social death is a type of death that is particularly high in pollution (Ahern 1975). It is ‘shameful’ for a family to have a deceased maiden-daughter. In the old times, the family usually hired a grave-digger (to-gong-ah 土公仔) to remove their dead maiden from their house. The grave-digger would place the body in a container made of wood and carry it to a secluded site. The body would then be dumped into a hole and covered with sufficient earth to prevent it from being eaten by dogs. No gravestone would be erected. Also, normally, no tablet would be set for the maiden-spirit (Lou 1968, 24; Shih 2002, 54–55). It is customary that the spirit of the deceased is represented by its written name on a tablet. It is believed that the spirit is accommodated on its tablet, which in turn becomes a locus of worship (Watson 1988, 13–14).
The exclusion of deceased maidens from family and ancestral lineages leaves relations between the living and those who die ‘bad deaths’ disordered. People believe that homeless maidens become restless ghosts after death who will bring misfortune to their family and others in society (Harrell 1986). If something bad happens in the family, their deceased maiden would normally be blamed as the agency of misfortune. As a result, the family would have their deceased maiden’s spirit-tablet made and placed temporarily in a dark corner of the house. Soon after a place to house the maiden-spirit is found, the tablet is removed from the home forever (Jordan 1972, 138–140).
There are a variety of practices by which to provide a ‘home’ for maiden-spirits, which constitute a correction to the exclusion/homelessness/pollution of deceased maidens. I describe these practices as ‘corrective practices’. The corrective practices usually involve the adoption of various after-life ideas from other religious traditions such as maiden-goddess worship, Buddhism, and Christianity.
The case study examined in this paper is a correction to the exclusion/homelessness/pollution of maiden-spirits through ‘adoption’ in the maiden-temple of Sam-giap (Sam-giap go-niu-bhior 三峽姑娘廟). The Sam-giap maiden-temple was chosen for three reasons: firstly, it is one of the very few maiden-temples that emerged as means of solving the problem of maiden-death. Secondly, it is also one of the very few maiden-temples that provide a place to accommodate homeless maiden-spirits. Thirdly, it is one of the very few maiden-temples that has been documented—albeit briefly—in the existing anthropological literature, such as Arthur Wolf (1974b, 147–150) and Lin Fu-Shih (1995). After my first visit to Sam-giap maiden-temple in October 1995, I have re-visited it several times to do follow-up research during 1996–1997 and during 2001 and 2003. However, the case study presented hereafter is mainly based upon my first period of fieldwork. I will firstly show how the exclusion of deceased, unmarried women from ancestral lineages generates pollution and disordered relations in Holo religious discourse. I will then analyse how spirit adoption in the Sam-giap maiden-temple constitutes an attempt to correct that disorder and pollution. I will also argue that one result of the Sam-giap corrective practice is the generation of a new space for maiden-spirits in which a new category that disrupts the opposition of ghosts and ancestors emerges.
Spirit Adoption in the Sam-giap Maiden-Temple
My first assumptions regarding the Sam-giap maiden-temple were formed well before my first visit—I knew from Arthur Wolf (1974b) and Lin Fu-Shih (1995) that this temple accommodated homeless, dis-placed maiden-spirits. According to Wolf, ‘In San-hsia [Sam-giap] families that want to rid themselves of an unmarried daughter [spirit] usually deposit the ashes that represent her in what is known as a ko-niu-biou (go-niu-bhior), a “maiden’s temple”’ (1974b, 149). In October 1995, on my first visit to the temple, I rushed inside to take a quick look at the interior, before rushing out again. My first hasty impression was that this was a small temple within which there was a statue of a goddess on an altar and an incense-burner in front of the statue. From my previous experience of visiting other temples, I understood that the statue is the object of worship and the incense-burner the location of worship; these are the two fundamental components of the temple (Shih and Yu 2003).
It was a sunny day. There was an elderly man sitting on a stone stool under the cool shade of the tree outside the temple. I initiated a conversation with him by talking about the weather before asking him about the history of the Sam-giap maiden-temple. He related to me a story about the temple goddess, saying that the goddess of the Sam-giap maiden-temple was a local unmarried woman by the name of Miss Ng who died 150 years before. Some years after she died, she returned to her family members in a dream. In the dream she ‘demanded to be a maiden’ (tor bheh zor go-niu 討欲作姑娘). The Ng family granted her ‘a piece of land’ as her ‘dowry’2 and built a small stone shrine on her land to house her spirit-tablet. The elderly man then pointed out Miss Ng’s original dowry land (i.e. the temple’s original territory), which ranged from the temple to the edge of the road. But, he added, when the Kuomintang government carried out its land reform programme around 1950,3 the then temple’s yard (i.e. the land behind the temple to the edge of the road) passed into private ownership. Since then this land had shifted from owner to owner, but none of them were able to collect a harvest from it. The then dowry land contrasted strangely with the other lands around; whereas the former was covered in weeds, on the latter were fertile standing crops. After a silence, I inquired whether the Sam-giap maiden-temple adopted other homeless maiden-spirits, to which the man replied ‘Yes’. I then asked: ‘Where are they?’ ‘In the incense-burner!’ he answered.
A few days later, on my second visit to the temple, I paid attention to the incense-burner. It was inscribed with three Chinese characters ‘聖媽爐’ (siann ma lo), which means ‘the Efficacious Grandmother’s incense-burner’. This incense-burner was no different from other incense-burners in other temples, except in terms of its proportions to the temple itself. It seemed odd to me that such a small temple could have such a large incense-burner. The incense-burner in the Sam-giap maiden-temple was twice, or even three times, the size of other incense-burners in temples of a similar size. I hastened out of the temple again. At the house over the road from the temple, I saw an open door.
I walked towards the open door, and stepped inside. After giving the reason for my visit, I was invited to take a seat. The housekeeper, Mrs Diunn, said that the goddess of the Sam-giap maiden-temple was the daughter of the then wealthy Ng family whose ancestral house was about 15 minutes walking distance from the temple. The temple’s goddess was addressed as siann-ma 聖媽, ‘the Efficacious Grandmother’, who had been extremely effective in responding to the needs of temple worshippers, particularly during the 1960s and 1970s. Mrs Diunn went on to say that during this time one Ng family member had a statue of siann-ma erected and worshipped her (i.e. they worshipped their great-great-grand-aunt) as a domestic goddess on the ancestral altar in the family house. Since then, the wealthy Ng family had been brought to ruin. Mrs Diunn then took me to the Ng family’s ancestral house. I saw an empty altar buried in thick dust in a big empty house with a door lock covered with a spider’s web. On the way back Mrs Diunn recited a folk saying; bai go e lu bai lu bhor 拜姑會愈拜愈無. This saying claims that if a family were to house and worship their paternal aunt on the family altar, the longer they worshipped, the more likely the family lineage would come to an end. Before departing, Mrs Diunn pointed the way to the house of the temple’s custodian and told me that the maiden-spirits adopted in the temple were hung up in the form of small red sachets around the two sides of the statue.
Several days later, on my third visit to the temple, I paid particular attention to the statue. I noticed that there were two pieces of red wooden board at each side of the statue: nothing was on the left board, while two red sachets were hanging up on the right board. There were three Chinese characters written on one of the sachets, probably the name of the deceased maiden. Nothing was written on the other sachet, although it may have had some words on the back. At that time it occurred to me that I should turn over the sachet in order to check whether the other side bore the deceased maiden’s name, but I was afraid of disturbing the maiden-spirit. I ran out of the temple again and made my way towards the house of the temple’s custodian. The temple’s custodian, Mrs Sia, said to me that, in and around Sam-giap, families who had deceased unmarried daughters and who could not afford to buy them an after-life place in a Buddhist monastery usually deposited their daughters’ red sachets in the Sam-giap maiden-temple, donating some money for incense and candles (hiunn-iu-zinn 香油錢). But, this had to be done on the basis of an agreement between the maiden-spirit and the temple’s maiden-goddess. After a while, Mrs Sia showed me the registry book that recorded the addresses and the names of each family-head and the dates of adoption of maiden-spirits to the temple since 1974. Some of the more recent entries included the amount of the donation for the adoption. Before leaving, Mrs Sia told me that every year the temple held a gap-lo 合爐 ritual to adopt annually lodged maiden-spirits and clean away the year’s deposited red sachets. In recent years Mr Dan, the father of the village-head, had been the official charged with this practice, which takes place before the communal worship at the date of the temple’s anniversary festival, which is the day commemorative of the temple’s rebuilding, on the 16th day of the 11th month according to the Chinese lunar calendar.
The Sam-giap maiden-temple, according to Wolf, ‘now houses the souls of 32 unmarried girls’ (1974b, 150). This is unclear as to whether the number 32 refers to that year’s number of adoptions or the total amount of adoptions. According to the temple’s registry book, it seems likely that this number refers to the number of new adoptions in the year when Wolf collected his field data. However, in 1995’s gap-lo practice, only four new maiden-spirits were officially adopted by the temple.4 The gap-lo ritual was held on 6 January 1996 (according to the Common Era) and began at 6 a.m. Apart from myself, only two people participated in this ritual: one was the executor, Mr Dan; the other was the assistant, Mrs Sia. Mrs Sia began by burning three sticks of incense to inform the temple’s goddess of the forthcoming cleansing of the temple’s incense-burner. She removed the incense-sticks and incense-ash with a trowel from the incense-burner, placing them on a sieve that was held by Mr Dan. Mr Dan then shook the sieve. Except for fine ash, incense-sticks and clumps of incense-ash did not pass through the sieve and were disposed of into the temple’s spirit-money burner. This procedure was repeated twice, and then Mrs Sia poured some coarse husks of rice inside the incense-burner in order to keep the future incense-sticks well set; the temple’s incense-burner was thus ritually cleansed. Before Mrs Sia left, she removed the four red sachets from the red boards at either side of the statue, and handed them over to Mr Dan.
The gap-lo ritual continued with Mr Dan opening the red sachets with a pair of scissors, one by one. The first one enclosed a handful of ash and a sheet of paper that was inscribed with a few characters. Mr Dan read the characters and murmured a prayer in front of the goddess. He then poured the ash into the temple’s incense-burner and put the paper and the empty red sachet aside. The other three red sachets were dealt with in the same way. They all enclosed a handful of ash. Two contained sheets of paper; one was a paper talisman (hu-ah 符仔), while the other was completely covered in writing. Finally, the three sheets of paper and the four empty red sachets were thrown into the temple’s spirit-money burner and burnt.
After the four red sachets had been disposed of, the gap-lo ritual was complete. Then, three masters of Zai-gau 齋教5 who had been hired to do merit-making (zor gong-dik 作功德) for the newly adopted maiden-spirits began to chant a section of the Diamond Sūtra (Gin-gong-ging 金剛經) in front of an image of the Three Precious Buddhas (Sam-bor-hut 三寶佛),6 which was set up on the table of the altar. The head-master then read out loud the archives of merit (gong-dik bhun-diap 功德文牒), each of which contained an adopted deceased maiden’s name and details of her birth and death dates. He then set fire to the archives and put them into the temple’s spirit-money burner. I had a conversation with one of the masters after the merit making. Master Huathi said that the Diamond Sūtra7 was often used to dedicate merit to the newly dead and was particularly suitable for festive occasions. The merit archive was understood as a certificate that granted the dead a merit credit. Burning the merit archives informed the newly adopted maiden-spirits that they must visit the Sam-bor-hut in order to receive the merit that the Zai-gau masters had made for them. By holding and accumulating merit credits the deceased maidens might one day enter the Pure Land (se-hng gik-lok se-gai 西方極樂世界) and be freed from samsāra (lun-hue 輪迴).
More and more people then came to join the communal worship to celebrate the temple’s anniversary festival. Most of them were local villagers present as household representatives. Traditionally, a household is defined as a territorial unit within a locality. It is considered to be a ritual unit for communal worship in local temples (Feuchtwang 1974; Wang 1985). Those who were outsiders were either temple worshippers or family members who had deceased maidens adopted in the temple. All contributed incense and food to the communal worship on the table in front of the altar and completed their worship with the burning of spirit-money. Spirit-money is a piece of paper bearing a thin tinfoil square either in gold or in silver that is burnt to provide money to the dead or to gods/goddesses (Jordan 1972, 5). On this occasion, worshippers burned golden spirit-money (gua-gim 刈金 and hok-gim 福金) to the temple’s goddess and silver spirit-money (ging-i 經衣 and ghin-zua 銀紙) to the adopted maiden-spirits.
During the afternoon’s communal worship I chatted with some participants. Mr Ziu, a local politician in his sixties, told me that the Sam-giap maiden-temple had been rebuilt after the temple’s goddess appeared to a village woman, by the name of O-hior 芋葉, in a dream. The temple goddess complained that the temple was too small. O-hior began seeking donations for the rebuilding of the temple in 1966. During this period many villagers had seen the temple’s maiden-spirits in the form of young and pretty ladies combing their long hair, or washing their clothes by the brook, or chatting with each other. Many of those who witnessed this were taken ill. As such, the rebuilding of the temple was accelerated through the forced collection of funds from each household in the village in 1971. Mr Ziu went on to say that, before its rebuilding, the temple was a tiny shrine, the size of a squatting person, with a wooden spirit-tablet and an incense-burner inside. By 1976, when the new temple had been completed, a statue of the temple’s goddess was erected that was donated by the man who owned the temple goddess’s dowry land at that time.
A family member, Mr Ong in his forties, told me that he came to join the worship, and in particular to offer incense, food and spirit-money to his eldest sister who died unmarried at the age of 13, about 40 years before. He never met her since she had died before he was born. Mr Ong said that about 20 years before, his mother was terribly ill. She consulted a spirit-medium, who told her that her illness was caused by her dead daughter whose spirit had been neglected. She then followed the advice of a Daoist practitioner to erect a spirit-tablet to accommodate her daughter’s spirit. She also set up an altar to worship her maiden-daughter in an unused room of their house. Mr Ong added that his mother soon recovered after this had been done. Some time later, a relative of theirs warned them that it was prohibited to house their deceased maiden’s spirit-tablet at home and recommended that they accommodated the spirit-tablet in the Sam-giap maiden-temple. Before ending our talk, Mr Ong described how, before his mother died, she asked him to visit the Sam-giap maiden-temple regularly and offer necessities (food, spirit clothing and spirit money, etc.), to his sister’s spirit, as he was the family’s first son. So, he came to participate in the communal worship annually at the date of the temple’s anniversary festival.
At this point, I wondered whether, apart from the anniversary festival, the temple held any other communal activities. For example, the fifth day of the fourth month (cing-bhing ziat 清明節) is the annual occasion in the Chinese lunar calendar for visiting and sweeping the tombs of ancestors (Burkhardt 1953, 24–26), and the fifteenth day of the seventh month (diong-ghuan ziat 中元節) is the annual occasion for feeding hungry ghosts (Suzuki 1989, 588–595). The answer given by the temple’s custodian, Mrs Sia, was ‘No’.
That evening, I interviewed Mr Dan at his house. I began by asking him why he disposed of the red sachets and the papers into the spirit-money burner. He told me that the information written on the enclosed pieces of paper were reported to the goddess, and the red sachets were purified, so they were of no use any more. They were burnt to send them to the world of spirits, in case the temple’s goddess wanted to review them at some point in the future. I then inquired as to what had been written on the three enclosed pieces of paper. Mr Dan told me that one was a paper talisman. Another concerned the identity of the deceased maiden, including her name, address and horoscope (be-ri 八字). The other was completely covered in magical writing, but also bore the deceased’s identity. I then asked Mr Dan what he had said to the temple’s goddess as he opened each red sachet. He said that he had made a ritual introduction by announcing the name, address, and horoscope of each adopted maiden-spirit to the goddess, hoping that the goddess would be pleased to adopt them. But, he added, every adoption should have been confirmed by the family when they first deposited the red sachets in the temple. This was usually accomplished through divination with a pair of moon blocks (bua bue 卜筊).8 If either side were not happy with the adoption, the people most likely to have trouble were the deceased maidens’ families. I asked him if any details regarding the deceased maiden’s life were inserted in the red sachets. ‘No’, answered Mr Dan. The adopted maiden-spirits’ past remained secret, as their families did not provide this type of information to the temple. Also, it was not necessary to be acquainted with this information, as no matter how shameful their pasts were, the temple was open to all maiden-spirits willing to be adopted by the temple. In any case, Mr Dan was sure that the adopted spirits were all female and unmarried.
Our conversation then moved on to an argument between Mr Dan and his wife over ‘what kind of ash was enclosed in the four red sachets’.9 ‘It is the incense-ash mixed with the cremated bone-ashes of the deceased maidens’, Mrs Dan answered. ‘It is the ash only from burning incense offered to the deceased maidens’, Mr Dan insisted. I asked Mr Dan if any of the deceased’s bone-ashes were contained in the red sachets. His answer was a clear ‘No’. He then turned to his wife, shouting, ‘No one would take their deceased’s bone-ashes to place in this temple. This is not a mass-grave-shrine (dua-bhong-gong 大墓公)!’ In Taiwan, if bones of unidentified dead are discovered they are usually collected and placed in a local tomb-shrine called dua-bhong-gong (Harrell 1974, 195). Mr Dan then turned to me, saying: ‘The ash from burning incense offered to a deceased maiden represent her spirit. Red sachets are also known as incense-ash sachets (hiunn-hue-de 香火袋)’.
In order to discover the procedure for making red sachets, I interviewed some Daoist practitioners who are usually employed by families to sort out problems caused by deceased maidens. According to Master Kihian in Taipei city, red sachets function like spirit-tablets in a simplified form. Furthermore, he said that the poor always use a simpler version of the practices for calling their maiden-spirits home (huan-zu 返主). A Daoist practitioner opens communication with the spirit by burning incense, and conducts the calling-spirit-back practice either at the place where the deceased maiden was buried or around the place where the spirit is thought to be wandering. The maiden-spirit is then brought home in the form of incense-ash (rather than on a spirit-tablet). The family make a red sachet in which the incense-ash and a sheet of paper bearing the identity of the deceased maiden are enclosed. The Daoist practitioner usually adds a talisman with his commands in written form (Thompson 1996, 89–94), which is enclosed with the incense-ash in the red sachet in order to prevent others from being attacked by the maiden-spirit, and to protect the maiden-spirit from being molested by male spirits.10 A temporary altar is then set up to house the maiden-spirit. The family begins to offer their deceased maiden incense and food regularly until the day when accommodation outside the home is found. The maiden-spirit (i.e. the red sachet) is then sent to her new ‘home’.
One year later, Mr Dan introduced me to one of Miss Ng’s (the temple goddess) family members. Mr Ng, who was in his sixties, told me that the goddess of the Sam-giap maiden-temple was his great-great-great-grandfather’s youngest daughter, who was named Bhan-niu 尾娘. However, he could not provide me with any additional details about Bhan-niu’s life, as he had not been told anything by his senior family members. So, he introduced me to his cousin, who was in charge of editing the Ng family genealogy.11 The cousin told me a story he had heard from his senior family members that Bhan-niu died in a fire one chilly night caused by a stove that she used to keep her bed-quilt warm. He then showed me the genealogy and turned to the page of Bhan-niu’s record, saying that Bhan-niu was born in 1813 and died in 1829, aged 17 (Ng 1997, 105). It should be noted that Bhan-niu’s record was not written in the family lineage tree, but in the table of birthdays and death-days of the Ng family ancestors since the 29th generation emigrated to Taiwan (zuan ziu zi hun ri zap gau se zo lai dai au lik dai zo sian sing zut ni dui ziau bior泉州紫雲29世祖來台後歷代祖先生卒年 對照表). A note about Bhan-niu says that she was ‘unmarried’ (bhe cut ge 未出嫁) and is the goddess of ‘the Maiden-Temple’ (go-niu-bhior 姑娘廟) (Ng 1997, 105).
Analysis
A number of issues, in particular, relating to cultural transformation, have emerged from this case study. In his book New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, Ernesto Laclau (1990) attempts to theorize social change, rupture and dislocation, by assuming that no ‘set’ of beliefs and practices are, as it were, complete, and that this incompleteness provides spaces in which other beliefs and practices can emerge:
Let us assume we fully accept the structuralist vision: I am a product of structures; there is nothing in me with a separate substantiality from the discourses making me up; a total determinism governs my actions… But, the question immediately arises: what happens if the structure I am determined by does not manage to constitute itself, if a radical outside—which does not share a common measure or foundation with the inside of the structure—dislocates it? The structure will obviously not be able to determine me, not because I have an essence independent from the structure, but because the structure has failed to constitute itself fully and thus to constitute me as a subject as well. There is nothing in me which was oppressed by the structure or is freed by its dislocation; I am simply thrown up in my condition as a subject because I have not achieved constitution as an object… This means that the subject is partially self-determined. However, as this self-determination is not the expression of what the subject already is but the result of its lack of being instead, self-determination can only proceed through processes of identification. (Laclau 1990, 43–44)
In the Sam-giap maiden-temple, maiden-spirits who escape re-incorporation through ghost marriage come to stand outside ancestral orthopraxy, which never manages to constitute itself as a fully complete structure. Its incompleteness allows for new discursive and physical spaces in which alternative practices and conceptions regarding maiden-death emerge.
The Sam-giap maiden-temple was born in the language of ancestral orthopraxy, and yet, at the same time, this language articulates many contradictions. I have collected three different discourses about the ownership of the temple’s land and the founding of the maiden-temple. It is legally entitled to the person who works on the land. But, the Ng family claims that the land belonged to their family branch Gong-se in Sin-diam. However, the villagers and the temple worshippers believe that it is the maiden-goddess Miss Ng’s land. I am concerned less with the legal status of the land and the family’s discourse than with the practical strategies adopted by the villagers and the temple worshippers. In other words, it is the popular interpretation that I value and privilege. I will hereafter focus my analysis on the versions of the stories that have been worked out by the villagers and worshippers.
According to the villagers and the temple worshippers, the origin of the Sam-giap maiden-temple lies in a piece of land given by the Ng family, and more specifically, according to the elderly man I spoke to under the tree, it lies in a ‘dowry’ in the form of land, so as to meet the demand from their deceased daughter to keep her maiden status and to be worshipped as a maiden-goddess. A ‘dowry’ is ‘a gift, not a right or an inheritance’ (Gates 1996, 124) from a father to his daughter for her wedding. There is, as such, an evident contradiction in the language of response and demand. Critically, the dowry land became the space upon which a temple was built to enshrine Ng Bhan-niu.
However, this response not only generates an alternative space for the dead maiden Bhan-niu, but also simultaneously constitutes a correction to the disordered relationship between her and her living family. Marriage is, of course, the primary means by which a family excludes their daughter from their lineage, and here the dowry land operates to solve the problem of Bhan-niu as a homeless ghost and the threat of pollution to her family.
Normally, dead maidens that appear to their families demand a ‘husband’ and are provided with a ghost marriage (Martin 1991). As a result, they are granted a place on an ancestral lineage in a male line and thus are re-integrated into the patrilineal system. However, the spirit of Bhan-niu wanted to keep her unmarried status and therefore stand outside the ancestral orthodox structure.
Being a maiden, Bhan-niu’s spirit lacked any identity and was situated in a socially marginal position. However, by naming her ma, the villagers attempt to create a recognizable identity for Bhan-niu’s spirit as grandmother, granting her a legitimate position as a female ancestor. As such, disordered tension between the dead maiden and the living villagers is re-configured as relations between a grandmother and her descendants. It is interesting to note that a public relationship with a female ancestor is authorized in the Sam-giap maiden-temple. Here, we witness the inversion of the private relationship with a male ancestor in patrilineage, and its replacement with a public relationship with a female ancestor in a maiden-temple. This echoes Ranajit Guha’s (1994) observation that a fundamental feature of peasant resistance is ‘inversion’.12 An alternative space for Miss Ng emerges in the Sam-giap maiden-temple, and later this space also provides other maiden-spirits with accommodation. However, the discourse of ancestral orthodoxy continues to intrude into this space. For example, Mrs Diunn attributed the Ng family’s decline in fortune to their violation of the taboo on worshipping their unmarried great-great-great-grand-aunt, quoting a folk saying bai go e lu bai lu bhor. The saying uses a pun; go 姑 (paternal aunt) is linked with go 孤 (alone) through phonetic identicality to forcefully imply that worshipping a paternal aunt (bai go 拜姑) would risk ending the family lineage (bai go 拜孤). Popular discourses of this kind reinforce ancestral orthopraxy and the coding of relations between men and women, juniors and seniors, and familiars and strangers.
From this case study, we see many forms of communication, albeit in symbolic and in ritualized form, including nightmares, visions (individual and group), clothing, postures, illness and offerings, and so on. As evidences of haunting and of the severing of reciprocal ties between the living and marginal dead maidens, these led firstly to the construction of the Sam-giap maiden-temple and later to its rebuilding. Here, we witness the maiden-temple’s growing importance; the signs of this are the enlargement from a stone shrine about the size of a squatting person to a brick temple about the size of a greenhouse, and the shift from representing the maiden-goddess with a wooden spirit-tablet to a brightly painted statue. A larger space, then, was created specifically designed to enable the community to establish reciprocal relations with their (shameful) dead maidens.
Yet, these corrective practices—like orthodox ancestor worship—include prohibitions and exclusions. Single, young men are forbidden to visit maiden-temples and to communicate with maiden-spirits. This echoes Stevan Harrell’s observation about the differences of power between the two genders. According to Harrell, ‘women’s fear of men is in a sense open and legitimate. Men’s power to oppress women is a recognised part of the social system. Men’s fear of women, on the other hand, must remain covert. Women’s power is not part of the system; rather women have the power to subvert the system’ (1986, 114). Indeed, as Harrell has claimed, ‘the Chinese male feels somewhat guilty for the oppression of women in his society and at the same time very afraid of the destructive power of females in the kinship system’ (1986, 113–114).
Furthermore, some practices and ideas of ancestor worship have been re-employed to correct or re-order the relations between the living and the dead in the Sam-giap maiden-temple. For instance, the gap-lo ritual is normally employed to integrate a newly dead family member into a family lineage. This is done usually after one year, and involves placing the incense-ash from the burner of the newly dead into the burner of the ancestors. Then, the spirit-tablet of the newly dead is formally housed at the ancestral altar, and the name of the newly dead is formally inscribed on the family collective ancestral tablet.13 Through the gap-lo ritual, the newly dead is provided with a new status as a fully-fledged ancestor and a ‘home’ on an ancestral altar of the family house and a ‘connection’ with a family lineage in the world of the living.
The same practice and idea is re-employed in the Sam-giap temple to incorporate the incense-ash of the newly adopted maiden-spirits into the incense-burner of the temple goddess. However, through the re-employment of the gap-lo ritual, a series of transformations and changes take place. The maidens who die a bio-social death have attained social continuity in the living world. They are provided with a ‘connection’ not with a family lineage, but with the Sam-giap maiden-goddess and the Sam-giap temple worshippers and villagers. As such, a different type of connection emerges in the Sam-giap maiden-temple: the adopted maiden-spirits are connected to the Sam-giap maiden-goddess and the temple worshippers and villagers not because of particular kinship ties, but by virtue of their membership in the Sam-giap maiden-temple and in the Sam-giap community. Here we witness a dissolution of kinship ties, and its replacement with community ties.
Again, through the re-employment of the gap-lo ritual, the maiden-spirits are provided with a ‘home’ not on an ancestral altar of the family house but in the incense-burner of the Sam-giap maiden-temple. The fact that the adopted maiden-spirits’ ashes are mixed with the temple goddess’s ashes implies that the adopted maiden-spirits have some share of the incense offered to the temple goddess. Whenever the temple goddess is worshipped, the adopted maiden-spirits are worshipped as well. As such, a different sense of community emerges in the Sam-giap temple’s incense-burner: unlike lineage community with its emphasis on vertical relations of hierarchy, the focus is on horizontal relations of sharing and equality. Here we witness a dissolution of the hierarchical community of the lineage, and its replacement with an equal community of maidens.
Moreover, unlike in other religious institutions (such as in Buddhist monasteries), the communal worship of maiden-spirits in the Sam-giap maiden-temple takes place on the temple rebuilding anniversary, rather than on the day for visiting ancestors or on the day for feeding ghosts. This suggests that the maiden-spirits adopted by the temple are identified neither as ghosts nor as ancestors, but as a new category—‘the disciples of the maiden-goddess’. Here we witness a disruption of the opposition of ghosts and ancestors, and the generation of an alternative category.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to take this opportunity to thank Glen Dudbridge, Stephan Feuchtwang, and Paul-François Tremlett for their comments and suggestions. Holo-Taiwanese (also known as Hokkien) words and phrases used in this paper are romanized according to the system of Taiwan Pinyin 台灣拼音. The author would like to thank Charles Jhang for his assistance.
NOTES
- The term ‘maidens’ is used to denote ‘unmarried women’, which are usually, but not always, equivalent to virgins as within the Chinese cultural context married women can also be virgins. For example, in the old tradition of little daughter-in-law (sim-bu-ah 媳婦仔) marriages, girls were sometimes adopted as daughters-in-law at very early ages for marriage purposes. They typically remained virgins for several years into their marriages (Chuang 1991). ↩︎
- It is customary for Taiwanese parents to give their daughter a dowry (such as money, jewellery, a house or land) when she is going to marry out of the family (Chen 1985). ↩︎
- Land-reform was a component of Kuomintang government policy from 1949 to 1953. Land and wealth was distributed in Taiwanese society on the principle of equalization of land rights; that is, land was taken from wealthy landlords and powerful institutions and was distributed among tenants (Lumley 1976, 64–75). It should be noted that the Kuomintang’s land-reform policy was initiated to weaken ‘traditional’ structures of power in Taiwan in order to interpolate Kuomintang sympathizers and officials into local power networks. For example, Chiang Kai-Shek and other Kuomintang leaders were Christians who were hostile to the power wielded by traditional religious institutions, such as temples and Buddhist monasteries. This policy resulted in drastic decreases in the landholdings of temples (Jordan 1994, 147), including the Sam-giap maiden-temple. ↩︎
- Another two red sachets were deposited after my third visit and before the day of the temple’s anniversary festival. ↩︎
- Zai-gau 齋教 means to ‘adhere to a vegetarian diet and worship the Buddha as a householder’. One does not leave human society, rather one earns one’s living in the city or village, while adhering to the Buddhist precepts as a layperson (Jones 1999, 14). ↩︎
- The image of the Three Precious Buddhas is represented as a triptych on a folding screen. Sikgamoni 釋迦牟尼 (also known as Śākyamuni) is in the middle, to his left is lorsuhut 藥師佛 (also known as Bhaisajyaguru) and to his right is Amidohut 阿彌陀佛 (also known as Amitabha Buddha) (Ciyi 1988). ↩︎
- There are several Buddhist sūtras applicable to this kind of occasion. The choice of sūtra for chanting depends upon facts such as the manner of death and the mode of payment. For instance, those who die violently (e.g. in a car accident or by suicide) require sūtras with more merit-credits. Sūtra-chanting of this kind involves more people and long periods of chanting and so entails greater expense. ↩︎
- In Taiwan the most common way of communication with divine agencies makes use of bue. A pair of divination blocks consists of two pieces of wood, each cut into the shape of a crescent moon, rounded on one surface and flat on the other. In divination the two blocks are held out upon the two palms, and allowed to drop on the floor. There are three combinations of positions: both blocks might land rounded side downward, both might land flat side downward, or each might land differently. The last combination is called ‘sacred bue’, which is taken to indicate agreement by the spirit with the proposition as a ‘yes’ response. Both of the other combinations indicate failure of the spirit to agree, although the degree of disagreement is open to dispute (Jordan 1972, 61–62). ↩︎
- According to Wolf, maiden-spirits are ‘represented’ by ashes (1974b, 149). However, it is not clear what the ashes are (e.g. whether they are human ashes or incense ashes), where these ashes are located in the temple, nor how this fact correlates with the widely held belief among Chinese-in-Taiwan that a deceased maiden’s spirit abides upon the object that represents her. ↩︎
- For Chinese, the world of the dead is coterminous with the world of the living. In the world of the living, people are not all equal, and powerful men oppress weak women; in the world of the dead, male spirits oppress female spirits. One instance of this is the Grandmother Maiden Li (Li Niu-ma 李娘媽) of Kun-san Temple 崑山寺, in Ziam-suann Village 尖山村, Ian-zau Township 燕巢鄉, Gor-hiong County 高雄縣. At the time I visited the temple in August and September 1997, the temple was empty except for the incense-burner of Grandmother Maiden Li. The statue representing her had been lodged in another temple of Huat-zu Grandfather 法主公 in the same territory. I was told by the custodian of Kun-san temple that 10 years ago, Huat-zu Grandfather spoke through his spirit-medium, saying that his nominal older sister, Grandmother Maiden Li, would like to stay with him. As she lived alone in a temple situated on a mountain, male spirits often intruded upon her temple to harass her. Such male spirits were, according to the custodian, Taiwanese men who had been killed by Japanese soldiers or former Japanese soldiers who had been killed during the war. Their bodies were not attended to, and so their spirits were thought to be wandering around. ↩︎
- In Chinese society, genealogy is the tracing and creating of links between individuals and lineage groups in such a way as to arrange them in a coherent framework in accordance with accepted principles of patrilineal descent (Freedman 1966, 42). ↩︎
- In Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, Guha draws upon a number of accounts that detail subaltern ‘inversion’ (1994, 75) of elite symbols and artefacts, and argues that inversion was an essential feature of peasant insurgency in British Colonial India. ↩︎
- For more details about the gap-lo ritual in Taiwan, see Thompson (1988, 90) and Suzuki (1989, 342); and elsewhere in China, for example, in Hebei province, see Naquin (1988, 44–45). ↩︎
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Fang-Long Shih (author to whom correspondence should be addressed), Taiwan Culture Research Programme, Asia Research Centre, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK. E-mail: f.shih@lse.ac.uk