Fang-Long Shih

Generation of a new space: A maiden temple in the Chinese religious culture of Taiwan

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.

Generating power in Taiwan: Nuclear, political and religious power

This paper addresses how religion is playing an increasingly important role in empowering anti-nuclear protests at Gongliao in Taiwan. It begins by describing how the anti-nuclear movement in Taiwan was originally dependant on the opposition political party, and then examines how growing disaffection with party politics at Gongliao has resulted in a local temple dedicated to the goddess Mazu coming to the forefront of the struggle. This paper frames the dispute as a struggle between three different ways of generating power (and implicitly, of losing power): first, the generation of nuclear power by bureaucrats and scientists working through the industrial sector; second, the generation of political power by opposition politicians and elite campaigners; and third, the generation of religious power by people rooted in local communities, creating an alliance between religious power and secular protest.

Chinese 'bad death' practices in Taiwan: maidens and modernity

Abstract This article interrogates so-called ‘bad death’ rituals and their cultural implications in the Chinese patrilineal society of Taiwan. It begins by outlining the significant features of ‘good death’ rituals through which the discontinuity of biological death is transformed into the social continuity of being an ancestor. Importantly, only those among the dead with male heirs are entitled to become ancestors. The article then looks at ‘bad death’ practices relating to males who die in childhood or who die before they marry, with a focus on the rituals through which they are re-incorporated into their family lines and are granted ancestral status. However, according to ancestral orthopraxy, females who die unmarried have no place in a family line or on an ancestral altar, and thus are excluded from the social practices of remembering that ancestor worship enshrines. This paper in particular analyses the cultural significance of social practices relating to maiden death in two contexts: examining how people deal with dead maidens, firstly, in pre-modern and rural Taiwan in relation to Daoist practices and, secondly, in modern and urban Taiwan in relation to Buddhist practices. It concludes by arguing that the analysis of maiden death requires a contextualisation of those practices within wider processes of societal modernisation.

Addressing injustice through state, local culture and global civil society: the white terror incidents in Taiwan

This chapter examines the issue of injustice in a Confucian society in Northeast Asia. It uses examples from the White Terror in Taiwan, focusing on three levels at which the demand for justice has been articulated, both during and after the period of the terror: firstly, at the level of the state through political calculation and bureaucratic procedures; secondly, at the level of local culture and through the idioms of religion; and finally, at the level of global civil society. These three levels do not constitute a unified demand for justice nor, indeed, do they offer a coherent response to the problem of injustice. Instead, they reveal fractures and discontinuities through which ideas of justice and injustice are refracted. I consider the Luku1 incident of 1952–53 and the Kaohsiung incident of 1979, which respectively mark the beginning and the end of the Terror. I conducted my field research on Luku, including interviews with surviving victims and their family members, between 2004 and 2005.