The Limits to Cultural Domination

Abstract

Attempts to forge a single, shared meaning fail when no strong social relations of interpretation support them. Only the enormous and difficult social transformation of the Taiping movement bolstered and energized the creation of their new ideology. In the absence of any comparable organization for most of Chinese popular religion, the maintenance of its free space against the propagation of explicit, unified interpretations should be no surprise. The one social organization large and powerful enough to exert an effective influence was the state. While Guangxi in the 1840s had a feeble and faltering state, Taiwan since World War II has had a powerful and intrusive one, especially concerned with control over ideas. That state has often tried to influence religious interpretation, yet it never succeeded, even at its most authoritarian. The power of indeterminate free space like the Eighteen Lords temple allowed it to digest attempts at control, and placed strict limits on the possibility of cultural domination. The temple illuminates the weakness of even a strong state, which cannot construct tight organizations of interpretive control everywhere at once.