Abstract
This paper explores the challenge of spirit mediums to the secular project in China and Singapore. Different modes of human flourishing (Taylor in A Secular Age, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2007) provided by Neo-Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism are examined in the context of the rise of relatively autonomous village governance in late Imperial China. These practices were challenged by spirit possession, which took place in temples at the center of village life. These tensions have continued in the age of modern secular states. In many parts of rural China, spirit mediums still contest the secular project, and in Singapore, spirit mediums have even more space to innovate in a multi-cultural urban context, generating new and hybrid ritual forms that exceed secular as well as cultural frames.
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Notes
- 1.
Yuzo Mizoguchi, “China as Method,” in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 17, no. 4 (2017) (special issue), For an overview of Mizoguchi’s research see Viren Murthy and Sun Ge, “Introduction: The “Vectors” of Chinese History, ”Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 17, no. 4 (January 2017). On imperial rule and ritual form see also Zito (1977).
- 2.
There is a long tradition in southeast China of the sale of land, and even the division of land ownership into surface rights (which can be sublet), tenant rights and subsurface landowner rights, all with different tax implications. Nonetheless there were customary limits on the sale of village land, with conditions set by lineages and village temples (for additional information see Zheng 2001).
- 3.
Casanova (1980: 7) analyzes secularization theory as being made up of three distinct and not necessarily linked processes: (1) secularization as a differentiation of the secular spheres (the state, capitalism, science) from religious institutions and norms; (2) secularization as a decline of religious beliefs and practices; and (3) secularization as a marginalization of religion to a privatized sphere. I will argue below that in some parts of contemporary rural China, village temples have regained many of their earlier roles and functions.
- 4.
De Groot (1886, 1910) described local communal religion in Fujian as “animist.” He drew parallels with traditions of spirit possession across Southeast Asia. His account linked Daoist ritual masters closely to spirit mediums. The field of Daoist studies has evolved since the 1980s largely through discussions of the nature of this relationship, and the historical transformations of Daoism in relation to bloody sacrifice and spirit possession within popular worship. Early Daoists rejected these practices, but by the Song new traditions of Daoist exorcism marked new interactions with local cults. This led to the complex interactions between Daoist masters (daoshi or shigong), local ritual specialists (fashi), and spirit mediums (wu, jitong) found by ethnographers from DeGroot to the present day.
- 5.
Kenneth M. Morrison, “Animism and a Proposal for a Post-Cartesian Anthropology,” in The Handbook of Contemporary Animism, ed. D. Harvey (London: Routledge, 2014), 39. For another perspective, see David Graeber, “Radical Alterity Is Just Another Way of Saying Reality: A Reply to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro,” HAU: Journal of Ethnogrraphy 5, no. 2 (2015): 1–41. This essay poses a serious challenge to some of the claims of the ontological turn, from a realist perspective. There is a large literature on spirit possession in India and elsewhere, which I am not able to reference here for reasons of space. See the work of Thomas Csordas and Frederick Smith, among others.
- 6.
Gilles Deleuze outlines a series of three syntheses (connective, disjunctive, and conjunctive) in Difference and Repetition, Chapter 4, Ideas and the Synthesis of Difference, trans. P. Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) (originally published by PUF, Paris, 1968). Thomas Lamarre has applied these concepts to the study of animation in a forthcoming essay (personal communication).
- 7.
Vincent Goossaert and David Palmer, The Religious Question in Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), compares various kinds of “authoritarian secularization” in Communist countries.
- 8.
Lee Dean Wang Koon, “The Ah Peh Party: Religious Merriment and Homophilous Networks,” conference paper, Comparative Approaches to Inter-Asian Religious and Trade Networks, ARI, NUS, March 3–4, 2016.
- 9.
Daniel Goh, “In the Place of Ritual: Global City, Sacred Space, and the Gunyin Temple in Singapore,” in Handbook of Religion and the Asian City: Aspiration and Urbanization in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Peter van der Veer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 21–36. References to the “as-if” world of ritual order and the mending of a broken world are to A. Seligman, et al., Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on Sincerity and Its Limitations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
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Dean, K. (2019). Spirit Mediums and Secular–Religious Divides in Singapore. In: Dean, K., van der Veer, P. (eds) The Secular in South, East, and Southeast Asia. Global Diversities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89369-3_4
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