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Canada •

Gcnder Perl'ormatlvity and Ritual Performance in South-east China

Samantha Anderson Department of East Asian Studies McGillUniversity, Montreal March 1996

A thesls submitted ta the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Master's of Arts

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ABSTRACf

• This thesis explores issues of subjectivity and gender around ri tuaI activity in Xianyou county, Fujian Province, China. Il focuses on three groups of women: Buddhist nuns, mediums and village women engaged in the ritual caretaking of their families. Il also examines a :.pirit writing text from the late Qing dynasty (1644-1911). It is suggested that subject positions and kin positions are to a certain extent coextensive and that participation in certain riluals is what constitutes one as a gendered sut.ject (as a "woman") and in certain kin roles (as a wife, daughter-in-Iaw, etc.) Other gendered subject positions (such as that of melancholic lover) are explored in an attempt to complicate any simple determinism that might accompany to easy a correspondence of kin position with sex role.

ABSTRAIT

Cette thèse se veut une exploration de la question de la subjectivité et du genre entourant les activités rituelles dans le canton de Xianyou, Province de Fujian, Chine. L'etude porte sur trois groupes de femmes: des religieuses Bouddhistes, des mediums et de villageoises engagées dans les soins rituel donnés à leur famille. Un texte d'écriture spirituelle datant de la dynastie des Qing (1644-1911) est aussi examiné.

• ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

• So many people have helpcld me in so many ways 1 hardly know where 10 begin. Thank you especially to Professor Kenneth Dean who inlroduced me to the study of the religions of China, employed me, encouraged me to take the time to do a year of fieldwork even at the Master's level, helped me make contacts and find a situation in Fujian where 1 could do this kind of research, read my thesis and helped with the translation of the piece of spirit writing that forms the substance of my final chapter. Thank you to Professor Zheng Zhenman for taking me around Xianyou, introducing me to innumerable people who helped with my work, spending hours patiently explaining to me in simple Chinese so that 1 could understand about local culture in Xianyou, ritual practise, the role of the temple in a community etc. and even for occasionally acting as my interpreter. Thank you to Trish Salah who spent innumerable hours agonizing with me over theoretical issues and who read, reread and offered criticism on every version of this thesis. 1 would also like to acknowledge the assistance of the Religious Affairs Bureau of Xianyou county, and in particular the help of Ms Huang Ying who acted as my interpreter and took many hours off work to accompagny me to various temples and nunneries. Many other people have helped me in thinking through various issues that impinged on my work and in more material • ways through jobs, food and comfort that helped me keep body jji

and sOlll together over the last few years. So thank you to John Anderson, Amar Bahadoorsingh, Chen Qiuming, David Reid, • François Dandumnt, Grace Fong, Victor Hoari (for giving me a copy of Ecstatic Reli~ion), Constance Macintosh, Brian Noblc, Roopa Nair, Michael Szonyi, Elyse Tera, David Van Fraasen, Jim Wilcox, Allison Wolf, Zheng Aiping and finally to my parents, Joan Anderson and Gary Anderson who sent me to China in the first place and then didn't freak out when 1 didn't come back. Finally 1 would Iike to acknowledge financial support from McGiIl University in the form of two major fellowships, and to the Canada-China Exchange Programme for a scholarship to study in China for a year.

Samantha Anderson Montreal, March 1996.

• iv • TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Introduction p.1

2. Gender Performativity and the patriline: domestic ritual at Spring Festival... p. 18

3. Abject in the field of dreams: contamination in Xianyou nunneries p. 30

4. Mediums and anthropology: (dis)possessing a binary...... p. 51

5. Possession and melancholia: the poetry of Huo Buyun...... p. 72

• 1

One: Introduction

• From September 1993 to July 1994 1 was a history student at Xiamen University in Fujian Province, in south-east China. At that time 1 conducted neldwork in Xianyou county in the Minzhong region of Fujian Province. As 1 was unable to get permission from the government to stay in any one place for a long period, 1 ended up traveling al1 over the Xianyou plain and even occasional1y into the remote mountainous regions. 1 visited innumerable temples, attended numerous ceremonies, saw countless operas (which 1 have now developed a taste for) embarrassed myself with my ignorance about Chinese religion and was taught an enormous amount about China and Chinese religion by ail kinds of people: Buddhist nuns, intellectuals, village women, mediums, fortune-tel1ers, temple headmen, advertising agents, and the list goes on. When 1 began my fieldwork 1 possessed only a vague notion of my research goals beyond the fact that 1 was interested in the ri tuai practices of women. Of course, 1 soon discovered that women engaged in a vast array of ritual activities, and they had various roles to play: as nuns; as mediums; as members of the

Three-in-one religion; 1 as participants in village level cult activities, such as youxian pilgrimages and festivals; as

lThe Threc-in-one (Sanyi liao) was founded by Iiteratus Lin Zhao'en (1517 98) in an effort to popularize Confucianism by combining it with Chan Buddhist thought and Taoist meditational practises. See Berling (1980) for an account of Lin Zhao'en's Iife and thought and Dean (forihcoming) for a discussion of ihe tradition since ihe lime of Lin Zhao'en. There are over • 1000 Thrce-in-one temples in ihe Xinghua region today. 2

representatives of their families in hOllsehold and anceSfor worship. Il seemed obviolls that women were much more active • than men in all aspects of religious life in which they couId participate (women, of course, cannot become Taoist priests). 1 was very confused that this was not readily apparent to everyol1e else as weIl. Attending a ritual such as a pudu (universal salvation of souls) in a Three-in-one temple. 1 observed that excepting the ritual specialists, the only participants were women. Wanting to chart the particular requirements that religious activities made on women, 1 asked why only women were in the congregation? only gradually became accustomed to the response the question received: a flat denial that this was the case. 1 only began to

understand this response when 1 realized that what WllS meant was that no rules prevent men l'rom participating. though they normally do not. ln thinking about how to bring this extremely diverse body of material together in something more than a generalized "this is what women do". 1 also felt the need to attend to recent feminist construals of "woman" as an unstable category. an assemblage of various discursive positions. with disparate and often contradictory histories and meanings. Obviously 1 would have to discuss what 1 meant when J talked about "women's" ritual activity, and about how the category "woman" is produced. and what that means, specifically in respect to Wcsterners productions of "Chinese women". Finally, in regards to my own fieldwork, • how might 1 suggest that ritultl activity is one of the key ways in 3

which gender identity is produced and reproducChinese Communist Party in turn rejected this term as westernized and bourgeois and readopted fünu, but this use of the term had more in common with "...other modern state categories, like worker (gongren) and youth (qingnian) and proletariat (wuchanjieji)."(Barlow, 254) Furthermore, the Fulian or Women's Federation "...has sustained funü and so ensured that gender inscription remained a province of the state." (Barlow, 254) Relying heavily on Chen Hongmou's theories2 on the education of women, she shows how traditional Chinese conceptions of "woman" were not essentializing3 and that the equation of the

2Chcn Hongmou (1696-1771) was a Qing dynasty Iiteratus who advocated education for women as a way of promotfng virtue and making them beuer wives and mothers. Sec Handlin (1975, 36-38) 3Glven the protracled discussion and critique of essentialism which has informed, even ovcrwhelmed, contemporary feminist, anthropological, literary and philosophical discourses (to name but a few) it hardly seems necessary (or possible) to index ail the relevent accounts, but for sorne motivated but intelligent caricatures see Butler (1992) and Haraway (1991, • chapter 8) 4

sexcd body and gender arises specifically in Ihis cenlury, parlicularly in CCP discourse. Barlow lies Ihe developmenl of Ihe • concept of funü as physiological difference 10 Ihe Slale's conflalion of production and reproduction. Thal is, Ihe Parly's implementation of educational programo for village women focusing mainI y on the scienlific, safe and healthy produclion of children installed reproduction as labour and slale's business. (276) This, in tum, constituted the gendered identity category of woman around reproduction and in relation to the slale rather than through the multiple kin identities of daughter-in-law, wife, mother etc. Not incidentally, the production of "women" as a group in the service of the state had the effect of eroding Ihe ideological base for a primary loyalty to the family. (Though, admittedly in the earlier formation women served the state by serving their husbands and parenls-in-law.) She suggests that even though the CCP was producing an ideology of gender thal was binary and based on physiology, it did not produce the binary as hierarchical or as descriptive of personality, instead leaving the class framework to provide the explanation for character and personality. (277) That is, women and men were differentiated only in terms of physiology, and not in terms of intelligence, morality or other such categories. ft is only in the post-Mao era that a reformulation of nüxing is being produced not only as physiologically distinct but also as naturally inferior because of her biology.4(277)

4This may be true at the levcl of policy or intcllcctual work; howcvcr, as • Margery Wolf points out in Reyolutiop Posllloped, womcn's infcrior biology 5

Barlow's discussion of gender identities in China as constituted at the macropolitical level has had interesting • implications to me for thinking about how performing rituals is a way of perfol'ming gender in Xianyou. One question that might be asked is if Barlow's categories are applicable, in practice; in Xianyou, is woman conceived of as funü or nüxing, or is there no "woman" but a proliferation of kin categories that precluded a unified and essential womanhood? Following Foulcault's remarks on the overlap of differing regimes of sexuality and alliance and their attendant opportunities for identity the answer seems obvious: that these categories exist simultaneously in a state of ongoing negotiation. Il is her discussion of kinship categories however that 1 wish to employ in talking about women's rituaI activities. Women's engagement in ritual life is largely circumscribed outside their l'oIes as representatives of their families; visiting temples, mediums or performing household rituals on behalf of theil' parents, their children, born already or not, their parents-in-Iaw, their husbands. Barlow cites Elizabeth Cowie's argument that kinship was not a system of exchange but "a production line for subjectivities". It is "in the family-as the effect of kinship structures- that women as women are produced." (Cowie, in Barlow~ 256) She relies heavily on Chen Hongmou's models of proper female behaviour; a

was frequently slted as a reason for awarding fewer work points or requiring women to engage in backbreaking labour in the fields because they were no'. "strong" enough to drive a tractor. (Wolf. 1985. p.83-86. 96· • Ill, passim) 6

formulation of women's identities taking as foundational kinship • ties rather than an inhering gender core: Chen Hongmou's definition of nü, fu, and mu makes it clear that while (good) women in the jia did effect social relations outside the family, no position existed for f.2male persons (or male persons, for that matter) outside the jia's boundaries. (Barlow, 259)

Barlow also links the production of gender identities to ritual, in a broad sense of the term:

Li- behaviours, rituals, or normative manners- were what, for the most part, protocol consisted of; they provided guidance for appropriate, proper, good, and efficacious self-presentation. Prescribed, normative behaviour and gendered experience were inextricable (Chen, n.cl.., 9b). (Barlow, 260) 5

1 do not wish to suggest that the construction of gender identity in rural Xianyou is sorne sort of continuation of late Imperial attitudes heId by Chen Hongmou or an unproblematic resurgence of those beliefs. The detailed rules that existed for the correct behaviour of persons occupying those kin positions are certainly not followed today, nor is it Iikely that the majority of people in Chen's time followed them. Also, in post-Mao China there is simply a wider scope for women to exist outside of their kin positions as friends, workers, students or other possible

SRitual is also one of these terms around which there is an overwhelming amount of discussion. 1 have been using the term loosely to refer to religious rites or ceremonies (presenting incense or food offerings to gods. reciling sutras, etc.). 1 have concenlrated far more on the fact of participation in a given rile rather than on the parliculars of the rite itself, thus allowing for a certain slippage betwecn ri tuai as rite and ritual as protocol, which may be productive in understanding the mu tuai implications of religious performance and other/broader sociat praclises in conslituling "women". See Catherine Bell (1992) for a discussion of • thcories of rituaJ. 7

subject positions. Howe'/er, in the case of women who are not ritual specialists, particularly in the realm of family and Iineage • ritual, they act most fre9uently as representatives of their families. 6 Butier's intervention should be seen first in the context of the ongoing debates within feminist and philosophical circles over epistemic foundations of 'gender', 'sex' and 'desire'. In Gender Trouble she sketches sorne recent histories of these categories of identity in feminist and philosophical discourse. Butler underlines and adds to the critiques of the implication of these discourses in the maintenance of phallogocentrism and compulsory heterosexuaIity. Her critique takes the form of an investigation into those operations which maintain these identity categories as originary, as causes, rather than effects, and thus as naturaI. In an aUernpt to disrupt these categories and open up the possibilities of a proliferation of identities (exceeding a binary framing of gender qua masculine/feminine) she puts forward a performative theory of gender acts:

In what senses, then, is gender an act? As in other ritual social dramas, the action of gender requires a performance that is repeated. This repetition is at once a reenactment and reexperiencing of a set of meanings already socially established; and it is the mundane and ritualized form of their legitimation. Although there are individual bodies that enact these significations by becoming stylized into gendered modes, this "action" is a public action. There are temporal and collective dimensions to these actions, and their public character is not inconsequentialj indeed, the performance is effected with the strategie aim of maintaining gender within its binary frame- an aim that cannot be attributed to a subject, but,

6Thanks 10 Professor Zheng Zhenman for firsl emphasizing Ibis poinl 10 • me. 8

rather, must be understood to found and eonsolidate the subject. • (1990,140) Butler rejects the idea of a prior subject upon which gender is inscribed, maintaining, "That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontologieal statlls apart from the variolls acts which constitute its reality." (1990, 136) There is in fact no "one" who performs her gender but rather "one" is constituted as a "her" through gendering discourses. In Bodies That Matter, Butler moves both in the direction of

an attack upon the reinstallation l:f foundational thinking at the site of the materiality of the body and towards a critique of the radical voluntarist reading of her earlier work. One of the popular reactions to Gender Trouble and Butler's formulation of gender as a series of performative acts, was the reduction of gender to drag. That is to say many understood Butler to be proposing that one could wear gender like a costume, taking it on and off, or

changing one gender construction for anothel', in a kind of free for-ail of agency and self-determination. (Butler, 1994 ; 1993, 230f.) This "voluntarist" reading fueled the critique of Butler's work for not taking into account the materiality of the body, of the "facts" of sexual difference. Butler uses the Derridean notions of iteration and citation (developed in readings of the speech act theory of l.L. Austin) to reiterate her theory of performative gender acts through the model of the linguistic performative. Linguistic performatives are to be understood as those speech acts which constitute an • action or object through its utterance: "Let there he light!" (13). 9

ln Austin's favourite example a judge brings into being a marriage by saying. "1 now pronounce you husband and wife." (224) • Performatives are thus authoritative speech acts, and it is suggested that the phenomenon is brought into being by the will (where productive authority seems to reside) of the subject performing the act (God. the judge). (13) However. Derrida points out that the performative succeeds precisely because it is an ilerable utterance, a citation of the conventions of authority. (In fact ail language may be said to have this status in the sense that any language use is a citation of the authority of language.) The judge enacts a marriage because she cites the law which allows her to name a marriage into existence and ".. .it is the power of this citation that gives the performative its binding or conferring power." (1993.225) Thus, it is not by virtue of an individual's will that a phenomenon is brought into being. nor is an 'act' a theatrical performance; il is only theatrical in that its historicity has been obscured: (12) "...every act is itself a recitation, the citation of a prior chain of acts which are implied in a present act and which perpetually drain any "present" act of ils presentness," (1993, 244) Butler is insistent in arguing the enforced and constrained nature of performativity: "Performativity is neither free play nor theatrical self-presentation; nor can it be simply equated with performance. Moreover, constraint is not necessarily that which sets a limit to performativity; constraint is. rather. that which impels and sustains performativity," (1993.95) Gender is then a • regulated citation of previous acts. "...a process of iterability. a 10

regularized and constrained repetition of norms." (1993, 95). Butler relies on Lacan's formulation of sex as "...a symbolic • position that one assumes under the threat of punishment , that is, a position one is constrained to assume, where those constraints are operative in the very structure of language and, hence, in the constitutive relations of cultural life." (96) This reformulation of the Lacanian model of the assumption of sexed subjectivity suggests not that subjects choose sexes but that in order to be a subject one is compelled to assume a culturally intelligible gender (12):

To the extent that the naming of the "girl" is transitive, that is, initiates the process by which a certain "girling" is compelled, the term or, rather, its symbolic power, governs the formation of a corporeally enacted femininity that never fully approximates the norm. This is a "girl,' however, who is compelled to "cite" the norm in order to qualify and remain a viable subject. Femininity is thus not the product of a choice, but the forcible citation of a norm, one whose complex historicity is indissociable from relations of discipline, regulation, punishment. Indeed, there is no "one" who takes on a gender norm. On the contrary, this citation of the gender norm is necessary in order to qualify as a "one," to become viable as a "one," where subject-formation is dependent on the prior operation of legitimating gender norms. (1993, 232)

Butler's dependence upon Lacanian models does occasionally seem to risk reinscribing an absolute limit or boundary to the domain of thinkable subjects-- this is however precisely the type of production she is attempting to contest and unsettle. She is successful in as much as she recasts the Symbolic as an imaginary or phantasmatic production continuously in the process of reproducing itself, imperfectly. (97) This reproduction or • recitation of normative genders and bodies is precisely the 1 1

condition for the assumption of any sexed position but it is an • ambivalent condition, Le. its valences are al ways various and not cntirely predictable. Additionally the fact that the Law of the Pather must constantly be reiterated, eternally returns as the "lInwanted" evidence of a failure in constituting the perfectly sexed subject. It is important to understand that Butler is not making a "merely theoretical" point in her critique of voluntarist readings of gender performance. What these readings consistently omi t is the Iived trauma of those inhabiting socially unviable, or abjected bodies. The positive articulation of norms which engender a sllbject is necessarily predicated upon constitutive exclusions and disavowals, the production of a Iimit, a boundary, an outside: "...the constitutive outside means that identity always requires precisely that which it cannot abide." (188) Because the subject is sustained through a (re)iterative performativity, the subject is never finally and fully formed. The excluded outside must be repeatedly excluded, a constant reminder of the failure to perfectly constitute a coherent identity: "The normative force of performativity- its power to establish what qualifies as "being" works not only through reiteration, but through exclusion as weil. And in the case of bodies, those exclusions haunt signification as its abject borders or as that which is strictly foreclosed: the unlivable, the nonnarrativizable, the traumatic." (188) The heterosexual imperative constitutes subjects in a binary gender • frame as straight men and women; at tht: same time a domain of 12

abject beings is constituted, both the precondition for and the • unspeakable other to the domain of the subject. The abject designates here precisely those "unlivable" and "uninhabitable" zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under the sign of the "unlivable" is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject. This zone of uninhabitability will constitute the defining limit of the subject's domain; it will constitute that site of dreaded identification against which- and by virtue of which- the domain of the subject will circumscribe its own daim to autonomy and to life. In this sense, then, the subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constitutive outside to the subject, and abjected outside, which is, after ail, "inside" the subject as its own founding repudiation. (3)

As 1 mentioned earlier, Butler is engaged in a critique of a certain impasse in feminist and philosophical articulations of the essentialist/constructivist debate. Hel' intervention contests the reinstallation of foundationalist thinking atthe site of the materiality of the body; Le., in the objection that at sorne point the body cannot be reduced to discourse. (If 1 hit you it hurts, doesn't it?) She objects to the popular notion that if something is constructed then it is somehow free, unfixed, but at the same time is also wary of conserving constitutive constraints in such a way as to recapitulate an (essentialist) social determinism. In the sex/gender divide, sex is that which has no value waiting for the mark of gender to render it intelligible. But sex also has its histories, and to allow it only to have value when it "assumes ifs social characteristics as gender". renders sex as inaccessible except through its cultural construction, .....a fiction ...retroactively • installed at a prelinguistic site to which there is no direct access." 13

(1993,5) She objects to nHowing sex to disappear this way, asking • "... if "sex" is a fiction, it is one within whose necessities we live, without which life itself wou Id be unthinkable." (1993,6) However, to concede the "fact" of sex is not to leave it unquestioned: "to "concede" the undeniability of "sex" or its "materiality" is al ways to concede sorne version of "sex," sorne formation of "materiality."" (1993,10) If sorne part of "sex" is not produced discursively, is "unconstructed", then what is constructed and what is unconstructed must be delimited, defined, demarked, constructed. In her (Foulcaultian) reformulation, the materiality of bodies is "the recasting of the matter of bodies as the effect of a dynamic of power, such that the matter of bodies will be indissociable from the regulatory norms that govern their materialization and the signification of those material effects;" (1993.2) ln thinking through how the subject position of woman is assumed in rural Xianyou, it is important to return to Barlow's argument that subject positions and kin positions are coextensive in traditional China. While 1 think that possible identities now exceed possible kin positions. as 1 mentioned before in terms of ritual activity. most women act as representatives of their families. This is frequently true for rituai activities which are in sorne sense optional. It is especially true. however, for those rituals in which it is a woman's responsibility to participate; in sorne sense her participation is that which constitutes her as a woman. The rituals 1 will focus on are those that take place at • Spring Festival and include sorne that ritually reproduce the 14

patriline. Il is important, 1 think, to see the connections between • the constitution of the identity of woman and the reproduction of the patriline. ln Butler's work it is primarily homosexuals who inhabit the domain of the abject, though she recognizes that race and racism, for instance, function as constituting discourses through the deployment of strategies of abjection. In my discussion 1 shift the locus of abjection from the homosexual body to the nonreproductive body. Buddhist nuns, as unreproductive bodies, are routinely cast as abject. They are not constituted as daughters-in law, wives, mothers, that is, as subjects, and are hence the unthinkable, the excluded, the unlivable.7 Not only are nuns in themselves the abject of the "proper" woman, the nunnery may be

7Setting aside the problems of categorizing certain acts, behaviour, or desires as homosexual in a culture where that category certainly does not exist in the same way that it exists here 1 am not qualified to comment on the presence of "Iesbian" behaviour in the nunneries or in Xianyou in general. 1 never came across any; the only charge of improper behaviour leveled against a nunnery, of which 1 was aware in the course of my fieldwork, was that a nun had built a house for her father adjoining the nunnery because he had no other children to take care of him. There were bad relations between the village and this man because he, a strict Buddhist, insulted the local gods and refused to participatc in festivals at the local temple. As the village had provided the land on which his house was built, it was felt that it was a bit much that he disparage the local popular cuits. It was felt that the situation of the nunncry was not quite proper, as men are not supposed to live within its walls. Interestingly enough, in Canada, casual conversations about my researeh in nunneries invariably feature someone wanting to know if the nuns were doing il, so to speak. A heterosexual/ homosexual binary is in strict force. These questions are usually asked by people who are engaged in thinking about gender and sexuality, who do not' mean to be insulting; rather they seem to be hoping for sorne utopia'l lesbian community. There does seem to be however an assumption that if women live without men, then it must mean they are lesbian. Even less than whether or not certain people engage in certain sex acts can 1 comment on trajectories of desire. It is however interesting that while people here are wiliing to accept that the nuns will adhere to their vows of not killing, not drinking, daily sutra reeitation ete., there seems to he an automatie assumption that a vow of • eelibacy will be disregarded. 15

conceived of as playing a disavowed but constitutive role in the production of the patriline. ft is the most improper of families, • consisting only of women and girls, not fathers and sons, the key members of the patriline. ft also absorbs the rejects of the patriline, those things which show the patriline to be imperfect in reproducing and maintaining itself. These "imperfections" include the dead who cannot be worshipped properly by the patriline because they were unmarried girls, or Buddhist. The most striking imperfections are those bodies in which the patriline Iiterally fails to reproduce itself: unwanted daughters. Given the restrictions imposed by the state on reproduction in present day China, the patriline is facing a serious crisis. Every failure to produce a son is more acute because of the few chances one gets for giving birth. Absorption of unwanted girls by nunneries is a remarkable strategy for ensuring sons and avoiding state censure. What must also be addressed is the nuns' refusai of their status as abject, in their own spiritually superior position to lay people and to non-Buddhists, as well as a certain belief that although their Iife is not suited to everyone, it is a better Iife than that of the average village woman. The third group of women 1 will look at are mediums (if two can be called a group). 1 add them because in a sense they are the unthinkable of my argument. They did not choose their Iifestyle, but were chosen by the gods as mouthpieces. They both have families, although one lives apart from her family now. Their ritual life is not however centered around their family. They do • not act as supplicants. representatives of their families. but as 1 6

ritual specil1lists, intermediaries between their gods and the • people who come to them with problems. Also, sorne of the Iiterature on female mediums in China has suggested that they are part of the dregs of society, the despised, the abjected. (PoUer, 1974) My impression was however of women who were held in high regard, with spiritual and economic power, not the unthinkable, the nonnarrativizable, but not "ordinary" women either. They were performing a particular type of femininity, however, in that women were considered to be much better mediums than men.S (The unthinkable then, of a masculinist hegemonic imaginary self obsessed with its own imaginary hegemony.) Finally, 1 examine a piece of spirit writing from the late Qing that offers an alternative view of gendered subjectivity. It may seem odd to add a chapter that may at first seem as though it has Iittle to do with the rest of my thesis. Il is a text, from a different time period, and deals with a Iiterate gentry daughter rather than with peasant women from contemporary China. As another fascinating example of a ritual practice by a woman, 1 offer it up in an attempt to further complicate how gender may be constituted through ritual activity in Xianyou. It is important to remember that the constitution of gender identities involves much more than ritual practices, and that religion, rituaI activity etc. of course exceeds this discussion which links it to gendering. My discussion is very localized and frequently fails to take into account other key organizational

Soc this type oC "consulting' mediumism, Ibat is. The mediums controllcd by • Taoist priests who take important roles in festivals are still men. 17

forces involved in religious activity and the family in China. 1 • have touched on the State's one child family poliey and the problems it raises for traditional family at a time when the traditional family is becoming more and more valourized. The status of nuns, mediums, women in families and their ri tuai ac:ivities are ail of course affected by State policy. While nuns are not held in high regard by ordinary people, their status is necessarily complicated by the fact that the State recognizes nunneries as official religious institutions and at least the largest one as a tourist site. Mediums are still considered charlatans and their practice is iIIegal as such; however, government officiais consult them in their spare time. Lineage halls were total1y destroyed during the Cultural Revolution and few in Xianyou have been rebuilt. My discussion of the constitution of gender through ritual activity is one (1 think interesting) way of organizing this material. There are of course many others and many questions raised which this preliminary inquiry into women's ritual Iife cannot answer.

• 18

Two: Gender Performativity and the Patriline: • Domestie Ritual nt Spring F.~stival Gender is eonstituted through performative aets whieh ean be anything from being named "girl" to wearing pink bows or engaging in certain types of housework (deemed appropriate to the gender that is constitutive of that subject). ln Xianyou, participation in certain rituaI activities is also constitutive of gender. It is important to note that it is not so much that womcn must perform certain ritual duties but that il is seen as natural that they do so. Village women spend a good deal of time engaged in ritual activities. Sorne of these activities are not obligatory, such as visiting mediums, or consulting the fortune sticks or moon blocks in a temple. Others are regulated, such as the preparation of food for offerings on festival days. Women and men both attend major festivals such as the birthdays of gods, or processions that take place at Lantern FestivaLI Women tend to be exclusively responsible for offerings to the stove god on the first and fifteenth of each month and to the eurth god (tudigong) on the second and sixteenth of each month. These bimonthly offerings seem to be considered as partaking in

the business of housework. 1 Wil.S repeatedly told Ihat the reason

lIn this particular village women are of key importance in village level festivals. Specifie responsibilities will be rotated amongst women in Ihe community but some older women are so knowledgeable about when and how which gods are supposed to be worshipped that they are consistently consulted by the temple commillcc. and in some ways form part of the defacto leadership of the temple and therefore of the communily. This was not an area of inquiry 1 was able to pursue in depth. but hope to be able 10 • do so in the future. 19

women are responsible for these offerings is that they know what sort of offerings are to be made,2 wou Id prepare the food anyway, • and are at home. Men are frequently away on business and cannot be relied on to make the offcrings.3 A woman makes these offerings on behalf of her family. By fulfilling these ri tuai obligations she is enacting the proper prolOcols of wife and daughter-in-law.4 It is one of the public ways that she performs her gender, through the ri tuai caretaking of her family. At Spring Festival, 1 attended two rituals in a large traditional style house in a village in Fengting zhen. These are two rituals which commonly take place at the time of the New Year: the first was held to worship Heaven and Earth (bai tiandi), the second was held to worship the ancestors (bai zuxian). On the last day of the lunar year, people gather to worship Heaven and Earth. The various branches of the family no longer live under one roof, but on days such as this they return to the hall where the ancestral altar is located. The women prepare tables full of food, including plucked uncooked ducks with paper

2To Tudigong. the offerings arc similar to that made to ghosts: three types of simple food on the same plate including meat. uncooked rice grains and noodles or peanuts. cooked or uncooked. On sr-~cial occasions more iood would be offered. 3 Freedman (1978, 174) suggests that it is men who should be responsible for offerings to the stove god. 1 wonder now if offering this functionalist explanalion for women's ritual responsibilities is a recognition that "t one lime men were in sorne cases be rcsponsible for sorne of this rituai :.ctivity. Intereslingly enough, while presenting sorne of this material to an undergraduate class at McGW, one of the students objected to my characterization of women's ritual caretaking of their families as constitutive of gender by also pointing to this functionalist explanation. This insistence on the commonsensical or functional expIanalion seems the banal form of the familiar argument refusing "analysis". "theory" or "politics". 41 do not know if unmarried daughters perform these rituals in certain • circu mstances. 20

pin-wheels stuck in them, red "turtlc" ricc fioul' cakes, long-life noodles, and fruit. A spat:e is left bctwcen the ancestors' altar, • then a thin tablc with an incense holder is set up. The tables of food are set up in a tine leading away l'rom the altar towards the courtyard, in other words to the "outsidc", towards Heaven and Earth. Only women worshipped the night 1 attended although the head of the family, an old man, instructed some women on how they were supposed to present incense. In fact many of the younger women did not seem to know what they were doing and either asked or were shown what to do by other women. Worshippers were supposed to first kneel, kowtow and place incense in the holder facing the courtyard, then they were to bow once to the ancestc,ïS. As one is supposed to thank Heaven and Earth for favours granted in the past year and ask for favours in the coming year people took varying amounts of time to pray depending on their circumstances. Paper money, white with beautifully colourful papel' cuts pasted on, and old, tattered paper lanterns were set up in the courtyard. When the incense holder became full, the wife of the head of the extended family removed it l'rom the holder, took it to the courtyard, kowtowed and placed it in one of the lanterns. Shortly al'ter, sorne men set the paper on fire and set off firecrackers. The woman continued removing incense, kowtowing and throwing the incense into the fire until the end of the ritual. This lasted about two hourE. Two days later, on the morning of the second day of the new • year, we returned to the same house to attend the ceremony for 21

worshipping ancestors. Each ancestor is worshipped on his or her birthday and deathday, but ail ancestors are worshipped • collectively on the second day of the first month. We arrived at seven a.m. as worship was to take place before breakfast, but the only table set up was that of the old woman who had led the worship the first night who still lived in the house. Others slowly trickled in, and there was much discussion as to when things should start, sorne complaining that it was too early, others, too late. There was also discussion as to whether paper money would be burned. The old woman said money would be burned but not immediately. This lime the food was ready to be eaten and consisted of fare typically consumed at Spring Festival; long-life noodles, wonton, fish, fried tofu and so on. Bowls and chopsticks were set out, as weil as wine cups. One old man poured a sip of wine for each ancestor as he recited their names inviting each to drink. Someone told him he had better just invite them ail collectively rather than take the risk of leaving one out, but the man continued. This time the tables were set up against the altar and people worshipped "in", that is, facing the altar. People were much more casual than they had been the other night, making a perfunctory three bows and then placing incense in the holder. The money was plain white with a stamp on it and was burnt inside the hall, although this may have been due to the pouring rain. After everyone had presented incense, divination blocks were cast by the oldest man in the Iineage to ask if the ancestors • had eaten their Cill. The answer was positive, to everyone's 22

delight. Then the tables were quiekly dismanlled and everyone went home for breakfast. • As usual, 1 naively asked why women perfonned lhis rilllai and, as usual, 1 was told lhat they do nOl, or al least lhat il is nol required that the ritual be performed by women. However,

although the head of the family instructed some women on how 10

worship eorreetly, and (1 few men watehed, the only man to actual1y participate was one who had no woman to represent his immediate family. There was also an inleresting pieee of gossip eireulating amongst the older women standing on the sidelines watehing. They were remarking on the faet that an old woman was representing one family who had a young wife who shollld have been attending. Apparently this young woman, angry with her husband for refusing to lend her brother money, refused to partieipate in the worship of Heaven and Earth or in worshipping her husband's aneestors. When she refused to worship Heaven and Earth her husband beat her. Saying he had lost face, he then jumped off a three story building. His wife tried to fol1ow him, but was held baek. He broke his leg, and everyone in the village sympathized with him. His relatives al1 took presents to hi m, and helped him and his wife resolve their problems. However, when 1 asked what happened to the wife, people shrugged and said they did not know. In spite of a continuai insistenee that these rituais are not neeessarily or exelusively performed by women, it appears that it is not a easual matter for a woman to refuse to represent her family at an important ritual event. If • there is no woman available (or able) to participate in worship, it 23

is better that it be done by a man than not at aIl. It is, however, • preferable that the work be done by a woman, and a serious matter if she refuses to fulfill her rituallkin obligations. Not only is she refusing to behave as a proper woman, but it seems evident that her husband's gender performance is thrown into question (undercut) by her unruly and unfilial behaviour. By failing to control his wife, by failing to have her worship his ancestors he Iikewise becomes unfilial, he fails to be a proper son, a proper descendant. The possibility of inhabiting a body of questionable masculinity was traumatic enough for this man to at least make a show of committing suicide. This might be read both as an attempt to reinscribe masculinity by committing suicide as the honourable alternative to living with the shame and/or as indicating a willingness to fully inhabit the shamed body, the dead body, in submission to the judgment of the community. Alternatively, it could also be read as an inability to conceive any difference between an embodied wounded (shamed) masculinity and a Iiterally wounded body. Naturally, the woman was blamed for this incident. Ali the older women were extremely critical of her actions. Il is interesting that fear of this type of censure, or of the trauma it would cause her husband, did not prevent her from engaging in this behaviour from the start. Not having had an 0pp0rlunity to speak with the woman, 1 would like to engage in a Iiule speculation. Presumably she was hoping either to blackmail her husband into doing what she wanted (Iending her brother the money) or to hurt him, in • revenge. Did she realize the seriousness of her refusaI to 24

participate in these rituals? This is the central question in considering how performative acts conslitute a gendered self. • Performative acts enact structural norms which are variable depending upon locale. She may have come from a different village, or a different linef\ge where women did not perform these rituals. Indeed the faet that many young women at the ri tuais had to be shown how to perform the ceremony is indicative. If the constitution of a gendered subject means the citation of certain acts in one context, what transpires when one moves to another context where other acts take on more importance? If a subject's constitution is a function of acts particular to one locale from which one has been transposed, not only does one not know how to act socially in the new locale. but one may be mandated to act in a way which is contrary to one's social life, by the regulatory norms which had force in the pas\. The patriline and patrilocal marriage patterns are frequently cited as reasons for gender inequality in China. (see Wolf, 1985; Ebrey,1990; Ebrey and Watson,1991) The functionalist reasons offered for a preference of sons over daughters is that daughters are unable to carry on the family name, and, because they marry out, cannot support their parents in their old age. The necessity of descendants is Iiterally proverbial (Mencius said: "Three things can be called unfilial and the worst is to have no descendants"). Whether motivated by a Confucian philosophy obsessed with social stability anchored by the hierarchical patrilinial family, or by a fear of wandering • forever as a hungry ghost for want of descendants to make 25

offerings, the necessity for sons and the importance of ancestor worship are two favoudte topics (veritable clichés) in • anthropological Iiterature on China. Less frequently discussed is the specifie role of sons in ancestor worship. Maurice Freeman makes the distinction between the domestic worship of ancestors and the extra-domestic, noting that women are responsible for routine offerings made to ancestors at the family leveI. (Freedman, 1978, 173) It is men, however, who perform rites in ancestral halls. (176) He also distinguishes between two types of ancestors worshipped. When worshipped in the home, ancestors are worshipped as individuals, that is as a father or grandfather of the living, whereas in the hall they become na sort of ancestral collectivity". (176) ln the case 1 have described the situation is somewhat entangled. The aItar was still located in a house in which the head of the family, the old man, and his wife, live, aIthough it is possible it will becorne an ancestral hall once they die. Several separate households were represented by women who returned to the main house for ritual purposes. None of the individual families represented has an aItar with ancestral tablets in their own homes. All the ancestors reside here, and this is where they are worshipped, in collective ceremonies such as at New Year's, or individually on a particular ancestor's birth or death day. 1 was only able to observe one other ceremony for ancestral worship which took place during Lantern Festival in Putian in a Huang surname Iineage hall. Here, again, most of the worshippers were women. However, this time, a Taoist priest • conducted a ceremony in which the heads of the five branches of 26

the Iineage. al1 men of course, took part. COll'esponding to Freedman's analysis, it appears that when the unit represented is • that of the family or household, it is a woman who must perform the ritual work. When the unit is larger than the family then il is represented by a man.5 Traditional1y women were nol allowed in the ancestral hal1 except as ancestral lab!ets. At least partly due to pressure from the state women can no longer be banned from temples or anceslral halls (although a warning had been painted on one of the pillars of Ihe Huang ancestral hal1 warning menstruating women to slay out).6 Differences between domestic and extra-domestic. family and Iineage, even family home and ancestral hall are not always clear-cut. nor are Ihe differences between rituals appropriate to men and those appropriate to women. 1 think it is clear that the rituals 1 have

5A great deal of discussion has centred around exact definitions of "lineage" . Freedman's classic account of lineages "turns upon the maintenance of common property and the ri tuai obligations and privileges entailed in that property" which link certain groups of agnatic kin together.(1966, 21) Sangren (1984) acknowledges Freedman's "consistent sensitivity to the complexity of Chinese culture and social life"(393); nevertheless he critiques Freedman and others for their concentration on the formaI principles of lineage rather than on their practical forms. (410) A focus on descent ideology has allowed a reification of those principles as unique to lineage organization. Sangren argues inslead for these principles being the basis for a wider range of corporate groups which share form and function with lineages. (391) 1 follow Duara (1988, 8?) in arguing for the importance of the ideology of patrilineal descent. especially when dealing with issues of gender construction. It may be interesting at sorne point to speculate on the interstices of rilUal and gender as possible ways of defining different levels of kin organization. 6According to Michael Szonyi, at the rededication of ancestral halls in the Fuzhou area, this is a topic that frequently cornes up in speeches gi ven by the local cadres. Vnder the Communist Party, everyone is allowed in! (personal communication) How much this recent appearance of "open" temples is indeed due to state pressure and how much this phenomenon has been co-opted by the State in order to signify the State's modernizing impulses towards gender equality is unclear at this point. (Thanks to • Kenneth Dean for pointing this out to me). 27

descri bed here are ones that are appropriately performed by women, rituals that need to be taught to daughters-in-Iaw so that • they may fulfill their appropriate kin roIes. It is less clear at which point rituals which are about family becorne the prerogative of men rather than women, when family includes women, and when it is about connections between men. Ebrey suggests two main orientations for kin organization in traditional China. The ~ orientation incorporates classical ideas of kinship focusing on agnatic relationships, strictly enforced hierarchies between juniors and seniors, joint ancestral sacrifices of a great-great grandfather, condemnation of adoption from different surnames (e.g. adoption of a daughter's son), and ease with divorce. A fui. orientation is centred around a single line of descent from father to son, with that relationship prioritized over more distant ties to agnatic kin. The estate is of central importance to the jia: harmony within the family takes precedence over strict hierarchies, adoption of children of different surnames is allowed, ties with affines are important, and therefore divorce is much less easily resorted to. (Ebrey, 1994, 232) 1 find particularly useful Ebrey's concept of the patriline which she sees as having developed as a compromise between jia and zong principles. Like zong, the patriline was concerned with permanent genealogical links, but Iike jia it focused on the Iink from father to son, rather than the Iink between brothers (which was prioritized in sorne philosophical writing around the zong). (238) The patriline also allows for artificial genealogical links to • be formed in order to continue the line, thus, daughters' sons 28

might be adopted. In zong thinking, only agnatic kin would be able to carry on the line and perform the sacrifices: once a line • died out it was dead. The concerns of the patriline and the jia coincided for the most part, but the jia centred around common property and could end with the dissipation of that estate. The patriline, however, "...went back through aIl male ancestors and would continue presumably even through penniless descendants. Moreover, each married male was the focus of a separate descent line but he need never be the head of an independent jia." (239) If we follow Barlow, one can only assume the status of subject in China through the assumption of kinship l'OIes. The key kin l'OIes for a woman are wife, daughter-in-Iaw and mother. If she is unable to become a wife and mother, either in her own Iifetime or through fictive ties established after her death, she will become a hungry ghost, in many ways the ultimate inhabitant of the realm of the abject. (see Wolf, 1974, 148-152) These kin l'oies are constituted in relation to the patriline. Without the patriline, they do not properly exist. Il is in this way that these kin l'oIes are constituted in a specific cultural context. The specificities of rituals which may he key to the constitution of subjects as daughters-in-law, sons, fathers etc. do, in ail likelihood vary in multiple small and not so small ways from place to place. The patriline (as an ideological construct, rather than in any of the possible institutional forms it may take) has such cultural force in China however, 1 think it can be argued that it is of central importance to any discussion of subject constitution. Il is • important to reiterate that kin and gender l'OIes are mutually 29

constitutive. A daughter's body is constituted differently from a mothcr's; subject to their kin positions, they are differently sexed • female. Il is through varying ritual and kinship practices specific to particular locales, that different scripts of motherhood (etc.) are enacted and different bodies gendered female are materialized. What it means to be a mother is unique to specific contexts, just as is what it means to he a woman.

• 30

Three: Abject in the Field of Dreams: • Contamination in Xianyou Nunneries If those who inhabit the domain of the abject are the nonnarrativizable, the invisible, the unthinkable, then the first discussion 1 had in China on the subject of Buddhist nuns is suggestive. When 1 arrived at Xiamen University as a visiting student in the history department my research plans were centered on Buddhist nuns. One of the professors there suggested that it would be more productive to focus on ordinary village women as their religious activities were more important to the society as a whole. AIso, according to him, as there was only one nunnery in Xianyou, Guanhua Tang, not enough data would be available for a proper research project, especially since 1 was interested in nunneries in a social context. As it turned out this professor's c1aim was not strictly accurate; there are more than 235 nunneries in Xianyou with more than 760 nuns. (Xianyou government documents)l On the Xianyou plain there is a nunnery in almost every village.2 The professor is not the only one for whom the nuns do not exist. Although villagers will general1y know where a nunnery is,

1 The figures 1 give are those provided by the Xianyou government from a survey done ln 1991. New nunneries are being bullt and nearly every nunnery 1 visited had more nuns than were registered. Il was difficult for me to obtain accurate figures; when 1 asked about the number of nuns J would generally be told "more than thirty', or "Iess than ten". Il was rare that everyone would be in residence at one time. Sorne nuns might be away at the Buddhist college at Gushan in Fuzhou, or doing business or visiting friends or relatiyeso 2 According to one of the members of a research project on religion in Putian. sponsored by Professors Kenneth Dean and Zheng Zhenman, the • situation is similar in Putian as weil. 3 1

and who the nuns are, they also have very little contact with them. High waIls enclose the temple, living areas and courtyard, • and there is little interaction between nuns and villagers. One day, a woman who was washing her vegetables at the nunnery weIl remarked that there had been a number of changes since she had last visited. 1 asked how long ago that had been. Five years, she answered. She lived in a house facing the nunnery's main gate. 1 asked why she had come that day. She said, to see you, the foreigner, of course. At the same nunnery, 1 saw a group of girls go in to the Guanyin altar to bum incense and to consult the fortune telling sticks. (A donation is usuaIly left when this happens. This incense money is an important source of income for monasteries and village temples. ) However, for most nunneries this is an unusual occurrence. Unlike monasteries, nunneries are not places of worship for anyone except the nuns themselves.3 For the most part nuns are isolated from ordinary villagers even when their nunnery is located in the middle of a village. Nuns disappear into their nunneries and cease to exist for the outside world.

3 Of course. men and women who become monks and nuns are supposed to be withdrawing from the world. However, monasteries have a great deal of interaction with the outside world as they are both places of worship and tourist sites. Any visitor to Nanputuo monastery in Xiamen will note the remarkable amount of lay Buddhist activity that occurs daily. Visitors burn incense, pray, consult their fortunes. Nearly every time 1 visited the temple 1 would see one or two older women reciting scriptures in front of the Guanyin altar or at one of the small shrines up the mountain behind the main temple complex. 1 have also been told that every morning when the monks are reciting their morning prayers, a group of lay Buddhist women gather in the courtyard to recite sutras. Nanputuo, Iike other monasteries such as Guanhuasi in Putian city. are so crowded on important days ln the Buddhlst ealendar (e.g. the Buddha's or Guanyin's birthdays) that one can hardly move or breath from ail the ineense smoke. This is in • marked contrast to the quiet and isolation of the nunneries. 32

During the Cultural Revolution, nllns were literal1y made to • disappear. The actual status of Buddhist monasteries and nunneries had been problematic since liberation. Article five of the Common Program passed by the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference on September 29, 1949 reads as fol1ows: "The people of the People's Republic of China shal1 have freedolll of thought, speech, publication, assembly, association, correspondence, person, domicile, moving from one place to another, religious belief, and freedom of holding processions and demonstrations." (Welch, 461) This did not prevent monks and nuns from being attacked as landlords or temples being destroyed

as feudal remnants. 4 As Welch points out, "...freedom of religious belief was not a universal and inalienable right, but a right only to be enjoyed by persons whom the government considered progressive." (7) As elsewhere, aIl the older nuns 1 spoke to had been forcibly returned to lay life during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). The history of Anhui Tang, a smal1 nunnery located in Duwei zhen, covers most of the major changes that have occurred in this century. Original1y a lineage temple, then a school, the land was donated to an eighty year old nun in the Nationalist period (1911- 1949) and she turned it into a nunnery. During the Nationalist period the nuns bought their own land, .4 of a mu (6.6mu= 1 acre) each which they fanned themselves. Though they were al1owl:d to keep the land during the land reform period(1950-53), the land

4See Welch (1972) for a history of CCP policy towards Buddhism and Buddhist institutions and how those policies affected monks and temples • under the Communists. 33

was eventually col1ectivized, and at the time of the Cultural Revolution the nuns were forced back to lay Iife. Afterwards the y • were allowed to return, and a nun in Malaysia raised money to repair the temple. Most nunneries have been rebuilt with overseas Chinese money, sorne on their original sites, sorne on new ones. In the cases 1 encountered the money cornes from a nun in Malaysia or Singapore whose roots are in Xianyou. The nuns trace their lineage back to whichever nun provided the money for the temple. She is their Dashi or Master and is counted as the first generation.5 Guanhua Tang, the largest nunnery in Xianyou, was one of the few with any original buildings left. The old temple had been preserved and two old nuns continued to worship and live there. The rest of the nuns worship and live in the much larger new temple with extensive living quarters. Guanhua Tang is located in Duwei zhen and, according to ML Lin Jinhai, the nephew of Ding Chan, the nun who raised the money to rebuild the temple, it is the largest nunnery in aIl of Fujian. There are 46 nuns from ail over Xianyou registered there. A nun from Manchuria who had been studying at the coIlege at Nanputuosi in Xiamen had also applied to move there. Tbis temple has a close connection with the governme"t and is something of a tourist site, though the nuns do not receive any income from this. TypicaIly, they do not

SIn many cases lbe Dashi has aIready died. In one nunnery 1 visitcd, the nuns were very worried because their Dashi was over eighty and was living by herself in a temple in Singapore. Il was her disciples' dutY to look after her but the Singaporc government would not allow any of them • to move therc to look after her. 34

receive an income from incense money. They do. however• • receive money from Singapore for the recitation of sutras. so unlike ether nnnneries in the area the temple includes a sutt'a recitation hall. In addition to daily morning and evening praycrs in which everyone r :.rticipates. sutras are recited for one and a half hours every morning and afternoon, and again in the evcning though not for as long. Every nun Hho is able participates in a schedule of rotating cycles which allows ten days off a month. When 1 visited '3uanhua Tang in the faU, they were performing a ritual to Wen Fo (Manjusri). This ten day ritual is sponsored every three years by a woman from Singapore who arrives with female family members in tow to attend. The nunnery also has sorne land on which they cultivate vegetables. but for the most part the nuns support themselves through their ri tuaI acti vities. Other nunneries are not so fortunate. Sorne have land which they cultivate themselves.6 Sorne look after the ancestral tablets of lay Buddhists for which they receive a smaU one time donation from the farnily of the deceased. Most women. nuns or otherwise. knit sweaters in their spare time for export sweater factories. These factories provide the wool or cotton and the pattern. A good knitter can finish one in two weeks working part time and will earn fifty to eighty yuan per sweater depending on how complicated the pattern is.7 At a nunnery such as Anhui Tang it is

61n terms of size. the largest nunncry in Xianyou is 2340m2. Guanhua Tang is 2300m2. The largest mo,lastery is 2400m2. MoSI lemples have less Ihall 400m2• wilb sorne as small as 40m2. 71n Ihe spring of 1994. China devalued the yuan 10 bring il in Hile wilh black markel exchange raIes which were al aboul 6 yuan 10 Ihe Calladian • dollar. 35

often difficult to make ends meel. When land was decollectivized, the nunnery's land was not returned, and the nuns presently only • receive about 230 jin(half a kilo) of rice, or the equivalent in cash, per month from pensions from their production brigades. This is hardly enough to support nine adults and three children. The nun 1 spoke to estimates that they need 500 yuan a month for electricity, fuel, food and clothes. They support themselves by knitting sweaters and in renting out the use of their courtyard to the villagers. Another nunnery 1 visited consisted of a room attached to a Three-in-one temple, with one old nun in residence. Ber only income was her pension from the production brigade she was a member of during the Cultural Revolution, about twenty five yuan a month, barely enough to buy her tood. Just as the economic situation varies depending on the size and circumstances of the nunneries so do the reiigious lives of their nuns. As we have seen, nuns at Guanhua Tang have a fairly orthodox religious Iife, and a high level of organization. Chengjian Tang is another large and prosperous nunnery in Daji zhen. Ding Ming, a nun from Singapore raised 100 0000 yuan to built il. There are more than thirty nuns there (as weil as three children), although not that many are in residence at one time, as many are away attending school in Fuzhou, or are otherwise occupied. There are daily recitations in Chengjian Tang twice a day, which ail of the nuns are expected to attend. The first recitation takes place at five or so in the moming, the second at four thirty in the afternoon. Prayers are chanted at breakfast • and lunch, and the eldest of the three children living in the 36

nunnery places the rice in the incense holder for the hungry ghosts. Chengjian Tang does have offices, although naturally Ilot as • extensive as a large monastery. They include the guest prefect (zhike)8, and the succentor (yuezhong), who change frequently. The office of precentor (weina ) is held by two nuns at a time. Their Master felt that if only one held the office she might get too tired. so she decided they should take turns. This office does not have such a rapid turnover. as the nuns who hold it must have an extensive knowledge of the scriptures to be able to lead daily recitations and know the proper forms of worship. In this temple many of the younger nuns have: studied at the Buddhist academy in Fuzhou. so they are somewhat better educated than most nuns in the area. Still. there was only one nun in the temple who had completed high school. and she rarely spoke due to sorne sort of mental breakdown. Many of the older nuns were illiterate and did not know the scriptures by heart. They had been hoping to set up their own school for studying the scriptures. but their Master was now too old to raise much money so they could not attract a good teacher. When 1 was there. a lot of pressure was being put on one of the younger nuns who heId the office of weina to go back to the academy for further study so she could in turn teach the rest of them. but she wanted to learn how to paint and

81 am using Welch's (1967) translations of thcse tcrms. Sec chaptcr one where he discusses the various offices and ranks of a large public monastery. The nunneries in Xianyou are organized as small hereditary temples (Welch. 1967. 129). The zhike as one might guess looks aCter guests. The yuezhong rings the hand chime during the daily recitatioll of the Iiturgy while the weina leads the Iiturgy and keeps time by striking a large bronze bowl. Few of the offices that one might expcct in a large • public monastery are in use. 37

was avoiding the issue. The office of abbess (dangjia)9 also had Iillle turnover, mainly, one nun suggested to me, because the • nunnery was too small to hurt someone's feelings by removing her from that office. 1 got the impression that the woman who was presently holding office was there in a largely nominal capacity, and that most decisions were in fact made by her assistant, one of those who then heId the position of weina. There do not appear to be offices for things Iike the cook; those sort of duties also rotate but mainly amongst the older nuns who participate less in religious duties. The situation at a small temple such as Anhui Tang is quite differenl. As it is a very small temple, the rules are not very stricl. The nuns do not hold offices, nor do they ail participate in daily scripture recitation. They get up around 3:30 am in the spring and summer, and 4:30 in the fall and winter. The abbess recites scriptures and burns incense every morning on rising while everyone else prepares for the coming day. In the evening, also, only one person prays, but the nuns take turns. Everyone else watches whichever favourite soap opera happens to be on at the time. They have a fancy foreign television set which their Master from Malaysia bought for them on her last visil. Cooking duties are also organized on rotation, one person per month. The cook makes the offering of rice, but there are no collective prayers

9Welch (1967, 130 n.1) translates dangjia, lhe senior monk or nun at a hereditary or branch temple, as manager, to distinguish it from the fangzhang or abbot of a major public monastery. 1 prefer the term abbess as it is more suggestive of the head of a religious community, although as Welch (468. n.8) notes it is difficult to match lhese terms wilh lheir closest • equivalents in the Christian monastic system. 38

before eating and people eat where they want to, unlike the larger nunneries where prayers are recited before breakfast and lunch • and everyone eats in the dining hall. Another way in which Guanhua Tang is more orthodox. th an other nunneries in Xianyou is that they have no young girls living there. Nearly every nunnery 1 visited had a few children living

there. Girls are generally abandoned when a family is trying 10 have a son, but have too many children. One abbess told me Ihat babies were frequently left at the nunnery's doorstep but only nine were living in the nunnery at that time because often the abandoned babies were so sick they died shortly after. lO ln sorne cases they are left anonymously at the temple gate during the night. Sometimes a relative might give his sister or cousin an unwanted daughter. At one nunnery, the two girls were not left on the doorstep. Rather, the nuns found them and their brother abandoned in the market town in which the nunnery is located. They kept the boy for a Hule while, but soon one of the families that li ves in the vicinity of the nunnery adopted him. Only Guanghua Tang, the largest temple, did not have any small children. Children are left at the gates here but the nuns do not want child rearing to interfere with their spiritual practices so they adopt them out. One prepubescent girl, an orphan. lives there because her paternal aunt is a nun and there was no-one else to look after her.

IOTradilionally, sick childrcn wcre oClcn promiscd 10 lhe 8uddha if he would cure lbem. so 1 wonder if sorne of lbe abandoned children were parenlS who were worried aboul lheir children and eilhcr could nol afford or did not wanl 10 wasle money on mcdicine. (Welch. 1967. 250). This did nol • occur to me at lbe lime, so 1 missed my opportunily 10 ask the nuns about il. 39

At Chengjian Tang then: are at least three Iiule girls, one already auending school. Ali were left at the nunnery as babies. • The IiUle girls are somewhat more involved in the daily rituals of the nunnery than in Anhui Tang, for example, but in general this reflects the greater degree of organization involved in running a larger and more prosperous temple than most in Xianyou. Also, unlike smaller nunneries, the girls are allowed to eat meat. In fact, the nuns despair of one of the Iiule girls because they say she loves to eat meat so much, she will probably never become a nun. This may reflect their greater familiarity with the order in which vows are taken; that is, they know that young children cannot take even the simplest vows and therefore are not bound by them. Welch quotes a number of missionary accounts from the late Imperial and Republican periods which describe a high number of child monks and suggest that most monks are bought from poor families as children. (1967,249) Welch disputes this with data from ordination yearbooks from five large public monasteries which show that most monks underwent tonsure between the ages of twenty and thirty. (1967,251-252) His own interviews suggest that most were tonsured in their mid-teens. (253) Unfortunately. Welch chose not to do any research on nuns. Again in response to the missionary accounts which almost uniformly state that most monks leff the household because of poverty, laziness and in search of an easy life, Welch suggests a number of reasons for entering a monastery, drawn from his own interviews. • These include being promised to the monastery in return for his 40

own or a relative's recovery from illness; being orphaned; being persuaded by relatives; desiring the peaceful monastic Iife, or • feeling an affinity with monastic life, possibly due to having been a monk in past lives, an interest in Buddhism, and a desire to escape from the world. (1967, 261-269) As Welch points out, in the Buddhist tradition a desire to escape from suffering is not the act of a lazy person who is not religiously motivated, but rather the act of someone who has learned the First Noble Truth, that aH life is suffering. (Welch, 1967, 260) Obviously the circumstances of Welch's ethnography are quite different from those which obtain in the People's Republic, in Fujian in the 1990's, and of course the differing circumstances of women and men must impinge upon our assessment of the motivations for entering monasteries and nunneries. One abbess told me that most women become nuns because life is too bitter for Chinese women. She said they will aH teH me they became nuns because they wanted to worship the Buddha (she was right), but the real reason was the peaceful life in the nunnery. Of course, as Welch noted, these two goals are not incompatible. Most of the nuns left home in their mid teens. Il was emphasized to me again and again that the girls who are given to the nunneries are not required to become nuns, although the nuns hope they will come to that decision on their own. 1 would guess that the government has discussed this matter with the nunneries, given that 1 receivcd the same stock answer to this question everywhere 1 wenl. One nun 1 interviewed had been given as a young girl: The abbess of • Zhiyuan Tang came to the temple in 1989. Hel' father was a 41

Buddhist and had been good friends with an old monk. He promised one of his man y children wou Id chujia, that is, leave • home to becorne a nun or monk, and gave her to the monk when she was twelve. However, her mother disagreed and took her back home. Eventually, she herself decided to becorne a nun and left home at twenty-two. 1 have no data on whether boys are ever left at monasteries. Given that male children have becorne that much more precious, and girls that much more unwanted due to the one child family policy, it seems unlikely. Not only do nunneries act as small scale orphanages, they are also refuges for women in trouble. While 1 was at Chengjian Tang, a woman who had fought with her family had taken refuge in the temple. Later two men came to take her away. The nuns said that women often come to the temple, after fighting with their husbands or in-Iaws. and declare they want to becorne nuns. They usually stay for a few days. calm down and then go home. The nuns do not really Iike to accept them, as it disrupts their Iife, is a drain on their food. and because they know these women do not really want to becorne nuns. However, they feel they must or else people will criticize them for not being compassionate. Also there is al ways the danger that a woman might commit suicide if she is not given refuge and they do not want to risk that. 11 The nuns 1 spoke to said that if someone wants to becorne a nun, the

IISee Margery Wolf. "Women and Suicide in China", pp. 111-142, for a discussion about high rates of suicide among Taiwanese peasant women. with historical precedents and ideological support for female suicide as an appropriate response to some situations (e.g.. protecting her virtue) and a powerfu1 weapon in others (suicides make extremely powerful and • dangerous ghosts- an effective form of revenge). 42

first thing they do is let them live in the nunnery for a while 10

see if they can get used 10 Ihe life Ihere. If Ihey feel Ihat she can • adjust and that she no longer has obligations to the outside world, then they will accept her as a novice. There is one young woman who has been living in Chengjian Tang on and off fol' yeal's now. They would not normally allow this except they ail really like hel', and feel that she will eventually be able to join them. She wanls to chujia, but her father is very iII, so she often musl l'eturn home

to look after him, so she cannol commit hel'self fully 10 Ihe nunnery. Buddhist nuns may be said to inhabit Ihe domain of the abject in two ways, as individuals, and as a type of communal organization that is not a patrilinial family. As the nonreproductive body, as the body that leaves home, the nun excludes herself from ail that is normal, good, proper and

comprehensible. The earliest critiques of Buddhism ail point 10 the severing of family ties. In the fifth century, a Taoist work, Sanpo lun (Treatise on the Three Destructions) assumed that Buddhism was a degenerate form of Taoism, the Buddha was in fact a manifestation of Laozi. and stated that Buddhism was specifically created for the destruction of foreigners:

The barbarians are without benevolence, unyielding, violent and without manners, and are not different from birds and beasts...They are also coarse and uncivilized. Desiring to exterminate their evil progeny, Lao-tzu ordered the males not to take wives, and the females not to take husbands. When the entire country submits to the teaching of Lao-tzu, they will be exterminated as a matter of course." (Chen, 137-8) • 43

The Chinese however, being good and virtuous, had no need for this barbarian religion with ilS goal of restraining eviI. • Although not often put in quite this way, one of the most persistent critiques raised against Buddhist nuns and monks throughout the history of Buddhism in China cites their lack of filial piety, the severing of the line between their ancestors and potential descendants, and emphasizes the unnaturalness of not having children. James Watson describes the uneasy interaction between nuns and Cantonese villagers at funerals. (1988) The nuns' shaved heads represent sterility, as long heaithy hair is considered a sign of fertility. They are considered ritual specialists who are invited attend funerals to chant sutras, but unlike ordinary women they do not avert their eyes at key moments or take any precautions against the debilitating effects of death pollution. Watson notes, "The fact that nuns expose themselves to death pollution but do not transform it into new Iife is the ultimate inversion, and perversion, of the feminine role.' (Watson, 1988, 27) He says that villagers often told him that nuns were "not real women". (127) By not performing the proper ritual roles of women at these funerais, by inhabiting nonreproductive bodies, nuns cease to be women. Those who inhabit the domain of the abject act a1so as the constitutive outside of the subject. It would be easy to view the nunnery as a utopian space for women, free from male control, a safe space for unwanted female children or battered women. 1 would suggest rather that the nunnery is inextricably Iinked to • the village and the patrilineal family structure. If the abject is 44

that which circumscribes the domain of the sllbject. that is indeed "inside" the subject as its fOllnding replldiation. then the nllnnery. • in containing ail that is necessary yel horrifying to the patriline. can be said to act as the patriline's constitutive outside. The patriline links ancestor to grandfather, father and son and further down through unborn generations and in various ways it requires women for its reproduction: in the production of sons; in sustaining the home through their labour, and in sorne cases through their ri tuaI activities. The nunnery collects the delritus of the patriline: unwanted baby girls, sick children. unhappy womell. bodies which threaten the stability of the patriline. which must be rejected by the patriline, but which also act as a founding repudiation of the patriline. Emily Ahern has written on the danger to the family callsed by disruptive women (200, 212-14), how daughters-in-Iaw can cause families to break up, men to ignore their filial duties (Wolf, 1972, p.32-37, 164-67). One of the worst dangers to the well being of a family is suicide. Unlike most other countries in the world, China has traditionally had a higher ration of female to male suicide, suicide being one of the most effecti ve ways a woman has of taking revenge on a family that treats her so badly she can not see another way out. (Wolf, 1975, 123-29) The nunnery offers a place for women who are in conflict in the family, that is for women who are disrupting the harmony of the family. More importantly, by providing that refuge, a woman has an option other than suicide. Then two nuns 1 spoke to about the • necessity of the nunnery acting as a refuge, said that they would 45

be criticized for their Jack of compassion if they did not accept women in trouble. 1 wonder, if they did in fact refuse refuge to a • woman and she committed suicide would they then be blamed for that, al ways shifting the blame away from a family system that offers few alternatives for those in difficult situations. The nunnery is not a real or permanent alternative for most women, though it may offer a temporary refuge. At the same time, far from offering a real challenge to a traditional family ~tmcture, with ail the symbolic and structural difficulties it entails for women and subordinate (young) men, it enables the patriline to constitute itself. It is everything the patriline is not, everything that is not important to the patriline, but more than that it absorbs those entities and bodies that threaten the well-being of the patriline. Contained behind the nunnery walIs, the disruptive woman, the potential suicide, the unaecomodating ancestor, the superfluous daughter cannot threaten the well-being and status quo of the patrilineal family. Too, in the minds of the community a certain slippage may occur there, and each of the outsiders runs the risk of becoming or becoming Iike an other -- disruptive women may become nuns, nuns become associated with ancestors lacking descendants capable of paying them their due. The abject is a field of contamination. The nunneries accept ancestors who cannot be worshipped on the family altar. These are usualIy ancestors who were lay Buddhists, who took a vow of vegetarianism, and who their descendants are afraid they will offend by offering the • wrong sort of food. They give the ancestor tablet to the nuns with 46

a flat fee of about fifty yuan. The nuns will make offerings at Ihe appropriale limes. and Ihe anceslors will be happy and nol wreak • havoc on Iheir descendanls.

One of the strongest and most modern Ihreals 10 Ihe patriline is the one child family policy. In rural areas. Ihe

government has been somewhat accommodating 10 Ihe beliefs of the Chinese peasantry. or at leasl has recognized the impossibilily of fully enforcing the policy; it is allowed Ihal if Ihe first child is a

girl then couples can try again. The Iimit of two children seems 10 be generally ignored in rural Xianyou. parlicularly if no son is produced. But what does one do with an excess of daughlers? One generally puts up with the inconvenience. but the nunnery is an alternative. One less child means an easier opporlunity to try again for a son. If a subject's constitution is Iinked with one's conslitution in a kin role. what happens to these girls who are denied their first kin role as daughter? It seems that from the beginning lhey are

part of the domain of the abject. made 10 be expelled-- unwanled. superfluous. and troubling. When lhe nunnery takes them in they cease to be for their families. The object of this type of analysis always exceeds its subject, subjectivity being subjective. so to speak. In speaking of subjects and that which constitutes (their) outsides. it is important to remember that we are speaking of cultural norms. majorities. ideological models. In this case, 1 take the patrilineal family and the kin roles which make it up to be what is "normal". even ideal • etc. Failing to cite these norms nuns are not constituted as viable 47

social subjects. But subject constitution is always and everywhere a partial and contingent process. And the domain of the abject • like ail spatial metaphors has shifting boundaries. In sorne instances you're in and in sorne you're... In sorne contexts, nuns do become subjects, or at least subject (to). For example, in relation to the State they are religious subjects, without the same sorts of problems of religious expression as say mediums, but again with a c1early delimited obligation. The State recognizes their right to religion, their right to be who they are, which is to say to signify the religious tolerance of the post-Maoist state. Which is not a right or recognition granted by the state to mediums. Sometimes, however, a nun will emerge from behind the walls, becorne visible to the villagers. In the following cases, the nuns have entered into existence as far as the viIlagers are concerned because they provide services, one of a fortune teller, the other of a medium. Perhaps unsurprisingly this has the effect of making themselves dubious in the eyes of the state. Longyu Gong is a temple on a hilltop that resembles a theme park with elaborat:: fountains and gaily painted statuary in the courtyard. There had been a Buddhist nunnery and a Taoist temple to Xian Gong on this site for a long time. The nunnery had been very poor and so it joined with the Xian Gong temple which liad a large income from people burning incense, as the god was known to he very efficacious. Il :llso has difficulties with the village which lies at the foot of the hill, who in fact had stolen • incense money from the temple. The nun in residence at the time 48

f1ed and the temple was practically falling down when the thirty six village temple from another village in the zhcn dccided to • rebuild il with their own incensc moncy. The artisans wcre still in residence at the time of our visit. Thc nuns were ail from other villages. Since the older nun f1ed, they had secn more than 20 young nuns come and go, ail of whom, according to the artisan we were speaking with, did not like the fact that thc tcmple was not independent, but rather responsible to and dependent on the thirty-six village temple. Eventually, the thirty-six village temple convinced the nun previously in residence to come back, and sent people to live in the temple to guard it against the villagers. A middle age nun soon joined her. Sorne other old women also live

there, to help out. They are Buddhists, but not caigu l2 . This temple is extremely prosperous, with an income of approximately 100 yuan a day. This income cornes from two sources. One is from the people who come to ask the middle age nun to read their palms. The woman who came to consult her while we were there was having problems with her husband. The nun told her that although they were now having problems, in the future things wouId improve; however, she had to stop saying bad words (huai hua) to her husband. This was ail done in rhymed couplets in the local dialect. My companion who was translating for me was very impressed with her literary skill. The other source of

12Caigu are women who have taken certain Duddhisl vows. fewer lhan lhose taken by a novice, bul do nol &have lheir heads and so are easily distinguished from novices and full nuns. They live in nunncries or in vcgelarian halls bUI are registcrcd as nuns by lhe govcrnmcnl. The government distinguishes betwccn nuns (biqiuni), novices (shamini) and • caigu. 49

income is from the Xian Gong temple attached to the nunnery. People come to pray and burn incense to Xian (long and ask • advice. He responds by sending dreams to the petitioner. This situation is somewhat unusual, in that here he sends the dreams to the older nun. She sits to the side of the altar and dozes while the petitioner presents her requesl. When she wakes, she will give Xian Gong's response.. A nun's "existence" is also dependent on the particular relationship between her and the wider community. Another nunnery in Fengting zhen, Xiuyuan An, also had a Xian Gong temple attached to il. There had been an oIder nunnery on the site. The present nunnery was built in 1987. They had three old nuns and four children living there. The oldest nun had been a cadre, but then decided to becorne a nun when she was thirty seven. When in her fifties she was given a three year old from a neighbouring village who also eventually became a nun, now living in Putian. When the old nun was sixty-one, she received two disciples who are still with her. That was fourteen years ago. She has an extremely good relationship with the villagers many of whom donated money or services to built the temple. In particular, her daughter's son had been instrumental in raising money. This is particularly significant as the village has no overseas Chinese to donate any money. The nuns pray in the Xian Gong temple for peace and prosperity for the villagers. Individuals also come to petition the god, who sends dreams directly to them rather than through an intermediary. The nuns • also have thcir own land to support themselves. On the 25th of 50

the twelfth month, the whole village cornes to the nunnery to worship the gods and participate in a procession. This nunnery • almost has the status of a village temple. lt is possible that this is because of the Xiangong temple attached to the nunnery. or because the village participated in the construction of the nunnery. Il is not independent from the village, built with ovel'seas Chinese money. Il may also have something to do with the personal preferences of the ex-cadre. who it is obvious does not wish to isolate herseIf from the village where she had always been a dominant personality. That which otherwise might be constitutive of community but disavowed. as the abject, here perhaps must be acknowledged as participating in the creation of community. The abject is no more self-identical than any subject. What may be the abject for the patrilineal family, may not be for the state or for a particular community. Il certainly is not for the nuns themselves. The walls around the domain of the abject are not unbreachable. or even stationary. A shifting metaphor of abjection al10ws for its own reproduction white at the same time continual1y undoing itself.

• 5 1

Four: Mediums and Anthropology: • (Dis)Possessing a Binary Scholarly discourses on mediums and spirit possession have routinely been constituted through recourse to binaries of elite and popular, masculine and feminine, tradition and modernization. Sorne of these discourses have engaged in a straightforward denigration of the second term in each binary; others have attempted to recoup the second term via notions of resistance and/or a presumptive power to disrupt the hegemony of the first term. These discourses of resistance/disruption often fa1l short of their ai ms leaving the binary intact. These binaries are indeed very seductive: and the splits between high and low culture, modernity and tradition, men and women, have influenced me in my thinking about "popular" religion in China. Before 1 went to China, 1 was already looking for categories of resistance in the second term of each of these binaries. Spirit mediums would be the abject, the unthinkable, the highly troubling figures around which discourses of oppression and fissure could be constructed. The utopian space of the nunnery wou Id offer an alternative to a coercive femininity constructed in the service of the patriline. Female mediums would at once demonstrate the contempt with which a woman who is unable to conform to her ordained role in a patriarchal system is held and the failure of that system to control a1l of its members a1l the time. This, unsurprisingly, did not quite work out. Before turning to the ethnographie data, which as usual, • exceed the constraints of the theoretical frame which inspired its 52

gathering, 1 wouId Iike to eltamine how these binaries of clitc and popular, male and female, modernization and backwardncss • manifest in three classic accounts of shamanism, and in statc discourse around mediums in China. 1. M. Lewis' classic account Ecstatic Religion is founded upon the production of a split between "central possession religions" and "peripheral cuits". In the former, the shaman holds a key ritual (and frequently political) role in society, and possession is a way in which leaders seek to augment their spiritual and mundane power through recourse to the authority of the gods. (Lewis, 29) Peripheral cuits, however, rather th an installing and depending upon the moral code of the social dominant frequently act to subvert il. Spirits associated with peripheral cuits tend to possess marginal members of society, particularly women, or politically impotent men. (27) ln focusing on the cross-cultural association of women with ecstatic possession, Lewis suggests that peripheral cuits are in fact "...thinly disguised protest movements directed against the dominant selt" (26), in fact naming them as a "feminist sub-culture" (80). The constitution of "peripheral cuits" as a term into which ail markers of difference/dissidence/resistance can be poured, however weil intentioned, must obviously be seen to do the work of containment. Evacuation of distinctive "differences among" in favour of "difference from" "central possession religions" serves to shore up the homogeneity of the privileged term. Lewis even suggests that the existence of peripheral cuIts emerges as a tacit • 53

acknowledgment by a society of its inability to treat its members in a good and humane way: • ...il is in terms of lhe marginalization of women from full participation in social and political affairs and their final subjection to mCII that we should seek to understand their marked prominence in peripheral possession. We must also remember thal lhese cuits. as weil as the ri tuai license and blessing also accordcd to women more generally, may renect a shadowy recognition of the injustice of this contradiction between the official status of women and their actual importance to society. (79) Potter's (1974) account of the mann seag phox or "old ladies who speak with spirits" would certainly seem to recapitulate Lewis' definition of participants in peripheral cuits. These women are generally marginal members of the community who have ail gone through a traumatic experience which triggered their first trance. 1 They necessarily must have dead children, who will act as their spirit guides. (226) They deal with the community's dead, daughters who die before they are married, and other problematic souls:

The spirit medium is the high priestess of this black half of the villagers' supernatural world. She rules over the dark world inhabited by the malevolent ghosts of the unsuccessful, the discontented, thc abnormal, and the exploited. Her major function in village society is to deter these discontented and dangerous beings from wreaking their vengeance on the living villagers. (231) Although important to the community, they are low in status and viewed with distrust. (226) Unlike male mediums (jitong) who trance while guided by a Taoist ritual master and are possessed by the local gods in communal rituals, (Schipper, 1993, Chapter 3; Dean, 181-2), these women are possessed by ghosts, especially of their dead children who act as guides through the

1Sce Margery Wolf (1992) for an interesting account of whether or not • somcone is a trlle medium. 54

netherworld and as intermediaries between the medium and more puwerful deities. Although Potter focuses on the women's • marginal status, they do in fact cali upon very powerful gods to help them combat malevolent influences and cure the sick. One of the mediums described, Kao Paak-neung, includes the Jade Emperor. Guan Yin, and Wa Dho, a famous doc tOI' who lived during the Three Kingdoms period. amongst the deities who aid 11er. (217-18) These women have been un able to maintain themsclves in their appropriate kin roles. They are frequently widows. and ail have dead children. They have failed to be proper wives and mothers and now deal with others who have failed to live happy "normal" lives. Anyone who has died young. or been unhappy. pOOl'. or mistreated is a potential malevolent ghost. Unsurprisingly most malevolent ghosts are female. (229) Although mediums provide vital services for the villagers. and are important in maintaining the patrilinial family (like nuns in Xianyou. they look al'ter the anomalous dead who cannot be worshipped on the family altar). ~ontaining ail those who challenge the justice of this family system. they too are disavowed, looked down upon. enjoy no status for their vital role in maintaining the status quo. Unsurprising, as their l'ole in maintaining the patriline involves maintaining its detritus. it must be contained. disavowed. in order to maintain the myth of the patrilinial family system as just. good. and natural. In Korea. it is almost exclusively women who become • shamans. Laurel Kendall has discussed the contemptuous view of 55

women's rilUals and shamanism in particular which are heId by Korean Confucian eHtes. (Kendall, 25, 30ff) She discusses the • gendered division of ritual, with men engaging in Confucian rituals of ancestor worship while women worship household gods and consult shamans in limes of ilIness or misfortune. Likewise, missionaries and modern scholars have seen women's adherence to various "superstitious" practices as indicative of their unfortunate place in the world. (34) In this way hierarchical binaries are (re)installed as part of traditional Korean and modern scholarly discourse (sometimes Korean, sometimes Western) . Inscribed as dominant (and rendered as analogous by association) are the male, elite, Confucian and/or modern, rational (with the concomitant associations of Confucian with China, and modern with the West). Subordinated are the female, popular, shamanistic, indigenous. There are occasional instances of scholarship that does not conform to the particulars of this alignment. This work is frequently nationalistic in f1avour. Thus, it has been suggested that shamanism was once a proud archaic religion indigenous to Korean, that shamans were male, and it was only after men abandoned the faith that women took over and that in their hands it degenerated into the superslitious practices of today. (36)2

2The hierarchy of sorne of these categories have been manipulaled by sludent prolesters in the 1980's. when shamanism was used as a symbol of resistance against the government and neo-colonial presences of Americans and multinational companies in South Korea. The hierarchy was then reversed, the oppressed term became the privileged one: tradition (symbolized by shamanism)/modernity, Korean/Weslern (foreign), the people/the State. resistance/oppression, marginality/centrality. See Kim • (1994) 56

Ironically this organizational typology works well within Lewis' framework of peripheral cuIts and central possession • religions, even though it is as a corrective to Lewis' typology that Kendall makes her arguments for the importance of women's rilual work to Korean society. Rather th an seeing shamanism as a therapeutic mechanism to expunge the contradictions and suffering of an oppressive society, or women as peripheral creatures who worship peripheral gods, Kendall argues for the integral importance of women's ri tuaI work to family and society and ils complementary relation to men's ritual roles. (25) Unfortunately, Kendall is unable to take her critique a step further. Rather than engaging the problematic of Lewis' (and others) containment and dismissal of women's ecstatic experience, Kendall reinstalls that normative understanding or model while designating the socia: value of Korean women's roles as exceptionaI. This is readily apparent in her characterization of Chinese women as intrinsically polluted beings who therefore can only worship low dirty gods.(175) Given that she is basing her conclusions on accounts given by anthropologists working in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and not on her own experience it is perhaps unfair to criticize her too severely. Il is disappointing, however, given the extent to whieh her operating thesis refutes this type of eharacterization of Korean women. Why does she so readily dismisses Chinese women as peripheral to religious Iife? One also wonders at the severity of her interpretation of these anthropologists' work on Chinese women. The qualified and • temporary status of Korean women's pollution (by menstruation, 57

birth and death) allows them to worship the gods as usual wh en they are c1ean. Kendall's insight into the temporal differential • structuring ritual access and spiritual pollution in no way impacts upon her reading of Chinese women. (175) Interestingly enough, the passage she quotes from Ahern's classic account "The Power and Pollution of Chinese Women", does not give credence to the notion that Chinese women are essentially unclean, rather than situationally unclean, Iike Korean women: "It may be events that are polluting rather th an women per se, but polluting events are events that intrude new people or remove old ones in a male oriented kinship system." (Ahern, 213, quoted in Kendall, 175) Again, one wonders what rhetorical work is accomplished through the privileging of Korean women's ritual experience at the expense of Chinese women. At the very least this seems an unthinking (though precise) displacement of the peripheral/central binary. At worst it seems an attempt to render Korean women as the proper subjects of a feminist East Asian anthropology. Indeed, while maintaining the importance of women's rituals and the position of power held by a shaman, Kendall continues to emphasize the complementarity of women's roles with those of men, and allows us to see how the shaman continues to be denigrated along with the ritual roles of the women she serves, by themselves as weil as by their men. (28) The point that she has made is perhaps that "peripheral cuIts" are in fact not peripheral, rather than because Korean women are not peripheral to their society, they do not participate in peripheral • cuits. 58

1 have discussed briefly the difficulties at times of situating nuns in the realm of the abject, particularly when they are • constituted by the state as religious subjects. 1 would like to tum now to an examination of the position of mediums in state discourse. In present day China, spirit mediums l'aH illio the category designated as feudal superstition along with geomancers, diviners and other people who make a living off of their spiritual talents. Il is associated "...with, among other things, economic backwardness, low political consciousness, crime, the old society, evil, lack of virtue, irrationality, the market, and women." (Anagnost, 1987, 44) Anagnost gives a nice account of the type of discourse used in campaigns against spirit mediums. which usually involves exposing them as fakes, and showing the type of tricks they employ to make people credulous. (Anagnost, 1987) ln the early eighties there were three subcategories of superstition: religious superstition (zongjiao mixin), common superstition (yiban mixin) and feudal superstition (fengjian mixin). These refer respectively to institutional religion, household and community ritual practice, and the activities of ritual practitioners whose services can be bought. (Anagnost, 1994, 234) By 1986 the first category had been eliminated when the state recognized the right to religious belief, although in its ideological material it still emphasized the need to keep religious expression under surveillance to ensure that it was not misused by "bad elements" and maintains its belief in the eventual demise of religion following the logic of historical materialism. (236) A • distinction was also made between the second two categories. 59

Common religious practices such as ancestor worship, offerings to the earth god or the god of wealth, or auending annual festivals, • were the acts of ignorant people that should be countered with education and propaganda. Feudal superstition, however, is iIIegal. (235) Superstition as a category is set up against civilization; it is associated with peasants, backwardness, excess, waste, "...the "other" of modernity" against which the state must struggle."(232) Those who engaged in superstitious belief are marginal people, elderly, poor, uneducated, female, living in peripheral areas. (239) As China becomes more prosperous, il was believed that superstition would disappear. When it did not, in fact when it f10urished under economic prosperity, the Party had to reinvent its narrative of progress. Superstition thus became symbolic of what happened when market forces were allowed to run wild. Emphasis was put on the development of socialist morality and economic prosperily at the same time. (238) *** ln sorne ways the ethnographie data 1 present here is similar to that of Potter's and Kendall's. Both mediums have gone through the usual Iife stages deemed necessary to becoming a medium. Neither were particularly young women, both were married with children, both were peasants. Each of them experienced sorne sort of trauma after which they began to trance. However, their status is quite different from the shamans described by Poiler. One of them has had sorne trouble interacting with her community; the other is a leader in hers. • Neither however could be described as marginal. 60

One of the mediums lives in a huge temple called Tianyun Dian (Hall of Heavenly Clouds) in Fengting Zhen (Haian village). • When she was 37 she suddenly passed out and woke up speaking the language of Huian county which borders the Fengting zhen (market town) area. Even though she was born in Fengting, she now speaks the Xianyou language with a Huian accent. She began healing the sick. She was so successful that she was able to build a huge temple with the money she earned. The temple is somewhat unusual in that she and her family live there; and so it looks like a cross between a temple and a house. The altar runs all the way along the north side of the main hall. Unlike a typical village temple, the gods are not in an a1cove set back and up high with an altar in front of the aicove, with side altars along the walls. Rather, there are several gods including the Jade emperor, Dao Gong and Dai Yuanshui (Protector of the temple), on a table in the open about chest height with receptac1es for incense placed in front of the god, rather like an altar in a family home. In 1989 the medium gave consultations from her home. In 1990 she started to build the temple on 3 mu of land. She built the front half of the bottom floor one year, and the back half the next, completing it in 1992. The land originally belonged to the village and then was distributed to other families. The three production team leaders originally planned to give her the land, but because the land had already been given to other people, they were unable to come to an agreement. Then Bao Gong told the medium she could not wait for the production teams to give it to • her, she had to buy the land herself. 50 she took her family's 6 1

land, 0.6 mu, and exchanged it for 0.6 of the land she wanted. Afterwards she bought the other 2.4 mu with incense money, that • is money donated by people who came to consult her. She still plans to build a wall and an opera stage. She has already used more th an two hundred th ou sand renminbi to build the temple. When she started building the temple, a villager, now in J'aiwan, wanted to give her twenty thousand rmb but she refused. But the overseas Chinese would not take it back so they finally agreed it wou Id be a loan Because the villagers did not give land or money to build this temple they cannot interfere with the temple's affairs. This seems to be an important consideration for her. There seems to be sorne bad feelings between her and the villagers over the issue of land, and a certain amount of jealousy over her material success. Nonetheless she is weil respected as a powerful medium. Hel' husband is a peasant, and they have three children. When 1 was there her eldest daughter, who was 17 years old, had just gotten man'ied to a man from Xianyou city who entered her family, which gives sorne indication of the wealth and prestige of this family. The god who most frequently possesses her is Bao Gong, a famous Song dynasty judge, who, according to legend, was renamed Bao Qingtian by the peasants. Qingtian refers to blue sky, because it is believed that while the Jade Emperor has the concerns of the peasants at heart there are many evil forces which obscure his view of the world. Bao Qingtian however makes the • sky c1ear so t"~ Jade Emperor can see what is really going on. 62

Numerous stories about his cases are collcctcd in a Qing dynasly publication titled Bao Gong An. At this time Fujian TV was • broadcasting a popular Taiwanese television series about the exploits of Bao Gong that many people were watching in the countryside. Requests have been made that it be replayed on national television. This medium said when she trances Bao Gong enters her body. Then she can diagnose the sick or look at their luck, and can exorcise evil spirits. When she diagnoses the sick she uses this method: first, she determil'I:s what sort of iIIness it is, second she tells the person whether this iIIness can be cured through ordinary methods, Le. whether they should go see a doctor or not, third, she will give .hem a number of talismans (fu) as medicine or as a method of gelting rid of ghosts and evil spirits (mental illnesses in particular are considered to be the work of demons). When she helps people determine their luck she used the bWliu bwei- divination blocks- two kidney shaped blocks with three possible responses, yes, no, or the god is laughing, that is, the question is not worth allswering. She throws the divination blacks three times, then depending on the series of three she looks up the answer in a divination book. She can read and so reads out the responses to her clients. More importantly she can explain the stories that she reads. Many women her age can read now, but will not necessarily know the meaning of the stories. Many of the stories come from famous classicat novets such as Joumey to the West. or Romance of the Three Kingdoms. While 1 was there, a woman had come to consult her about a • sick child. She went into trance. The gad told the woman not to 63

worry. the ehild will soon start eating again. Then she took three • talismans. rubbed them down the front and baek of the woman, iii lhem on fire, eircled her head lhree limes, then let them burn out in a dish. The woman will take the ashes home to mix with waler and give to the ehild to drink. In her temple we examined many of the commemorative f1ags that people who had reeeived cures from her had sent. There were 198 large searlet fags with embroidered writing. AIs'J. there were two long strips of yellow fabrie whieh had been divided into squares on whieh many commemorative messages were also wriUen. Altogether 166 of these squares had been filled in. The medium said these were ail given by people she had eured of illness to thank Bao Gong. She said most people just gave her money. but these people wanted to make a partieular point. (see appendix) In Jinjing fuyang eun (Golden weil rieh plains village) in Daji zhen. Chongxing tang, there is also a medium. Chongxing Tang is a Three-in-one temple. The most important gods there are Lin Zhao'en (Sanyi Jianzhu) and his friend Zhuo Wanehun. The goddess who possesses the medium is Yang Bajie. She was the daughter of Yang Jingye, a Song dynasty general who defeated the Liao dynasty. He had seven sons and one daughter. They were aIl famous for their military prowess and were known as Yang Jiajiang (Yang family generals??) In the beginning years of the Song dynasty, the Liao dynasty, a Mongolian nation eontinued to harass the newly formed Song dynasty from behind the Great • Wall, so the Yang family was sent by the Emperor to proteet the 64

empire. Six of Yang's sons died, and the remaining son went to Wutai Shan to become a monk. Yang Wulang later became a very • important god (called Yang Taishi) in Fujian who couId prevent epidemics. In Putian there are many temples dedicated to him. Since there were no sons left, Yang Bajie then led her family's slaves and army against the Liao. From very early on there was a tradition of stories surrounding her exploits against the Liao, and later became the subject of a novel in the Ming (or Qing?) called Yang Jiajiang, part of the historical romance (lishiyanyi) tradition. There are many stories from this cycle in Putian- Xianyou opera. The entire temple was built at the medi.um's behest. She and her husband had worked in the fields. She had five children and a mother-in-Iaw to look after and their economic situation was bad. Then, in 1979, on the twelfth of the fourth lunar month, she was working on a construction project. The sky turned black and there was thunder and lighting. The other workers left, but she remained behind to watch the site. There was an earthquake a'ld a partially finished wall fell on her. She broke her leg and spent the next year or so in the hospital. She was 34 when the accident happened. The second day sile was in the hospital Lin Longjiang, Guan Yin, and Yang Bajie ail appeared to her telling her when she went back to the village, she had to build a temple to them. They showed her the plans for the new temple. After four months in the hospital she went back to her village and told the people at the small Three-in-one temple that was already there what the gods wanted. She returned to the • hospital and when she was fïnally released. she went back to the 65

small temple and started to trance. The new temple was built entirely wilh incense money earned from her consultations. • Although the actual buildings were started earlier, the spectacular stone carvings and the courtyard wall were done in the last four years. Construction of dormitories was going on at the time of my visil, and the medium has plans for further expansion. The major reasons people visit the medium are to ask about iIIness and business prospects. The medium sits at the head of a table placed near Yang Bajie's altar. In front of her are a brush and ink and piles of yellow paper. She writes a talisman on each piece of paper and then stamps it with a chop dipped in red ink. An old man sits further down the table. He writes out instructions for each supplicant as to wherc and when .0 burn the talismans, or, if they have come to ask about a disease, he writes down the medicines prescribed which they then can take to the dispensary located at the front of the tem't'Ie. The first day 1 went there a young man who had graduated from Xiamen University and was presently working in Fuzhou had returned to his hometown to consuit this medium, who also happened to he a friend of his mother's. He told me that when he has problems that he cannot tell to anyone but the gods he cornes back to consult her. He invited me to watch his consultation and afterwards translated what had taken place (they communicated in local dialect, of course). He was planning to go to Guizhou, Sichuan and Wuhan on business and was worried about the success of the trips. Yang Bajie said that he would he successful if • he burnt her talismans when he first arrives in each place. His 66

eIder sister also consulted the medium. At the time she was twenty-seven years old and not yet married. She was also • provided with talismans and told that if her boyfriend burnt them, his luck wouId improve and they would be able to get married. They encouraged me to ask a question, saying that the goddess wouId be able to tell me where 1 was born, how old 1 was, anything 1 wanted to ask. Deciding it was better to start with something a Iittle more general 1 asked about sorne travel plans 1 had for the summer and received supernatural approval for them. A few days later 1 returned with a number of friends who wanted to eonsult the medium. As before there was a line of people waiting to consult her. When we first arrived there was a car from the Putian Public Security Bureau. As mediums are still considered charlatans by the government, and can be arrested for cheating people, although il does not happen much anymore, we were a bit worried. But it turned out that the two men from the PSB were there for a consultation as weil. They had been invited to eat. They were obviously somewhat embarrassed to be consulting her and kept waiting for the room to clear so they could ask their questions in private, but finally had to give up. Both times 1 was there it was obvious that this was a public consultation, often with other people who 'Nere waiting their turn, or who were just watching adding their own orinions or observations on someone's case. The PSB men asked abcut sorne work they were engaged in outside of their official jobs. The medium told them that they should be concentrating on their • official jobs and anything else they were doing would meet with 67

trouble. Another man asked about his son's chances for entering university. He was told that his son wou Id passed the entrance • exams but would not do very weil and therefore should not set his sites too high. An agricultural or industrial college would be best and they should find someone of authority in the college he wants to go to help him get a place there. A woman (also a government official, interestingly enough) asked about her husband's chances at promotion. She was also told to find someone who could help. One man asked about building a house. The medium scolded him saying that he had already made the decision himself, why was he asking her what he should do. A woman asked about her mother-in-Iaw's iIIness. The medium said it was stomach cancer and she did not have long to live so her family should make her comfortable and do their best to make her happy. They could consult a biomedical doctor if they wished; he or she might be able to prolong her life a bit. Another woman consulted her about her family's business. They were presently selling produce in the city market and now her husband wanted to buy a car and become a driver. The medium said their original business was good, and that buying a car was a bad move. The womtm said that her husband also had a chance to go to Henan to get sorne rare mushrooms which they would bring back to Xianyou to sell. The medium said that if they really wanted to change from their original business, this was a better plan than buying a car. This woman came with a relative who asked about twenty thousand rmb her husband had lent out. The medium said if they helped • the person they had lent the money to earn SOrne money then 68

they wouId get the money back, olherwise they would never see

it again. She also asked if her husband should also go 10 Henan on • the mushroom expedition. This was approved. This case was interesting because the woman was very upsel al the idea thal the money might not be returned and tried to ask what her husband was to do. The medium having answered her original question however, brushed her off and wenl onto the next person. The woman kept lrying to break back in, but lhe iiledium refuscd to acknowledge her. This was the case for each consultalion. lt was done as fast as possible, and one could almost imagine her shouting "Next!" after each quick response. Another woman stepped up to ask a question and the medium immedialely slal'led to scold her saying lhat she was too argumentative, Iiked to curse people too much and was always ordering her husband around rather than Ii.;tening to him. 1 spoke with this woman afterwards and she said that she had not Iislened to anything the medium said because her family was Christian, and her mother had always told her consulting such people was a sin. She had come wilh sorne friends and had decided to ask sorne questions for fun, but in the end had been too scared to Iisten to the answers. *** 1 have characterized nuns in Xianyou as inhabiling lhe domain of the abject in relation to the palrilineal family. Il is perhaps more accurale to describe them as liminal, partially disappearing. They reappear in relation to the state, eonstiluted as religious subjects, as examples of the government's Iiberal • poliey on freedom of religion. 1 expeeted initially that il would he 69

in relation to the state that mediums would be constituted as abjected bodies, but they do not disappear. Rather, they are • figures against which the post-Mao state can set itself up against in its ritualized battle against ail that is backward and uncivilized in China. (Anagnost, 1994, 229) Anagnost points out that the signifier feudal superstition exceeds any material threat it may actually pose to the CCP's hegemony, but provides an opportunity for the state to represent itself as modern and activist, as a force in society, as a force of discipline. How then do the mediums described in this narrative operate within this binary? The binary logic in state and scholarly discourse frequently acts to mark mediums a embodying a kind of monstrous femininity, replete with associations of the backward, the irrational, the embarrassing remnants of feudal society. How does one reconcile the typology of these discourses with the stories of the two women 1 have described? The medium from Chongxian temple is no longer bounded by kin roles. She lives apart from her family in the temple and effectively acts as the leader of that temple, having built it in the first place, and now directs its expansion. Ail kinds of people consult her on ail kinds of matters, not just the minor matters which Kendall suggests are the purview of female mediums in China(173-4). The medium from Fengting still lives with her family in the temple built from her incense money on land she herself purchased. She does not have as strong a leadership role in her conununity as the medium from Chongxian temple, but this may come with lime. Both are • extremely weil respected and are considered extremely 70

efficacious. People travel from far away to consult them, Women and men, peasants. workers, university graduates, even • government officiaIs and foreign scholars seek the gods' advice. One can hardly describe either of them as marginal, low in status and only consulted by people equally peripheral to the large.' community. There may be less successful female mediums who occupy more marginal positions in their communities.3 Il seems however that a certain amount of professional success allows certain women to exceed the expectations of their gender, ln sorne sense, one could described the Chongxian temple medium in particular as having been masculinized. At the very least she is no longer performing her gender perfectly. 1 do not wish to suggest that these mediums effect a complete disruption of gender categories, but perhaps il is possible to see here with the interruption of one of the terms in the binary the link with the other terms is thrown into disarray. In sorne ways, professional and/or religious considerations have de-feminized these two women. How exactly they are gendered, when eX3ctly they are gendered is unclear to me. Is it only as religious specialists that they fail to perform a more traditional gender l'Ole? How have they disrupted it? Have they becorne masculinized, or have they simply expanded what it means to be a woman under certain circumstances? How do their gender roles fit in with their kin roles, and how are they gendered in their own families? How (or for that matter does) state discourse affect their status? Does the

3Professor Zheng Zhenman tells me that there are in fact minor female mediums that resemble more closely those described by Jack Poiler in the • Xianyou area although 1 never encountcred any. 7 1

gendering of mediums in state discourse as feminine affect male and female mediums differently? This type of gender analysis • opens up ail sorts of questions around the relationships and interactions between religious specialists, the state, scholarship and community in (1 think) provocative ways. How these questions may be answered remains to be seen.

• 72

Five: Possession and Melancholy: • The Poetry of Huo Buyun 1 have argued for the primacy of the patriline in the construction of kin and gender roles, and for the importance of kin roles in constructing gendered subjectivity in China. In the chaptel' on mediums 1 suggest sorne of the ways in which what counts as gender shifts, and what sorne of the implications of that shifting arc for our analysis of it as a category of knowledge and of being. We must learn to pursue how subjects emerge and disappear from view and perhaps even viability depending upon their performance of social scripts (e.g., kin roles) which they may or may not be familial' with. In this chapter 1 would Iike to nominate another gendering protocol which is not immediately legible in terms of kin roles, a femininity that exists outside of the l'oies of mother, daughter-in law, daughter and that transforms the l'ole of wife. Recent scholarship (Ko, 1994, Widmer, 1989) on women in the late Ming and Qing has been suggestive in thinking through possibilities for gendered identities that exist contingently and temporarily outside of a patrilineal ideology. In particular, discussions of qing l (emotion, passion) hllve been suggestive of how both men and women might perform genders that exceed kin roles. Katherine Carlitz (1994) in her discussion of stories of virtuous women indicates a shift in emphasis from loyalty to love, from stories where emotion is

1Dorothy Ko(1994) gives a nice summary of late Ming and Qing discussions around qing , variously translated as love, emotioll or passion. Sec chapter 2. She sites the cult of Qing as contributing to the rise in companionate marriages (p. 87, 183-5), or at least to ils currency as an ideal form of • marriage. 73

considered disruptive and dangerous to tales in which intense • emotion is given a positive valence. (104) She sees the eroticization of the body of the widow occurring in the late Ming in which physical beauty and intense dedication become key elements around which tales of virtue are told. (117) Iildeed, the boundaries between stories of principle and stories of romantic love are blurred as an emphasis on emotion as a positive virtue displaces an emphasis on notions of loyalty and righteousness. The young widow who dies of grief, or kills herself in dedication to her husband become a figure of romance. Indeed, Confucians such as Lü Kun objected to women who committed suicide in order to follow their husbands into death c1aiming that .....they were dying not for righteousness (yi) but for passion(qing)." (117) This kind of passion between men and women was seen by people such as Lü Kun as dangerous; it disrupted the hierarchical separation of the sexes and removed men's focus on the patrilineal family and their filial duties to their parents. (118,119) Wives were not for falling in love with but for producing heirs. The privileged status of Confucian discourse did not, of course, prevent the f10urishing of what has been called a cult of qing (Ko, 68). Although qing was not always conceived of as love and/or passion for auother person, it is that meaning which is of most importance to my discussion here. It is around this concept that figures of erotic and melancholic love were created; the Iink between love and death, the loss of the beloved and subsequent inability for continued existence points to a way of gendering that is disruptive of gendering along kin roles around the patriline and the reproductive body. It is • important, 1 think, to recognize that class relations/identities are also 74

tied to kinship/patrilinellineage formations and that the constitution of a certain class hierarchy makes room for another economy of • desire. either as the marker of a level of privilege or as an ideologically sanctioned vision of excess.2 This is not to suggest that one can escape constitutive constraints of gender by virtue of c1ass privilege (in sorne cases it is quite the opposite). but that c1ass will innect gendering differently. 1 want now to turn to a text frorn the late Qing which encapsulates sorne of these themes: it is a story of a young woman who dies for love and who through her own writing and the writings of men responding to her poetry is constituted as an highly erotic subject of both virtue and melancholy. 1 use rnelancholy here in its specifically psychoanalytic valence as that subjective condition entailed by the internalization of a lost object of love. in which "the melancholic refuses the loss of t:te object. and internalization becomes a strategy of magically resuscitating the lost object. not only because the loss is painful. but because the ambivalence felt toward the object requires that the object be retained until differences are settled." (Butler. 1990. 61-2) The melancholic wields her wound as a weapon. Rather than disappearing she recalls the abject to the social. She is constituted in the abject as horror. death. loss but refuses to be dismissed. ignored. contained and erupts instead into the social. 1 wouId like to suggest that this movement to an erotics of melancholy3 places under erasure (indeed renders virtually

2See Zeitlin (1991) for a discussion of a highly regulated form of excess in the form of "obsession" which was the marker of a "truc" gentleman in the late Ming. • 3Sec Salah (unpublished manuscript) 75

invisible) kinship as the condition for the constitution of gender and • enacts melancholy and Qing as its condition (the precondition for kinship and gender). The following text is a piece of spirit writing that 1 came across in the government archives in Xianyou city. Unfortunatcly the person who had gathered the text from the temple in which the spirit writing took place W;JS unavailable for me to talk to, so 1 do not know which specifie area of Xianyou it is from, or the context in which it was gathered. It is a fairly old piece; dating from the 1860's. The spirit who çommunicates through the medium is the suicide of a young WOmal.I, Huo Bu)'un. She possesses the medium to

tell her story and rest from her wanderings for 11 whil(;. A number of men hear and read her story and write poems in response to il. These poems in turn elicit more poems from her, as weil as an elaboration on her autobiography. A final poem in response to the entire exchange was added in 1948. *** This piece of spirit writing is identified as having been transmitted in the Oak Mountain Room of the Emerald Cloud Grotto and is titled "Lady scholar Huo Buyun's poems and lyrics written through spirit possession". The preface s~ate~ that initially Lady Huo spûke in the name of one of the eight immortals, Lu Zhenren, on the twenty-first day of the tenth month ili the eleventh year of Xianyou periocl in the reign of Emperor Xian Feng (Wenzong) of the Qing (1861). She assures those present that this transmission is a true possession and that she is indeed an immortal with certain powers • over good and bad fortune. Then she breaks down and admits that 76

in fact she is nOl the Reali:>:ed Man Lu, but only a woman, She sketches out a brief biography to thc cffcct that shc was from Shanxi, • was Iiterate, that her father was an official and that shc and thc l'cst of her family accompanied him on his way to takc up a post in Mindong (that is, north-eastern Fujian), On thc way therc, thc boat they were on capsized and her entire family drowncd, She thcn married a certain Liu Lang who died tcn days after thcir wcdding, His family was destitute and his mother altemptcd to force Huo into prostitution. She drowned herself to preserve her chastity. Shc thcn composes a poem:

Reealling past mallers my lears arc numerous My jade bones and iey nesh l'est on noating c10uds For ten lhousand years 1 will not forget illY halred of Ihe lish bellies One eold moon aeeompanied my sorry soul

Wandering for a generalion like spring mist A prelly woman unfortunate in life sinee ancienl times is eommonplaee [ran- natural) Red leaf poelry is preserved yel people do not see it How pitiful! 1 resent my dealh, before my dressinll table

Fu Zexie, who is apparently the medium through whom this communication takes place, responds with a poem of his own:

Before casting away life, earthly eoneerns are numerous An immortal wind, graeeful and delieale enlrusling herself to the emerald cloud [grollO) Conversing deeply on past events, her poelry is ail blood 1 wish to use this ineense of the heart [sineerity] to summon the soul

Flourishing the brush and seallering the paper, 1 wait for the elouds and smoke [that is, possession) 1 suddenly hear a sad song and my sadness doubles It is as though in the past 1 met the guest who amended the histories [Ban Zhao ?) Hel' fragrant reputation ought to erown her first of one • hundred flowers 77

This exchange is typical of the entire piece. In the next poem, Huo • continues to lament her sorry slate:

gefleelions (gan huai) Everywhere mlsts and clouds wcre ail ovcr thc ground, thc soul was soUtary A self-pltylng countenancc crowns the Suzhou girl How forlunalc for mr to have met someonc who can undcrsland my pipa lamcnt With a single word lhe pocm Is compleled, a drop of blood becomes a pearl

My accumulaled regrel Is vast. My grief drains lhe Heavens (or, 1 grleve al an indifferenl Heaven?) A prelly woman, a green mound, who Is lhl'(e 10 plly'! Green willows do Dol discrlminale lhe face of lhe easl wind EmplUy 1 walch lhe idle flowers. My lhoughlS are irresolule.

Twenly years have come. 1 shed lhe lead flower My grieved soul comes and goes now wilhoul a famUy The fale which brought lovers logelher for one hundred generalions, loday where is il? Cul off from lhe weSlern river, water is a vasl flood

Liu Lang did nol eal lhe pepper and sesame for very long Unworlhy of my beauly. v,hich slnce ancienl times has caused problems Mosl sad was lhe pcach blossom which followed lhe flowing waler The fisherman cul off from lhe Wulin clouds

1 look upou my own sorrowful sou! as like lhe misl in the willows Why shollid 1 alone be united wilh ail the immortals? Liu Lang is nol Usled in lhe regislers of Heaveu My guIs arc lwisled. the spring wind is even more pltiful

These two poems point to two key developments in her narrative. her search for her lost lover, whom she presumably expected to be reunited with in death. and her developing relationship with Fu Zexie. Fu Zexie answers in kind. emphasizing her sorrow and her Iiterary talent. She responds. denying her talent. but demanding pitY for her sad Iife. She describes how she met Liu Lang and alludes • again to Tao Qian's The Peach Blossom Spring. Her third set of 78

poems again raises the idea of her connection with Fu Zcx.ic. and hCI' • desire for tex.tual immortality: One time my brush is as though possessed If 1 made known the depths of my feeling, you would trust thul they were lrue Drowned no word of me was passed on; slill 1 have lingering resellUllell1 The spring wind alone ean beeome the body of lhe green willow

A red skirt is not remembered released from this Iife At Dealh 1 am separated from li fe- this mislaken former existence At the banks of the Ben river 1 meel the person who knows me Ilesl [zhi yin] How piliful il is not lhe person of former limes

Twenly years have gone by, 1 went easl and west Now how can 1 bear 10 say empty [wordsJ [Wang] Zhaojun already wrole her pipa lament The chcss game thal lasted a lhousand years. will lhis finish'/

Since ancient limes the bloom of youlh has ended in the grave Il has been Iike Ihis until now, whal cise can yon seek'/ My sou1 is graleful below the [Yellow] Springs If 1 cannot reward Ihis kindness 1 swear 1 will never ,est.

She then writes a poem to a Chen Meiyan assuring him that she is not a demon, and another to a Li Xueshou praising his talent and warning him not to be idle, She then transmits three poems titled "Sighing over the Liu Lang of this age". In the first she claims the supremacy of emotion (qing) and laments the fate wl1ich parted her and her husband. Next she writes about how she was comforted in the Emerald Cloud Grotto after having searched for her lover for twenty years. Finally she writes that for twenty years she was Iikc driftwood, but now she may he able to get rid of her resentment and sorrow. Il seems in the classic resolution of grief she has transferrcd her desire to a new love object and so is released from her melancholic incorporation of the lost belovl:d. But can she get rid of • 79

him so easily? After ail her entire identity is based (ln her existence as the pitiful lost soul searching for her beloved. • Next she writes a series of Jaments for famous people in history who presumably had fates as sorrowful as her own. These include Zhuge Liang, Wang Zhaojun, Xishc: and Lady Ban Jieyun.4 A poem by Fu Zexie in which he describes himself waiting in the cold for her next communication follows. He is rewarded; she answers by writing that the only thing she despises is one who does not feel enough. Fu's next poem suggests that her name is being restored through her poctry. In the next few poems he repcats his comments on how sad her Iife specifically and women's lives more generally have been. He suggests that poetry is a route to immofîality and for Huo specifically it is a way to recompense her for her sufferings. and to brÎ:'g her in contact with the friend who understands her [zhi yin]. Huo answers in a relatively cheerful nature poem. Then another of the denizens of the Emerald Cloud Grotto suggests that her emotions resolved and

her name restored she may have no need to continue in her present existence:

Isn't il too bad she was born a woman, and even saddcr that she's a wandering ghost. She only lodged temporarily i.l a mountain room for a few days and then left 1 don'l know whether feelings of parting [aCIer this encounter) will disperse her?

A more detailed version of her autobiography follows:

1 am from Neidong street, Huayin City, Tongzhou prefecture, Shanxi. My family name is Huo and my given names arc Buyun. From a young age 1 Icarnt poetry from my fathcr. Each day 1 made progress. Whoever mel me had tender affection for me. My father's name was Qi and his style was Ziling.... He was fifty-six when he was appointed district police

4The list also includes Prime Minister Wen, a Southern Song Loyalist who was • decapitated by the Mongols while facing south lowards Hangzhou. 80

magistrate in Mindong. My mother, Madame Yang, was fi ft y-four. She was the womb sister of juren Yang Zhongxin. In the nineteelllh yeur of Dao Guan's relgn (1839), tt.e l'irst week of the tenth monlh, he lllok ulong his family and wenl. On the road il wus ruiny und overeust for twenty • duys. From the half ferry the wind wus l'ieree. Sudly we were trieked by one of the ha~lers [of Ihe ferry]. The entire fumily wus drowned: My father and mother, two people, my eider brothers und their wives, six people, IWO olde: women relatives and two ehildren. There were draggers and haulers and five were drowned. This wus u multer of the fifteenth day of the twelfth month. At th ut time 1 wus fourleen yeurs uld. The next year ln the fourth monlt. 1 was sold outside of Suzhou- in western Duwei. In this place the rouds were lung- mure thun twelllY li. Mother Zhang used 780 liang of gold to buy me. When 1 flrst jolned the world of prostitution my ehustity did not chunge. Although 1 was inelined 10 reelte poetry, 1 couId also play the zither, ehess und paint. Mother Zhang usuaily called me her daughter. There was u screen, on one side were rallings. A bed was set up inside the rallings. 1 wus on the inside of the railing, the guest was on the outside. Thuse whu asked for the zither paid two Iiang. Those whu asked fur wriling, puetry ur painting paid one Iiang. 1 would not pluy chess with them, huwever. There was a Master Liu whose name was Changfang who was talented and unconventional and good at Iiterature. He had both these qualities. He waJ from that same prefecture, outside tlle eity in North Wei. Deili was ten li north of Suzhou. Master Liu had come tu my plaee, expending much of his <:nergi~:;, he spent not a Iitlle muney, therefore 1 was betrothed to h;m. Mother Zhang was also very happy. 1 was sixteen years old, Liu was nineteen. We had been married ten .Iays when he died. Il was tlle twenty ninth day of the first munth uf the twenty-Iïrst year of Dao Guan (1841). Liu Lang had a mother and an ulder sister. At first, they had been wealthy, but then the evil sister had slllien everything. There was only 60 mulberry trees and a Iillle uver twenty Qing (6.6 hectares) of land and that was ail. As fur myself, when 1 eame to his family 1 was nearly destitute....When 1 married Liu Lang 1 had two Iiang gold. one pair of jade bracelcts, clothes and ornaments were al su not a few. Aftcrwards the evll sister brought in thieves who stole the cash, jade and jewelry. 1 only had the c10thes lefl. Artel' Liu Lang died 1 had to pawn themall off. The sister's husband abanduned me ln Xiangsheng (lst degree graduate) Liu Zhegui who was at thut time already over sixty. 1 was impoverished in the Liu f.1mily bUI determined not to disgrace myself. The next year on the first day of the second month in the you hour 1 threw myself iDto the water ;"ld died. 1 calculate that 1 was born ;n the ji hour of the eighth day of the fuurth month of the bingxu year (1826) so 1 was 17 years old. Ah Ah. 1 came to this place for a reason. and in my poetry 1 set it out in detall and it is clear in itself. Not disputing with the spring winds, my tears flood furth. My pent-up feelings of sadness are gut-wrenching. The next section is by the colleagues of the Emerald Cloud Grotto. They praise her five virtues: she was born into a good houschold. she is intelligent and understands writing and hisïOry. she is beautiful, • meek and modest. she is pure. and she is devoted. They claim that 8 1

the morality of the world has declined and therefore it is important to let the world know about Huo Buyun.

• Nexl follows the "Emerald Cloud Grollo's preface 10 explain whal is obscure". Il is a lenglhy poelic recapilulalion of Huo Buyun's life in her voice. Ils language is also lhat of tears, mourning, lonelilless, coldness, r(lgrel. It adds also the desire to achieve immorlality lhrough her poetry. This section ends wilh a noie by Li *'" [illegible characlers]:

1 saw the recluse of the laequer garden Fu Zexie. 1 looked at the draCts and although 1 nor.nally do not believe in ghosls and spirits, besmirchlng chastity is somelhing a Confucian wou Id be ashamed of. These arc the tribulalions a talented woman eneounters. Difficuilles in love, anxious to the end. she was filled with feeling and sorrow. Every line of ner poems cornes stralght from her he~rt and guts. How could there be [amongst us] secking aCter f10wers and willows of the dusly world? We can give one or two reasons. However. as for works that speak of love it is perhaps best if wc do nol diseuss them in full. Bul as for many slanzas lhat eulogize antiqulty. these indeed show a knowledge of lhe ancielo's' times and doings. The brush slrokes of lhe poems can be seen to be of an uncommon nature. 1 asked around amongsl the gentry and they agreed lhis was excellent. Afler this a number of poems by different people appear, presumably by the gentry whose opinions were sought after by Li **. Sorne of these follow in the same vein as Huo's poems lamenting her sarry state with allusions to other ;premely melancholic poetry such as the Peach Blossom Spring (tlle loss of fairyland):

the immorlal mountain shimmers amongsl the clouds cooked food pepper and sesame arc ail empty the fisherman in front to the cave in vain gazes longingly Peach blossoms as of old fall in the eastern wind Others are wrillen specifically in her voice:

My rouge and eyciiner arc Iike mounlains but il is hard for them 10 form an image My golden 10luses traipse silently upon the moon Emerald Cloud Grotto is a thousand fecl deep • Il isn't deep enough for this lonely spirit's feelings of long ~Ield love 82

One poem is by someone (Huang Jizu) who daims 10 be a contemporary Liu Lang. In doing so he interrupts the completion of • her work of mourning. By reincorporating her lost beloved, by continuing to demand tha'. she love Liu Lang, Huang is demanding that Huo does not resolvt the grieving process, bul maintains he .. melancholy state, the state in which she is virtuous and desirable. The document ends with a lengthy poem which recapitulales the entire text. It was added by s:>meone in the Nationalist period who daims that although he is nvt a Iiterary man, he was so moved by Huo Buyun's story that he had to comment on il. *** If we follow the schema that 1 set up previously (though 1 hope 1 have succeeded in complicating this model throughout), of a construction of gender inextricably Iinked to the performance of kin roles, where those who fail to properly inhabit kin subjectivities inhabit instead the domain of the abject, the non-subjects, the dangerous, then Huo Buyun should not have a narrative. She is a woman without family, without descendants, a suicide. She should be a hungry ghost, dangerous because of her misery, in need of containment, necessary to placate so that she does not cause trouble for the living. It is gods who possess mediums, it is gods whose words are recorded in spirit writings, nm the suicides of young girls, girls who have no proper kin l'oies to inhabil. Hua Buyun enacts the meiancholic as the retum of the reFessed, as the haunting destabilization of the social norms which regulate kin/gender relations. 'Nhat 1 want to emphasize ._"re is how Huo Buyun's • discourse is productive of melancholic affect. First, as 1 have already 83

mentioned, Buyun's discourse consists in multiple, and multilayered citations of melancholic figures from Chinese Iiterature. ln fact one • might see the strategies of melancholy at work as she invokes and incorporates these figures to embody, to f1esh out as it were, her own discourse. Secondly, in her performance of the virtllous lost beloved she occasions the self productions of the scholars she speaks to, as the lover of the beloved, as he who exists only through the melancholic relation to an ideal but unrealizab!:: love. What's more, these relations of desire and loss function in a triangular fashion, with the third point as it were being the losl lover of Huo Buyun. As

the relations of desire as always also those of ar , identification, (however disavowed) thesl~ scholars are giv~n to identifying, not only with Huo Buyun's lost lover, but with Buyun herself in her dc~ire for that figure and her desire to incorporate the romantic/erotic/melancholic figure of one who died for virtue and cannot rest for love.5 This text also raises interesting issues around the ritual dimensions of gentry associations and the blllrring of lines between spirit writing associations, poetry circles and gentry contacts. There is a certain amount of panic present in the text; Huo Buyun must assure Chen Meiyan that she is not a demon, and Li ** denies a belief in ghosts and spirits. Il is her poetry, i.e., her citation of China's enormous literary tradition, that allows her to be reincorporated into

5Sec Eve Sedgwick's discussion of the triangulation of desire between the beloved and the rivais for the affections of the beloved in which desire and identilication exists simultaneously between ail three points of the triangle. (1985. 21) In this case. the gentry poems are either in her voice identifying themselves with her desire and melancholy, or are by the eontemporary Liu Lang. whereby the author identifies himself with the beloved, the one who • deserves the eteroal devotion of the virtuous and erotic figure of Huo Buyun. 84

the social. A slip occurs between demons and passion (qing), an intermingling of disruptive phantasies which haunt the edges of the • cool rational world of the literati who both seek after and seek to ward off the dangerous pleasures of possession and passion. "''''''' ln this thesis, 1 have considered the matter of women's ritual practices in Xianyou through the optic of gender and subjeclivity in an attempt to tease out the mutual implication of ri tuai praclices and gendering subjectivity. Much of the scholarship done on women and religion in China has focused on pollution beliefs (Ahern, 1975; Seaman, 1981) or on female goddesses (Sangren, 1983; Berthier, 1988). Much of this work is fascinating and has been groundbre?king in a variety of ways. 1 hope that moving to a more thoroughgoing inquiry into gender as a category of analysis may open up new possibilities for thinking about women and religion in China. Although the fieldwork 1 have done is very preliminary, 1 hope it points to various possibilities for exploring women's ritual experiences. By exe!llining the interstices of kin roles and gender roles 1 have attempted to suggest the particularities of subject constitution around iterative norms in China. If kin and gender roies are mutually constitutive, then the patriline takes on key importance in gender constitution in Xianyou. For most women ritual practices are about the ritual caretaking of their families. The specificities of kin and gender roles in China are derived from the patriline taken as the ideal family form in Chin2. Ritual constitutes family; participation in • ritual constitutes kin roles such as wife and daughter-in-Iaw. 85

Women act to reproduce the patriline through material and ritual means. • 1 also suggest that nunneries, rather than offering an alternative to or disrupting the patrilineal family act as ilS constitutive outside. The nunnery contains the detritus of the patrilineal family, troublesome ancestors, unwanted progeny and women who may disrupt the smooth existence of the patriline. While offering an argument for nuns inhabiting the realm of the abject, 1 also emphasize the volatility of the abject. It exists in multiple formulations in relation to multiple ordering discourses. Thus while nuns may in habit the abject in relation to other villagers, they emerge as religious subjects in relation to the State. Likewise mediums who signify as horrifying, as criminal, as abjected by the State emerge not only as suhjects in the village but their high status complicates their gender identification, emphasizing the instability and incompleteness of any gendered identity. The enforced and constrained nature of performativity must be emphasized; the punishment for not properly citing regulatory norms for enacting gender may be as drastic as the descent into abje.ction, the removal of personhood. At the same time, because gender is never perfectly consolidated it requires the constant reiteration of norms. This opens up a certain room for maneuvering, a place to shift requirements for normative behaviour. 1 do not want to suggest that changing gender norms is in any way a free and easy task, but 1 want to point to the inevitable crumbling around the edges of any sex/gender system. Because performative acts enact • structural norms which are variable depending on local and because 86

abjection is a shifting domain, the possibilities to negotiate the meaning of subjectivity and the ability to become a subject rel1lain • open (at least partially), Finally, an exal1lination of a spirit writing text cOl1lplicates further the relationship between kin and gender roles, ln it kinship is erased in order to enact a different type of femininity, one that conflates the beloved and the melancholic lover. the beautiful, the virtuous, the miserable, This type of gender analysis opens up questions around the interactions between the State and local community, ri tuai practicc and practices of scholarship and the constitution of subjectivity, With the l'esurgence of popular religious activity in China and its uneasy relationship with the state, 1 think these are important questions to consider in examining the renegotiation of local community and personhood in post-Mao China, Although this resurgence of popular religion has been tagged as an anti-hegemonic move against a repressive state, what kind of norms are installed through a retrenchment of conservative ideals around the patrilineal family system and its ritual hegemony? What spaces will women find for negotiating ~heir subjectivity in what appears to be. as it is in so many parts of the world today, a reinstallation of conservative norms in the hopes for peace and stability, Who will be moved into the abject, and where will the conflict over what constitutes subjectivity come from? ln order to begin to answer sorne of these questions, 1 believe it will be necessary to continue to examine how gender boundaries are mapped, how subjectivities are installed • through iterative norms such as rituals (among other things) in fact 87 to politicize the preconditions of our scholarship and our own status as knowing subjects. 88

Appendix 1

• Most of these f1ags indicated which village. market town (zhen) and/or county (xian) the iIl person was from. Some of the flags also indicated which illness they were afflicted with and how long they had il. Most of them simply recorded general commemorative messages such as saviour of Iife with great kindness (jiuming daen) or protector of the country, pacifying the people ( huguo anmin).

IIInesses: Mental i1Iness (jingshen bing): 58 Foot (jiao maobing): 13 Heart (xinzang bing): 10 Irregular menstruation (yue jing bu zhengchang): 7 Stomach (Wei bing): 7 Liver (gan de bing): 5 Skin (pifu bing): 5 BJindness(yanjing kan bu jian): 3 Dumbness (ya ba): 3 Headaches (tounao you maobing): 3 Kidney (shen de bing): 2 Rheumatism (feng shi bing): 2 Bleeding from the mouth(zuiba Jiu xue): 1 Constipation(niao dao bu tong): 1 Hyperactivity (jia zhuang xian) : 1 • Lungs (fei you maobing): 1 89

Native places: (The first figure indicates large individllal flags. the • second. small squares on the large piece of yellow fabric) l'rom Fengting market town: 48 + 51 l'rom Xianyou county but not l'rom Fengting: 35 + 42 Putian county: 52 + 37 Huian cOllnty: 21 + 5 Fuzhou city: 1 Ninghua county: 1 Jiangle county: 2 Jiangxi province, Nanchang city: 1

Ülder flags were mostly l'rom Fengting; newer ones show that her reputation and influence has spread. The ilInesses she cures are mostly chronic, difficult to cure and have often afflicted the person for many years.

• 90

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