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MAPPING FUJIAN LANDMARKS

Kenneth Dean, NUS

I believe precisely that at the bottom of all our mystical states there are techniques of the body that we have not studied, but which were perfectly studied by and India, even in very remote periods. This socio-psycho-biological study should be made. I think that there are necessarily biological means of entering into ‘communication with God’. Marcel Mauss, Techniques of the Body, 1935, in Schlanger 2006.

Introduction My paper is based on research on stone inscriptions and ethnography of ritual events carried out in Taiwan, Fujian and Southeast Asia. I am by no means an expert on the Neolithic cultures of Southeast China, but I am sympathetic to Fred Damon’s efforts to link structural elements of the relations to space and time of the Melanesian islanders to patterns and processes that developed in , among the pre-Austronesian people (Damon 2017). These people flourished along the lower reaches of Yangzi and crossed over into Taiwan several thousand years ago. From there, they travelled to the Philippines, and then on to the islands of Micronesia and Melanesia and onwards to Hawaii and New Zealand, in different waves facilitated most likely by successive technological improvements in their outrigger canoes. As people originating in what became China, they would have interacted and traded with other groups that would eventually form what Stephen Feuchtwang and Michael Rowlands describe as Chinese civilization in their recent volume, Civilisation recast, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, ch. 6. It is reasonable to assume that the pre-Austronesians would have carried some elements of a mixed civilizational complex with them on their travels, although other of their cultural features remained distinct, such as tattooing the body, blackening or removing teeth, jar burial, in some cases head- hunting, and other features. They would have shared with other members of an evolving proto- Chinese civilization key features such as the cultivation and cooking of millet and later of rice, and the domestication of pigs. Their innovative boat-building technologies would however give them alternative vectors for the spread of Austronesian civilization. Fred’s careful attention to the 2 ecology, material culture and practices of astronomy in Melanesia are inspiring and will no doubt lead to important breakthroughs. I recently came across the Puluto database project that reminds me of the work of Wolfram Eberhard on the Local Cultures of South and East China (Leiden, Brill 1968) which was a follow- up to his study of the local cultures of northwest China. His “cultural chains” were intended to replicate bits of genetic civilisational code that could be combined in different ways at different times and places. His intent was to demonstrate the multiple origins of “Chinese civilization”, and how it drew many elements from surrounding civilisations into the mix. This effort is now entering the age of digital humanities and database construction – which as we all know is only as good as the data entered into it. These studies of the diffusion of civilisational techniques and features had fallen out of favor in anthropology in recent years. Feuchtwang and Rowlands present a powerful call to revive and upgrade these approaches in their new book. I had been working on similar issues in my work over the past few years on the transmission of Chinese civilisational techniques to Southeast Asia, so I was delighted to read their book. They outline some core features of Chinese civilization, going back to Neolithic, and show how it has changed and evolved over the centuries through the establishment of city centers, kingdoms, and finally a unified empire and political system. They conclude that “the core concern of this civilisation is authorisation achieved through the performance of hierarchy, ritual, hospitality, and social relations (Gibeault 2017). It is a civilisation of cosmic historicity authorising asymmetrical relations among humans through encompassing relations with historicised deities” (Feuchtwang and Rowlands 153). They identify several features that hang together in a particular constellation. These include (ritual, self-cultivation, and social) practices of centering of the self, cultural means for generating senses of inside and outside, and the creation of moral milieu. Their discussion of hierarchical encompassment within Chinese civilization leaves space for a cosmology of several heterarchies, all sharing or reconceiving the encompassing . This resonates with a concept of multiple liturgical frameworks within ritual events of Chinese popular religion, which I have introduced in earlier work (Dean 1998). In my own exploration of the transmission of Chinese civilization conceived of as a set of techniques linked together in particular ways, I have sought to explore the spread into Southeast Asia of Daoist ritual practices, intensive and creative networking within clan and regional 3 associations, and techniques of the body in trance spirit possession. These will be the subject of my presentation on Friday. In the first section of this paper, I will draw on some of the stone inscriptions I have collected in the Minnan and Xinghua regions of Fujian, to show how practices of inscription generate historicity and sense of place in the built environment of Fujian. In this part of the paper, I draw inspiration from Wang Mingming’s illuminating study of the neighborhood and ward temples of Quanzhou, and the cosmological principles they embody through their interactions and their access to heterarchies, as well as his recent essay with Michael Rowlands and Sun Jing s on the “cultural garden” zone south of the Quanzhou city walls (Wang, 2016). The second part of the paper explores embodiment in relation to cosmological space, to bring out some of the implications of processes of manipulating space and time in ritual events in Chinese popular religion and ritual. Mapping Fujian landscapes My discussion below concerns the evolution of regional ritual systems and their relation to cosmological principles. But first I must address recent efforts to map religious sites in China in Yang Fenggang’s Atlas of Religion in China: Social and Geographic Contexts (Leiden: Brill 2018). Yang draws on data on officially registered places of worship. In comparison to a village by village survey, this data in some areas may come close to 10 to 25% of the number of actual places of worship. Moreover, the proportions of what are classified as Buddhist and/or Daoist sites to those of the Protestant and Catholic sites is highly skewed in favor of Christian sites, as many sites of popular religious worship are not included in the data. Indeed, Fujian and particularly Putian, is one of the first areas to experiment with the category of “folk belief worship sites (minjian xinyang shiyongsuo)” that are not required to register with either the Buddhist or Daoist national associations. Thus for example, the 15 temples and churches mapped by Yang Fenggang in Xiamen is a far cry from the 120 local, Buddhist and Daoist temples and 68 ancestral halls mapped in that city by my student Danial Murray in his recent dissertation on religion and urban growth in Xiamen (Murray, McGill University PhD 2019). The 820 religious sites Yang maps for the entire Putian and Xianyou region contrasts markedly with the 2500 temples and churches we mapped in 724 villages on the 460 sq km irrigated alluvial Putian plain to the east of Putian city (less than a third of the overall Putian-Xianyou area). 10 to 25% is still slightly better than the 3% to 10% of actual extant sites provided in most official regional gazetteers compiled since the Song dynasty and up to the present day. 4

Both the official gazetteers and Yang Fenggang’s government data reflect only a top-down perspective on the complex religious landscapes across China. GIS ground-truthing through local surveys reveals much denser hierarchies and heterarchical distributions of temples, with an average of 3 to 4 temples (including ancestral halls) per village (Dean, 2019). Typically this would include the main village temple, to which everyone belongs as part of an ascriptive community and to which everyone contributes financially (based on dingkou family population). These institutions form what I described as “China’s second government” (Dean 2001), supplementing local governmental administration by circulating pooled resources into village infrastructure, communal rituals and opera performances, and social welfare. The deities worshipped in these temples are drawn selectively from the regional pantheon as it has evolved over centuries, and is open to changes and the addition or invention of new gods through spirit medium possession, dream visions of the recently dead, and miracle tales. Many villages would also have one or more lineage halls, while smaller neighborhood shrines served more immediate territorial communal needs. In many villages, sectarian “secret” temples were open to anyone willing to voluntarily join and provided an outlet for those searching for a platform for self-cultivation or the performance of morality. Some villages also supported Buddhist monasteries or small nunneries, though larger monasteries can also be found in nearby mountains or at the edge of cities. Some temples developed over time into centers of extensive incense-division networks of linked temples dedicated to the same main deity. Overlaying these bottom-up developments, there was a thin layer of those temples recognized by the state through the enfeoffment of their main deities (similar to the canonization of saints in the Catholic church) and the bequeathal of official plaques and annually scheduled ritual offerings on the feast day of the god. Such official rites would only be offered to a very small number of the temples dedicated to a particular deity. Usually these temples had strong economic or political backers who had brought the temple to the attention of the authorities in the first place. Through many years of gathering stone inscriptions in the Xinghua and Minnan regions of Fujian, I have come to appreciate the various ways in which temples and lineage halls – the primary cultural institutions in village life – were situated in ways that centered the village cosmologically. Each temple re-centers the cosmos by its north-south axis, the position of the gods as hosts (inverted in Taiwan during Daoist rites when they are placed in the south as guests and the high 5

Daoist gods are placed in the position of hosts), and by providing a temporary location for the metastable powers of the gods within the village. Equally important are the stories of the foundings of the temples, the powers of the gods, and X-ray of the structure of village society provided by the lists of donors. These stelae are sites of memory, and need to read in situ to fully comprehend the role they have played overtime as loadstones for collective memory and cosmological orientation. Reading local inscriptions on site allows one to probe local terms and understandings, indigenous cultural and social categories, and specific regimes of exchange. Linking inscriptions on stelae that stand in the same temple allow one to develop a story of the evolution of the village over time. Exploring terms from state institutional history that appear in the inscriptions allow one to interpret the reach of the state into village life and cosmological conceptions. The major cities and mountains of Fujian are inscribed by temples that preserve even more inscribed surfaces. Many vistas at mountainside shrines such as those along the Jiuri Mountains outside Quanzhou include always already inscribed commentaries on the vista and its cultural significance. This encourages superscription of all kinds, writing over while referring to earlier inscriptions. The resulting palimpsest draws the viewer into the process of making place out of space. Each temple, even the simplest shrine, contains an enormous amount of cultural information, in the form of architectural and spatial relations, iconography, murals, carvings, inscriptions, sites for the presentation of offerings, technologies for contacting the gods, opera stages and performances, ritual transformations of space, etc. Ritual spaces and mobilities in Chinese religion The cosmic progresses of the early rulers of China around sacred spaces stake an early claim on gathering power by moving through charged sites, negotiating with local spirits along the way (Dorofeeva-Lichtmann 2009). There were hundreds of sacred sites that were incorporated into the Qin and Han imperial cult. Early accounts of the Nine Regions created by the Great Yu, or the concentric worlds of the Shanhaijing, organize space in complex, processual ways. The Shanhaijing can also be seen as an early model of the concentric magnetic power of the civilized center on surrounding barbaric and exotic lands and peoples. The imperial state cult of the five sacred mountains organizes space around the movements of the cosmocrat. Alternative Daoist sacred geographies of interconnected cavern heavens and blessed lands evolved out of multiple 6 local cultic sites and efforts to transpose the coordinated early parishes of the Sichuan region onto a dispersed Daoist community. Daoist conceptions of the physical universe extending from the Underworld through cavern-heavens to the tops of mountains and upwards along the mainstays of heaven (bugang) to the star palaces, reworking topography into cosmography. Buddhist pilgrimages to sets of sacred mountains, or to Wutaishan, or just to random monasteries – moving like a floating cloud – are yet another set of movements creating sacred place, establishing networks, and elaborating a cultic imaginary. Some sites call for physical movement in pilgrimage, others embody the manifestations of a Buddha such as Manjusri. Astronomical models and systems of cosmic correlations reworked physical topography into a charged field of cosmic forces. Schools of geomancy (formal and imagistic) developed to chart local vectors and power points of these forces. These overlapping networks and nodes, spatial imaginaries, and the movements through charged sites, have only begun to be mapped – for example in the Sacred City of Beijing project – but at least we are beginning to perceive a cultural and religious geographic map of China that would supplement and perhaps transform G. W. Skinner’s vision of the nine economic macro- regions with their discrete central places, market hierarchies, and hinterland polygons. Of course his division of Chinese space and his studies of economic flows within and across these regions was a great advance over earlier homogenous visions of a unified political space of empire. Steven Sangren attempted to sketch out some of the movements that underlie cultural and ritual space – local temples and flows of offerings and local processions, but especially processions that move beyond the market limits in search of cosmic powers at higher order temples or other sites. Like Yang Fenggang, Jiang , who mapped the distribution of Buddhist sites in the Yitongzhi for the Harvard Chinese Historical GIS project (CHGIS), is trying to use PRC data on registered religious sites to modify Skinner’s macroregional boundaries. There are many problems with that project, as it relies on very partial and uneven data, but one could imagine the development of such maps, and others tracing the distribution of operatic, musical and ritual performance traditions partially gathered in the provincial gazetteers of the Shida yicheng project. Such maps would also help give us a glimpse into the spread of regional Daoist ritual traditions. Physical environment and regional ritual systems In our project on the ritual alliances of the Putian plains (2010), Zheng Zhenman and I selected a geographically distinct region, the alluvial plain reclaimed from the sea along the banks 7 of the Mulan river in Putian, Fujian, and traced the evolution of a regional hierarchy of higher order temples that emerged to manage the complexities of the evolving irrigation system as it grew beyond the control of local lineages who had built sections of it. The ritual alliances of villages within the subsections of the irrigation system was also related to the evolution from founding villages (established in the Song and Ming) and the spread of their satellite villages (established in the Qing and Republican periods). These villages were linked by a shared founding she altar to the earth in the ancestral village (zushe) – the surrounding villages would build dongxi nanbei she around the founding earth god altar. As we documented in detail, most such she altars, including those established in the early Ming under Zhu Yuanzhang’s decree, merged with temples to local gods, becoming a kind of hybrid she-miao. Several similar projects on local cultural and religious history have been carried out in the Pearl River delta, the Han river delta in Chaozhou, the Zhejiang region, the region, etc. We are almost in a position to begin connecting the dots and draw comparative perspectives on what combination of factors (environment, local ritual traditions, interactions with the state at different times) makes each regional ritual system’s historical trajectory unique. As part of the survey of ritual sites and activities on the Putian plain, we gathered local historical inscriptions related to the history of religion (453 for Xinghua prefecture (Putian and Xianyou (1995), 1363 for Quanzhou prefecture (2004), and 1771 for the Zhangzhou prefecture (forthcoming 2018), a total of 3,587 inscriptions. I have continued this epigraphical work in Singapore in collaboration with Dr. Hue Guan Thye (our 2017 volume includes 1265 inscriptions from 72 early sites (1819-1911) – our forthcoming volume will include approximately 1500 inscriptions from 500 temples, native place associations and clan associations). Other scholars have gathered inscriptions in different areas, such as Lai Chi Tim’s meticulously edited collection of Daoist inscriptions in the area. Marianne Bujard has edited several volumes of inscriptions from Beijing temples and monasteries. For Southeast Asia, Wolfgang Franke and his associates, including Claudine Salmon, gathered and published 5049 inscriptions from Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. The intellectual stakes of using historical GIS methods to study the evolution of a regional ritual system in the Putian plains goes back to the image of the Chinese state as a totalitarian hydraulic empire raised by Karl Wittfogel in Oriental Despotism (Wittfogel 1957). In complete contrast, Stephen Lansing (1991, 2006) described for Bali the self-organizing evolution of an 8 island-wide crop rotation system arising from the interactions of local water god community temples in charge of local irrigation systems. The Putian case falls in between these extremes, as much of the evolution of the irrigation system and the filling in of the bay was done by small common surname and lineage groups in the Tang, Song and Ming, but the initial call for large- scale irrigation came from the state (under Wang Anshi), and the state was called upon to resolve disruptions in water-flow within the system in times of crisis (or irreconcilable differences). Nevertheless, the trend was towards self-management of environmental resources, to the point that a new layer of multi-village alliances developed around 1500 to manage the complexities of an interconnected irrigation system on an alluvial plain. These ritual alliances were based in higher order temples which also functioned as management center for the irrigation canals within their territorial boundaries. The profusion of newly discovered local documents including stone inscriptions, but also liturgical manuscripts and scriptures, deeds, contracts and account books, opera scripts, novels, song books and musical texts, have led to new understandings of local space and society, and in particular, the role of texts and ritual in constructing local space and identity. New methodologies are being developed to deal with the vast quantities of these new sources, focused on reading these texts in terms of their local settings, modes of production and distribution, and local meanings. These texts were not included in traditional Chinese bibliographic sciences, and many problems remain in developing the study of these materials. The so-called Huanan school of historical studies has been caricatured as relying on several slogans such as “enter the villages to find the temples”, “enter the temples to find the steles” and “use the steles to write the history of the village”. Regardless of the over-simplifications of these accounts, the (spatial) move away from traditional archives (national or provincial level) to the collection of new archives of village based sources in situ in the villages of China is an important change in Chinese historiography. Whether this can be called historical anthropology is another question. Debates over methodology amongst scholars in this tradition continue to this day. Hierarchies within regions Our surveys found between 3 and 4 temples in every village on the Putian plain. This corresponds with the findings of earlier surveys (Grootaers and Li Shiyu in Chahar in the 1930s) in northern China. More such surveys would be welcome. We located over 2500 temples in 724 villages with an average population of slightly over 1000. We found over 10,000 god statues in 9 the village temples, representing over 1000 different gods, most of whom were known only in one or two villages. Even the set of leading gods (in terms of numbers of temples) reveals the impact of local myths, legends and ritual traditions. This is even clearer in Southeast Asia, where the configuration of cults can clearly identify the regional origins of the temple community. Of course, hierarchies change over time, as can be seen in the first inscription related to the cult of , in which her statue is moved to the central altar in recognition of her local miracles, while the statue of a young male god is relegated to a side altar. (See the partial translation and discussion of this inscription in Dean and Zheng 2019: 129-131). Local gods can die slow, cosmic deaths, as in the case of the Great Official God mentioned in the Song Xiangying miaoji (still extant in the Putian historical museum – see the translation and discussion of this inscription in Dean and Zheng 2019: 121-125). The continuous invention of gods at the local level insures a high degree of instability in local pantheons and ritual systems. This is one area where spirit mediums can play an essential role. Urban regions have developed complex hierarchies of temples, as the Beijing project has shown. In the case of Tainan, Taiwan, the City God temple was at the top of the hierarchy of some 300 temples in the city, many of which joined in the processions on the god’s birthday. The city god temple was also the connecting point between the state cult and the local Daoist hierarchy. The urban ritual system was filled in by the Eastern Peak temple, official and popular temples to objects of imperial cults and popular worship, major Buddhist temples and their subsidiary temples, lineage halls, native place associations with shrines to their native deities, craft-based temples, small neighborhood temples and shrines, and altars in every home to gods and ancestors. In contemporary China, and to a large degree in Taiwan and Southeast Asia, the gods and the dead (ancestors and hungry ghosts) have been driven from the cities and from family apartments. The felt absence of the dead can be seen in the increasing popularity of horror films, such as the hopping vampires (ancestors) of Hong Kong cinema, or the evil spirits inhabiting new media technologies in Japanese cinema, intent on driving young women from their disruptive place in professional spaces. The spatial imaginary of Chinese religion is in large part built on the cult of the dead, and the consubstantiality of the clan. Ignoring the feeding of the ancestors is tantamount to blurring the boundaries of ancestor and (hungry) ghost – a devastating category error with frightful consequences. The contemporary development of mega-cities in China, where another third of the remaining 600,000 villages will be bulldozed as city limits expand, has created 10 a liminal space of uprooted temples and graves, and led to the establishment of massive Buddhist monasteries and mega-churches, often in the suburbs close by the new malls. But urban space is only one aspect of local ritual systems– the great temples were often far removed from urban centers, with sites chosen for geomantic reasons or along transport arteries. We have found several patterns to the division of incense networks of the great temples of Fujian, such as the two temples to Baosheng Dadi in Haicang; the Qingshui zushi miao in Penglai, Anxi, the Anxi Chenghuang miao and its offshoots in Southeast Asia and in Singapore – in fact the latter has inverted the hierarchy by claiming a copyright on any new branch temples built in Southeast Asia. But the spread of generations of branch temples is only one aspect of the mobility of these sacred sites – the centrifugal flows – on the other hand are the centripetal flows of the presentation of incense by the branch temples throughout the year and especially on the feast days of the gods. John Lagerwey and Yang Yanjie found alternative flows of gods and temples in the Wufu gufo networks of the Hakka regions of southwest Fujian and northeast Guangdong, where the gods are carried from temple to temple within the system – this also occurs in Penglai when Qingzhui zushi is carried in a five day procession around the beautiful valley lying below the founding temple. But the Wufu gufo keep moving throughout the year and over the years. We can discern generational models with centrifugal and centripetal flows, circular progresses of gods, systems with multiple centers, and fractal systems in which gods such as the Jade Emperor are dispersed into hundreds of thousands of temples as a symbol of hierarchal encompassment that loses much of its force in its dispersal (the gods are usually small statues placed above or outside the door of the temple in Singapore). Movements of gods are one thing, but temples are spaces of multiple flows of pilgrims, worshippers, suppliers, accountants, mediums, visiting delegations, merchants, officials, cooks, opera troupes, craftsmen and ritual specialists of many kinds. Many of these individuals move along the networks of branch temples, or within regional hierarchies of geographically linked temples, or these days, through the overseas networks of the great temples of Southeast China. A final comment of recent theories of temple networks and spatialities. Taiwanese scholars such as Lin Meirong proposed the concept of xinyangquan (broad, abstract zones characterized by belief in and pilgrimage to the temples of specific deities) in distinction to jisiquan (territorially defined local ritual spheres). This concept has some empirical problems, and seems to reflect the impact of temple tourism, amongst other developments. Other researchers at the Academia Sinica 11 are currently attempting to map the actual flows of jinxiang (presentation of incense, recharging of links with founding temples) within fenxiang division of incense networks to develop an intermediate level account of networked and periodic interactions between local temples and cult centers. This research can also link into transnational jinxiang circuits, which are increasing in intensity and frequency in recent years. Part 2: Spaces of transformation within temples – The establishment of a Daoist altar in a temple in Taiwan is marked by the movement of the gods of the temple into the position of guest, facing the newly erected Daoist altar (paintings of the Three Pure Ones, and other members of the pantheon). While the Daoist masters transform the temple into a Land of the Dao (Daochang),1 community representatives present offerings on behalf of the region. As Kristofer Schipper (1985) pointed out, fashi ritual masters and spirit mediums conduct a martial ritual complete with self-mortification and blood outside the temple, while inside a literate, courtly audience is held with the Heavenly Gods. Except that this structural binary breaks down when the Daoist masters come outside to gather light for the Division of Lamps, and to Present a Memorial (jinbiao) on the stage, vacated during that precise period of time by the opera troupe. Sometimes spirit mediums burst into the temple, and mobilize the powers of the gods through their speech and movements. The gods are often carried out on sedan chairs and paraded by each household in the village before tracing the spiritual and physical boundaries of the village. The gods are in a metastable state when resting on the altar unmoved. They contain their virtual powers of protection, blessing and destruction. But once moved, either on a sedan chair or within the body of a spirit medium, their powers are released in vectors of force that move through the village, blessing families, curing the ill, providing prosperity and fertility to the community of worshipers. The movements and transformations of multiple ritual objects and visiting worshippers and performers lends a chaotic nature to the space of cult observances in Chinese religion. Food is being transformed by fire in one corner of the temple, while spirt money is burned in another corner. Flows of offerings make their way into the temple and back to household tables. All kinds of transformations occur in the temple space. The Daoist masters overcode the inner spaces of the temple by laying out the Five Talismans and imprisoning gui demonic forces during the

1 The Land of the Dao can fit into a suitcase, and be transported to any space, as I explore in Dean 2015 “The Daoist Difference”. 12

Purification of the Altar. Community members have their fates transformed by crossing over Seven Star bridges. Crowds converge to watch opera and marionette and musical performances, along with the displays of the spirit mediums outside the temples. Visiting delegations crowd into the temple space, and god statues push their way through. Spontaneous spirit possession can pass through the crowd. Fireworks explode above and firecrackers below. Clouds of incense and smoke fill the air. Sounds pull the attention of the crowd this way and that. The crowd becomes one continuous mass through which a wide range of affects flow. I have pointed out elsewhere the limitations of the Tainan model of the Taoist liturgical framework (Dean 2015). Extensive fieldwork in China and Southeast Asia has shown that there are many versions of Daoist liturgical frameworks, and that there are often multiple liturgical frameworks operating simultaneously within a ritual event, modulating the flows within and through it. This includes the important role of masters of ritual ceremony who assist the worshippers in laying out the appropriate offerings, and call out the order of kowtows to the community representatives. Sectarian religious movements like the Three in One in Putian and Xianyou have developed parallel liturgies dedicated to Confucian, Buddhist and Daoist gods. These rites can be performed alongside Daoist or Buddhist rites. Spaces of transformations within and between bodies This raises another area of space that repays examination: the body, and the infra-corporeal and inter-corporeal realms– whether Daoist master, fashi, spirit medium, or community worshiper. The body of the Daoist ritual master is a kind of Moebius strip, linking and channeling planes of macrocosmic forces into their counterparts within his own body. Fashi (ritual masters) transform their bodies into various Daoist deities, using techniques of bianshen found in Song Daoist texts and many local liturgical manuscripts from a wide range of regional ritual traditions. They then proceed to transform a wide range of ordinary objects into ritual objects: “this is no ordinary chicken….” The spirit mediums are possessed by an outside power deeper than their own interiority. And we should also consider the community as a whole, as each ritual event is a collective effort that can fail or succeed depending on many factors. During the ritual the forces set in motion in the rites can move through the bodies of the crowd of devotees and onlookers. Individuals are drawn into the event through fascination and hesitation, and participate in a range of interactions from minor acts of imitation to transformative intense experiences. Transformations of religious space in China and beyond 13

These comments lead to a discussion of the transformations of the religious sphere in China and in the Chinese Diaspora. The religious field is a term used by Pierre Bourdieu to describe the efforts to monopolize the expression of the worldview of a region or a nation by religious specialists. As Vincent Goossaert and David Palmer have stated (2010), this model of monopolization does not apply to the Chinese religious field, which of course has been changing over time. They point out that the imperial cult was not imposed on the public. Several different ritual traditions were allowed to operate independently simultaneously, and sometimes they were mixed together in new ways by different syncretic sectarian groups. Moreover, ritual roles were dispersed across the entire social field, making everyone potentially some kind of ritual specialist, even if they were simply reciting the name of Amitabha. We can and should consider the dimensions and institutions and spaces of the religious field in the sociological sense, as it has transformed so often across Chinese history. But we can also consider this space more abstractly as a historically modulating syncretic ritual field – a field of forces shaped by formal elements of different ritual traditions that is actualized in any given ritual event. I have described this as a force field with bipolar attractors of self-mastery on the one hand and the eruption of spiritual power on the other. I mention this here as a possible way to classify different kinds of ritual events and mobilizations of ritual spaces. Each ritual event folds in the entire syncretic ritual sphere of its historical era – and the configurations of that ritual sphere can be mapped as shifting religious fields in different places and times (Dean and Lamarre 2003, 2007; Dean and Zheng, 2010, ch. 10). After moving to Singapore four years ago, I have begun a project on a Singapore Historical GIS (shgis.nus.edu.sg). This project marks the locations and historical movements of over 1000 Chinese temples in Singapore (as well as 250 clan and native place associations, 550 Chinese schools, 500 Christian churches, over 100 mosques, and over 20 Indian temples. Many unregistered religious sites are not yet placed on these maps, such as the over 1000 spirit medium altars in private apartments in Housing Development Blocks, or the over 1000 household altars servicing over 80,000 adherents, etc). Many of these temples were originally based in kampong (villages), and over 300 of these have had to merge into 62 united temples where a temple is contracted down into a single altar, set alongside several other altars (temples) like a supermarket of the gods. This compression of space is paradoxically linked to an expansion of transnational ties on the part of many of the temples back to their founding temples in Fujian and 14

Guangdong. From the 1980s onwards, temple and associations across Southeast Asia and Taiwan returned to China to rebuild tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of temples and ancestral halls and monasteries that had been destroyed or damaged during the . After the 1990s, the local economy of these coastal regions had improved so much that they no longer required financial support from Southeast Asian Overseas Chinese, but the latter still continued to visit and to offer their extensive ritual knowledge of traditions preserved overseas. In more recent years (since 2000) there has been a reverse flow of Daoist ritual masters, Buddhist monks, spirit mediums, temple craftsmen, ritual opera troupes and marionettists, musicians, and devotees moving from China through branch temples in Southeast Asia. A very great quantity of religious material cultural objects: statues, incense, spirit money, altars, carvings, brocade hangings, ritual vestments, incense burners, etc., has always moved through these networks. Not to mention the flow of actual money, cash, opium, property rentals, shares in credit pools under the protection of deities, required contribution and individual gifts. Shifting cosmologies and the blurring of ritual frames One intriguing set of religious fields touched on in The Question of Religion in Modern China (2010) are the diasporic spaces of Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao and Southeast Asia, home to 60 million Chinese. The religious fields in Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore are remarkably volatile and creative, with new religious cults popping up with exceptional speed. I have elsewhere written about transformations of the religious space of Singapore and the recent (within the last decade) emergence of underworld deities (Dean 2018). Some of these Underworld spirit mediums present a challenge to our usual conceptions of ritual space, as they are no longer performing rites in well-defined sacred sites, but instead are meeting for Tua Ah Pek parties in social spaces with their devotees, who eagerly offer them copious quantities of cognac and Guinness (and opium in Malaysia), in exchange for consultations and the occasional lottery ticket number. Here we find spirit mediums free of the constraints of a more homogenous regional culture (such as in Tainan or the Minnan regions of Fujian). They are free to flatten cosmological spaces– into spaces where the realm of the dead joins that of the living not in order to scold or punish but to party together. These spirit mediums are also inventing new rituals, or testing our ideas of the fundamental features of ritual (creating a bounded space, enacting a clear series of symbolic acts in a set time separated from homogenous, secular time). 15

These practices force us to reconsider the shamanic substratum of Chinese religion proposed long ago by Piet van der Loon (1977; Dean 2019b). Clearly the cosmological landscape in which mediums operated continued to transform radically with the introduction of , the rise of Daoist funerary rites and practices of self-divination, the spread of Tantric rituals, the rise of many sectarian millenarian movements with their own mixes of liturgical elements. But the Singapore case asks us to consider the agency of the spirit mediums themselves under certain conditions – there is a continuum between spirit medium practices, spirit writing, and self- divinatory practices (meditation, recitation, visualization, inner alchemical processing, identification with the Buddha). Many 19th century literati responded to the crisis of China’s confrontation with the West and its own internal turmoil by taking up techniques of spirit writing, meeting the village spirit mediums half way. These practices continue in many venues to this day – the Chaozhou shantang of Singapore and the spirit writing groups of Taiwan are just a few examples. Indeed, recent research by Robert Weller on the outskirts of Nanjing reveal the return of spirit-mediums negotiating the shifting boundaries between urban and rural, life and death, and visible and invisible realms in contemporary China. Concluding questions While the issues discussed in this paper do not lead to a new model, hopefully they have shown the value of applying focused historical GIS approaches to the study of specific regional histories and urban spatial transformations, and the importance of the tracing of Chinese temple networks around Southeast Asia. At the level of the bodily experience of ritual events, I have argued that the rich diversity of spatial conceptions, lived experiences, and the intersecting of multiple liturgical frameworks complicates efforts to develop unified theories of identity. As for the issue of the role of hierarchical principles underlying the distributions of temples within physiographic regions, we can theorize that hierarchical tendencies are countered by equally strong tendencies towards local claims to relative autonomy. Nonetheless, in many areas ritual alliances and temple hierarchies appear to have expanded up to the limits allowed by state authorities. Any alliance with hierarchical structures transcending these limits would potentially result in insurrectionary movements, especially if their purposes were the local redistribution of powers (a complex case would be the Ming Qing xiedou feuding lineages and ritual alliances in Fujian, Taiwan, and Chaozhou). However, religious movements including many sectarian groups have a long history of establishing wider networks, often operating underground to avoid state suspicion 16 and repression. The key issue is the degree to which membership in sectarian groups was exclusive, or whether it is best seen as another, additional layer to participation within a range of local and regional networks. This raises the issue of the individual actor’s participation in multiple scales and forms of networks within Chinese society, and this in turn returns us to Skinner’s research agenda in Thailand Chinese communities. One person I interviewed in Singapore is a member of 40 different associations, from street-level groups to regional associations to global kinship alliances. A recent area of research in GIScience has been the integration of social network charts with GIS mapping – on the assumption that many if not most connections and associations take place in a set number of locations, thus making them susceptible to mapping. This is an issue we are currently exploring in Singapore, where we are in the process of linking a Singapore Historical GIS with a Singapore Biographical Database.

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