1 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 China 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 South China, 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 Tian. 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.