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Psychopomps, Oracles, and Spirit Mediums

Nancy Mandeville Caciola

in Afterlives: The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages

This chapter analyzes several spiritist cults in Southern France that formed around individuals who claimed to be in regular contact with the dead. These spirit mediums, though at first taken aback ... More

This chapter analyzes several spiritist cults in Southern France that formed around individuals who claimed to be in regular contact with the dead. These spirit mediums, though at first taken aback when the dead began to appear to them, ultimately learned to control their interactions with the latter. They became voluntary oracles who opened up the world of the afterlife to crowds of other people, and they acted as psychopomps for the dead, helping them to find rest in the afterlife. Clerics also evaluated local popular beliefs according to their own religious values, sometimes condemning mediums as heretics, at other times arrogating oracular roles to themselves. Such accusations from the medieval Christian church often inverted the true character of ongoing cultural shifts: the “crime” of many dissenters was in fact to fail to keep pace with novelties that were pioneered by church institutions, rather than the reverse.Less

Can Commodities be Sacred?: Material Religion in Seoul and Hanoi

Laurel Kendall

in Handbook of Religion and the Asian City: Aspiration and Urbanization in the Twenty-First Century

This chapter examines material religion in Seoul and Hanoi by focusing on the production and circulation of sacred goods and services in the two Asian cities. In particular, it considers how notions ... More

This chapter examines material religion in Seoul and Hanoi by focusing on the production and circulation of sacred goods and services in the two Asian cities. In particular, it considers how notions of sacredness, magic, and efficacy are expressed and experienced in these settings through two similar but not identical domains of popular religious practice: those of spirit mediums in Hanoi and of shamans in Seoul. After a brief overview of place, the chapter considers how spirit mediums and shamans are situated within urban space and how these popular religious practices foster the production and consumption of different kinds of religious goods and services. It then explores how changes in production and distribution have been experienced and interpreted in Seoul and Hanoi by looking at the provision of services at ritual sites and the production and consumption of sacred images. It shows how the city becomes a hub of popular religious activity that is aided and abetted by brisk markets in ritual goods, and the ways in which these markets are marked by the commodification of goods and services.Less

“Look with Your Own Eyes!”: Visualizations of Spirit Mediums and Their Viewing Techniques in Tanzanian Video Films

Claudia Böhme

in Trance Mediums and New Media: Spirit Possession in the Age of Technical Reproduction

The chapter looks at the multiple relations between the spirit medium mganga and the medium video film in Tanzania. Not only is the mganga featuring in the movies but is also actor or producer. Video ... More

The chapter looks at the multiple relations between the spirit medium mganga and the medium video film in Tanzania. Not only is the mganga featuring in the movies but is also actor or producer. Video film producers are caught between his de- and revaluation due to performance traditions in the history of cultural politics in Tanzania. In tracing the remediation of the mganga and his visualizing techniques on the screen, this chapter wants to argue that the double interference of new media and trance media in the video films creates “a new regime of visibility” (Behrend 2005). While the films have contributed to the mganga’s popularization, the visualization of former invisible powers put the real mganga’s powers to the test.Less

Spirit Cults in Yan’an: Surrogate Rural Subjectivity in the Urbanizing Rural

Ka-ming Wu

in Reinventing Chinese Tradition: The Cultural Politics of Late Socialism

This chapter examines the public secrecy and popularity of spirit cults in Yan'an in the context of the urbanization of the rural area. It first provides an overview of folk popular religion and ... More

This chapter examines the public secrecy and popularity of spirit cults in Yan'an in the context of the urbanization of the rural area. It first provides an overview of folk popular religion and spirit possession in and out of China before discussing how deity worship figures as a form of unspoken yet widely circulated knowledge, communal bonds, and spiritual services in rural Yan'an. It then considers how spirit cults in Yan'an produce what it calls a “surrogate rural subjectivity” and proceeds by turning to the emergence of women spirit mediums in the 1990s. The chapter argues that, in the context of rapid urbanization, spirit cults provide occasions for the expression of disappearing rural communal relations, folk values, and ritual memories. It also suggests that folk religion now constitutes a new form of rural discourse through which the urbanizing rural subject of China is recognized. Finally, it describes spirit cults as a major site through which rural norms, values, dispositions, and desires are de facto produced and reconstructed in the urbanization of the rural area.Less

Some Occasional Rites Performed by the Singapore Cantonese: (1951)*

Marjorie Topley

Jean DeBernardi (ed.)

in Cantonese Society in Hong Kong and Singapore: Gender, Religion, Medicine and Money

This chapter deals with some of the rites performed by the Cantonese in Singapore with the object of overcoming illness and misfortune. The rites selected for description are in all cases specific to ... More

This chapter deals with some of the rites performed by the Cantonese in Singapore with the object of overcoming illness and misfortune. The rites selected for description are in all cases specific to the sufferer, and are enacted only when help is required. The term occasional is used here in this sense, to distinguish them from festival rites and the type of performances of a spirit medium which take place regularly and are attended by many people. They also differ from other rites in that they can be performed alone by the person who hopes to benefit from them, or who wishes to benefit some other person in whose welfare they are interested. Even when the rites to be described are performed by a priest, the person paying for the rite is an active participant.Less

The Divine Eye on the Internet: Visions and Virtual Realities in the Shadow of Disneyland

Janet Alison Hoskins

in The Divine Eye and the Diaspora: Vietnamese Syncretism Becomes Transpacific Caodaism

The sixth chapter includes a number of newer Caodai followers, many of them women. In “The Divine Eye on the Internet,” I examine the influence of new technology on the creation of deterritorialized ... More

The sixth chapter includes a number of newer Caodai followers, many of them women. In “The Divine Eye on the Internet,” I examine the influence of new technology on the creation of deterritorialized sacred communities, whose “holy land” may no longer be anchored to a specific landscape. Rival Caodai overseas groups now debate the importance of ties to their homeland on the Internet, and shoot television shows to proselytize on a global scale. This allows religious communities in Vietnam and the diaspora to define each other—sometimes by reaction and exclusion—and also allows an originally “Vietnamese” set of religious images to interact extensively with many other forms of iconography that float around in cyberspace. The Internet has attracted many non-Vietnamese Americans, including several converts who have been ordained as ministers, worked as translators of Caodai scripture, and helped to broaden the appeal of a once very “Vietnamese” vision of global unity.Less

Tales from the Jianghu

Avron Boretz

in Gods, Ghosts, and Gangsters: Ritual Violence, Martial Arts, and Masculinity on the Margins of Chinese Society

This chapter examines the jianghu and martial ritual performance troupes, and the critical importance of their historical and cultural affinity to the broader efficacy and meaning of Chinese popular ... More

This chapter examines the jianghu and martial ritual performance troupes, and the critical importance of their historical and cultural affinity to the broader efficacy and meaning of Chinese popular religion. It first considers the Military Retainers (Jiajiang), a ritual form unique to Taiwan. Starting in the 1980s, the Military Retainers became notorious in their association with juvenile delinquency, blood spectacle, and other unsavory elements comprising the “dark” (hei) side of popular religion. Closely linked to the Military Retainers, and in recent years increasingly marketed as coordinated performance packages, are groups of possessed, entranced spirit mediums (tangki), who provide the most dramatic and unnerving ritual spectacle of all. In fits of real or feigned trance, these mediums vigorously and skillfully strike their heads and backs with edged and spiked weapons, slice their tongues with knives and ice saws, and pierce their bodies with a variety of sharp-pointed metal rods and needles. The chapter aims to present the perspective and reconstruct the lived experience of the performers themselves, these socially and often economically liminal men who are the dedicated mainstays of, the essential labor pool for, and the ritually indispensable participants in martial ritual performance troupes.Less