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This essay explores otherworldly encounters and notions of mind across two charismatic‐style churches in China. In Zhao Village Church in rural Henan province, Christian congregants more often approached the mind as porous to the Devil's corruption. In Living Church in Shanghai, congregants were more influenced by bounded, psychological notions of the mind as an entity; although the mind was also held to be permeable to spiritual personae, its interior workings stood as the central hindrance to discernment, rather than the externality of the Devil. And while those in Shanghai stressed a gradual, retroactive verification of potential spiritual signs, those in Henan strove for a rhythm of immediate response. Meanwhile, Shanghai congregants described fewer sensory and embodied encounters with divine voice, pain, and healing than congregants in Henan. Such divergent theories of mind, virtuous rhythms, and distributions within the Christian spiritual sensorium might be understood in part through styles of engagement accentuated at these churches, and in part through the uneven unfolding of religious abolition and revival in China, including the heightened urban presence of psychotherapeutic genres and the rural presence of spirit mediumship in recent decades. These variations in personhood and otherworldly encounter, including deeply porous ones, were thus co‐present in an atheist secular milieu, after what have been seen as some of the most thorough secularization campaigns conducted by a modern state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Chinese Ritual, Theatre & Folklore / Mínsú Qǔyì is the property of Shih Ho-Cheng Folk Culture Foundation and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Journal of Chinese Ritual, Theatre & Folklore / Mínsú Qǔyì is the property of Shih Ho-Cheng Folk Culture Foundation and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In folk religion, the key to interaction among gods, ghosts, and people lies in the transmission of information. The separation between the spheres of yin and yang leads to an asymmetry of information and the need for communication. The transmission of information between ghosts and the living displays a differential mode of association 差序格局 in interpersonal relations. Two important means for this transmission are block divination 卜杯 and the spirit mediums known as tongji 童乩. The choice determines the mode of interaction between humans and spirits, the specific role played by gods, and the type of information they provide. That information may be called "sacred knowledge," which contrasts with ordinary social knowledge in the characteristics, mechanisms, and rules regarding its transmission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since spirit possession in mediumship and shamanism resembles psychotic symptoms, early researchers perceived spirit mediums and shamans as psychiatric patients whose psychopathology was culturally sanctioned. However, other researchers have not only challenged this assumption, but also proposed that spirit possession has transformative benefits. The idiom of spirit possession provides cultural meanings for spirit mediums and shamans to express and transform their personal experiences. The present case study focuses on dang-ki healing, a form of Chinese mediumship practiced in Singapore, in which a deity possesses a human (i.e., dang-ki) to offer aid to supplicants. This study seeks to explore whether involvement in dang-ki healing is transformative; and if so, how the dang-ki's transformation is related to his self and the perceived legitimacy of his mediumship. At a shrine, I interviewed 20 participants, including a male dang-ki, 10 temple assistants, and nine clients. The results obtained were supportive of the therapeutic nature of spirit possession. First, there is a relationship between his self-transformation and the perceived legitimacy of his mediumship. As his clients and community have recognized his spirit possession as genuine, and the healing power of his possessing god, he is able to make use of mediumship as a means for spiritual development. Second, he has developed his spirituality by internalizing his god's positive traits (e.g., compassion). Deities worshipped in dang-ki healing can be conceptualized as ideal selves who represent a wide range of positive traits and moral values of Chinese culture. Thus, the possession of a deity is the embodiment of an ideal self. Finally, the dang-ki's transformation may run parallel to his god's transformation. In Chinese religions, gods have to constantly develop their spirituality even though they are already gods. An understanding of the god's spiritual development further sheds light on the dang-ki's self-transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there has been significant work done on the creation of sacred space in residential housing, not enough attention has been paid to a particular segment of Chinese religion leadership in Singapore - spirit mediums - and the processes in which they practice within the political ideology of the modernist Singaporean state. In this paper, I will show how spirit mediums operate within 'unofficially sacred' spaces, specifically house temples that subvert and resist functionalist policies of the Singapore state. Using two visually focussed, participant-observation case studies, I will argue that this subversion is sustained in two inter-related ways-one, through the visual comportment of the spirit medium's body through behavior and aesthetic markers and two, through the social prominence of the spirit medium when he or she is in a trance. These two factors come together to temporally displace the importance of the physical location, allowing a spirit medium to operate in any location, 'official' or 'unofficial.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the absence of the institutional propagation of religious knowledge, how do people form an understanding of the yin world (yinjian), the Chinese spiritual realm where ancestors, spirits, and ghosts dwell, in contrast to the yang world (yangjian) where we live? Based upon fieldwork conducted in 2005, 2006, and 2010 in rural Chafing, Hunan, this article explores how the annual observance of the Ghost Festival, the time when souls are said to return to the world of the living, instills beliefs about the yin world. Elaborating on spirit mediums through whom villagers communicate with deceased family members, it examines how spirit possessions shape and are shaped by villagers' understanding of the yin world. Traditions and assumptions engrained in local fife enable a dialogue between the dead and the living, while the depictions of the afterlife through spirit mediumship embody images and visions of the yin world, making the invisible visible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores local Anping sociality with a systematic perspective as well as from an agent's point-of-view. I provide a thick description of the Anping phenomenon with scholarly discourse on social memory and concept of bodily practice. I offer a new attempt to inset Taiwanese society by exploring a spirit medium's (tangki) life history inset between personal experience and social tradition. I have followed the case as a participant observer for more than twenty years. The spirit medium, Phang-íng's impressive career, his posthumous apotheosis, and the rich ritual repertoire of the community embody Anping people's practice of the incorporation of the local tradition. The substance of the Anping local tradition is constituted by collective memory or recollection. Phang-íng's case of apotheosis is interpreted within the constructed context of social memory. His performance as a spirit medium is a result of the interaction between daily practice and local tradition. That places Phang-íng's personal narrative in a part of an interconnected narrative embedded in the group's collective identity memory. The case of Phang-íng illustrates how an individual and his group are interwoven, and how they represent the local tradition of a larger society. Due to individual variations, the local tradition does not remain unchanged. On the other hand, it is sustained because of the nature of the individual's community. The two sides maintain a dialectical inter-subjectivity. The Anping society is not a static one, but a constantly changing, evolving, and inter-determining entity, where the local people's past and collectivity are represented and constructed through incorporating practice. INSET: 6. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is based on my observation of an altar with private-own features yet maintaining a public, community status. I induce from the devotees' pleas to the deities and responses from the spirit-writing, the role and function of characters in the village's supernatural world. The dialectic of the mutually defined relationship found between their function and religious activities offers a glimpse into the structural layout of Kinmen's folk religion built upon domestic daily worship and temple sacrifices. The structure usually remains well hidden under average people's daily worships and ritual customs, executed unknowingly, following the example of a public cult. This rarely mentioned or explained structure only manifests when a person pleads to the altar after some unusual occurrences. Through the spirit-writing, the yin/yang principle of the occurrence and the relations of the gods and ghosts involved are illuminated in context. Spirit mediums guide their bewildered visitors of the altar to visit temples or participate in rituals that pacify wandering souls. The visitors are instructed or led to comprehend the character and function of the ones worshipped. With the initiation of his or her religious cognition, the individual turns from a lay man into a believer. His or her integration into this built-in structure of devotees' life, local custom and liturgies enhances the steady perpetuation of the religious custom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Krabi Provincial Administrative Organization, in co-operation with the Krabi provincial government (southern Thailand), has since 2006 organized a conjoint street procession of the Chinese shrines in the province, in the course of their Vegetarian Festival, to a prayer at the Krabi City Pillar. Two heretofore unrelated rituals, one a popular Chinese custom, the other a cult of Thai civic religion, with roots in Indian Brahmanism, were thus amalgamated. The conspicuous conjoint procession, bringing together the discrete processions of numerous shrines dispersed throughout the province, transformed the character of the shrines' processions, and superimposed an encompassing Thai cosmography upon the localized cosmic images engendered by the festival rituals in the individual shrines. The spectacular event, featuring pierced or otherwise self-mutilating spirit mediums of the various shrines, made Krabi a potential competitor with the established centers of the festival, Phuket and Trang, for the patronage of domestic and Chinese diasporic devotees; but the ‘gruesome’ and repetitive character of the mediums' performances seems to impair the chances of the conjoint procession of becoming a major attraction for Western tourists. This article relates the context, process and consequences of this appropriation of a popular Chinese custom for a Thai civic cult and discusses it in terms of a comparative framework for the study of change in tourism-related festivals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, I develop a detailed consideration of ways in which Chinese religious practitioners, including Daoists, Christians, and spirit mediums, deploy syncretism in complex fields of practice. Rather than focusing on doctrinal blending, this study emphasises the ways in which these practitioners combine elements from diverse religious traditions through the media of ritual performance, visual representation, story, and landscape. After considering the diverse ways in which syncretic processes may be deployed in a field of practice, the paper investigates three ethnographic cases, exploring ritual co-celebration at Wudang Mountain in South-central China, charismatic Christian practices in Singapore, and the recent development of Holy Mount Zion as a Christian pilgrimage site in Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the use of god icons created by the Chinese villagers in Taiwan. The villagers believed that making god icons will maintain their relationships with the people and places as they symbolize the meeting ground of the human and the god-like agencies. They created these icons through figurines and statues. The villagers also conceived that spirit mediums mutually inflect and share their powers. Their belief is that gods inhabit icons, as well as talk to and through the villagers.