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323 This chapter examines the complex interactions among the forces of nationstate , popular religion, media capitalism, and gendered territorialization as these are inflected across the Taiwan Strait.1 Relations across the Strait have been fraught with political tension and military preparations over the question of whether Taiwan is part of China or an independent state. Since the 2000 presidential elections in Taiwan, the new government there has been more vociferous about Taiwan independence, and Mainland China’s Communist Party has responded with more vigorous claims on Taiwan, which had earlier included the launching of a warning missile over the island in 1996. Under these conditions, it is all the more remarkable that in recent years there has been an increasing number of religious pilgrimages and exchanges across the Strait, and that in 2000, one such pilgrimage by Taiwanese worshippers of the maritime goddess Mazu (媽祖) to her natal home in Fujian Province was broadcast live from China back to Taiwan via satellite television. I conducted fieldwork on popular religion and media development in Taiwan for four months in 2000 and 2001, and traveled with Dongsen Television News Station (東森電視台, ETTV News) from Taiwan to Mainland China in July 2000, observing their reporters and technicians deliver live satellite television coverage of the historic religious pilgrimage .2 In contemporary Taiwan, Mazu has the largest deity cult, her temples are the most numerous of all, and popular estimates are that 70–80 percent of Taiwanese worship her in some form. The pilgrimage of 2000 was orga12 Goddess across the Taiwan Strait Matrifocal Ritual Space, Nation-State, and Satellite Television Footprints Mayfair Mei-hui Yang 楊美惠 The said “return of the religious” . . . is not a simple return, for its globality and its figures (tele-techno-media-scientific, capitalistic and politico-economic) remain original and unprecendented. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge” UC-Yang-rev.indd 323 UC-Yang-rev.indd 323 8/27/2008 1:02:10 PM 8/27/2008 1:02:10 PM 324 / Mayfair Mei-hui Yang nized by one of Taiwan’s most prominent Mazu temples, Zhenlangong ( 鎮瀾宮, Zhenlan Temple), in the central Taiwanese town of Dajia. This mediatized pilgrimage to a female deity propelled about two thousand worshippers—an unprecedented number, consisting mostly of women of the lower middle or rural classes—from Taiwan across the politically tense Taiwan Strait to the sacred ritual center of the Mazu goddess cult on Meizhou Island (湄洲島), Fujian Province. It was indeed a historic “mediaevent ” (Dayan & Katz 1992), in which the forces of popular religion deployed the largest contingent of Taiwanese media crews ever to cover such a phenomenon (Zhenlangong even paid the expenses of more than eighty media personnel), in order to solidify their national position and engage with the grassroots religious revival in China. This mutual deployment of religion and media took place against the larger historical backdrop of the emergence of the modern nation-state in China and Taiwan. It has often been observed that modern states are predicated on territoriality, the fixing and monitoring of the population, and patrol of state borders (Anderson 1991).3 Anthony Giddens draws a useful distinction between “frontiers” and “borders” when he writes that the frontiers of archaic empires or premodern states were marginal areas at the periphery where “the political authority of the centre [was] diffuse or thinly spread,” or were occupied by tribal communities not fully colonized by archaic states. Borders, however, are found only with modern nation-states and the global state system. They are sharply and clearly demarcated, and despite their location at the edges of the nation-state, they convey a state presence (through border patrols, customs checkpoints, and media messages) equal to that of the political capital (Giddens 1987:50).4 Modern state territorialities in both Taiwan and China have developed ways of excluding, containing, or rechanneling de-territorializing forces such as capitalism (Deleuze & Guattari 1987), migration (Scott 1998), the transnational media, and, more recently, religious pilgrimage. Television’s power to promote cultural integration (Ang 1996:5) has not been lost on nation-states, which have established or guided national broadcast systems and which control media access, media importation, and programming to varying degrees. Whereas nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nationalisms relied on newspapers, nation-states now actively deploy television to construct what Benedict Anderson (1991) calls the flattened homogenized monolingual and simultaneous space-time of the national imaginary. In the U.S., we see the role of the state in the ironic use of the First Amendment to establish an internal cultural space...

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