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

Chapter 3: Taidong: The Mountains and Beyond

58 C H A P T E R 3 Taidong The Mountains and Beyond The renovation of a local temple in late imperial China was an event that brought officials, local gentry, and commoners together in common cause. Stone steles, inscribed with a testimonial written by a wellplaced patron, were often erected to commemorate temple renovations . The act affirmed the position of the patron, but his lavishing of attention and resources enhanced the prestige of the temple as well. The texts of these inscriptions often preserve details of local history otherwise unaccounted for in official accounts. Yet the texts tend to be formulaic, couched in clichés of elite officialdom. There are oblique references to the local and different but few explicit descriptions of things that might be regarded as backward or deviant and thus reflect poorly on the author himself. Villagers, to the extent that they could read and understand the inscriptions, probably had little objection to this editing out of local knowledge. The stele was a talisman of imperial authority and automatically conferred prestige, in proportion to the rank and reputation of the sponsor. It established the locale as a venerable part of the empire, no matter how remote, and, by extension, gave it a place of importance in the cosmic imperium. Such validation could have practical as well as symbolic advantages, and by the late imperial period village temples and the voluntary associations connected with them became the focus of efforts by rural communities to join higher-order power networks and to be favorably represented in official circles (Duara 1988a; Watson 1985). Today, temples throughout Taiwan and China feature similar commemorative inscriptions, most of which imitate the classical style and rhetoric of those earlier texts.1 At the same time, there has been increasing interest over the last two decades in local practice, especially the unusual and exotic. In Taiwan, and to a limited extent also in mainland China, local customs once considered deviant or backward the mountains and beyond 59 are increasingly celebrated and even advertised. Difang rentong, “local identity,” has become a familiar term, appearing not only in these latter -day stone memorial texts, but also in scholarly articles, newspaper editorials, political speeches, and everyday conversation. Quaint folksiness has become a mark of the culturally authentic, turning traditional artifacts and practices, including the rituals and spaces of popular religion, into marketable commodities. Ultimately, however, as with the commemorative steles of the late imperial period, it is the voice of the elites that claims to speak for a community. The “discovery” of local culture has not, therefore, led to the unqualified empowerment of local communities or recognition of marginal voices. Instead, in both Taiwan and China, the power of representation and means of cultural production remain, as before, arenas of contention between local/marginal and elite/national interests. There is more to this contest than pride and face: there is considerable political and economic capital at stake as well. The asymmetry of the contest is greatest, and practical ramifications are most evident, in places where ethnic differences define the cultural landscape. Thus in the regions that once marked the empire’s periphery, from the western desert to the southwestern highlands to the coastal mountains of Taiwan, ethnicity adds an additional layer of complexity to the struggle. Here, the long and often vexed relationship between the Han and the “barbarian” peoples on the empire’s periphery continues to evolve. In government policies and the mass media (for example, in advertising for the tourist industries that now dominate the development strategies in both Taidong and Dali), the interests of the center, the dominant Han majority, are clearly ascendant (Schein 2000; Notar 2006). As with the rebuilding of temples, there are converging as well as competing interests at stake in this process. Given endemic disparities in access to resources and control of discourse, exploitation seems inevitable. But whether in the imperial era or the modern state, Republican or Communist, mainland or Taiwan, local-state engagement has often taken the form of accommodation, even across ethnic boundaries . Strategic accommodation is evident, for example, in the imperial practice of recognizing and awarding titles to local deities. Accepting imperial recognition, marginal communities and deity cults gained security and prestige but sacrificed autonomy and, most likely, the power to represent and interpret their own history and practice. Reciprocal if not equal, this relationship reveals, in another form, 60 gods, ghosts, and...