Materializing Magic Power: Chinese Popular Religion in Villages and Cities by Wei-Ping Lin (review)

WEI-PING LIN, Materializing Magic Power: Chinese Popular Religion in Villages and Cities. Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series 97. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015. 220 pp. US$39.95 (hb). ISBN 9780674504363 Lin Wei-Ping’s 林瑋嬪 book sets out to discuss the materialization and manifestation of ling 靈 or “magic power” in Chinese popular religion from a new angle. Contrary to previous scholarship that has understood magic power primarily in terms of onedirectional objectifications of social realities or as ideological alienations of powerrelations , Lin follows an approach developed in material studies that argues for the agency of material objects as social beings. However, she goes one step further to address how agency is constituted by materialization and a wider system of cultural meanings and symbolizations. Her study explicates how deities that originally are considered abstract and omnipresent acquire unique magic power in the human world when they are materialized. Drawing inspiration from Robert Hymes’s work on the “personal model” of divinity (pp. 76-78),11 Lin analyzes magic power from three interrelated perspectives: first, she shows how efficacy is bestowed on god statues and spirit mediums through the cultural mechanisms of personification and localization. Second, she examines the efficacy of deities through the social interaction between god statues, spirit mediums, and their followers. Third, Lin argues that god statues and spirit mediums represent two distinct but interrelated forms of materialization of magic power in terms of their static/dynamic, permanent /spontaneous, and passive/sensual natures. She vividly demonstrates how both forms of materialization complement and coordinate with each other in ritual activities and daily life, particularly in that a capable medium may be instrumental in increasing the deity’s authority and power, whereas over-manipulation may lead to its opposite. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in three places of southern and northern Taiwan, the book is divided into two parts. The first part comprises chapters 1 through 3 and is dedicated to popular religion in the village. Part 2 deals with the reconfiguration of rural popular religion by urban migrants in the booming industrial area of what is now Bade district 八德區 of Taoyuan City 桃園市 and covers chapters 4 and 5. Chapters 1 and 2 set out to describe in detail how the magic power of god statues and spirit mediums is materialized through a number of cultural and religious practices, such as the carving of a statue, the performance of rituals to further implement magic power, or initiation rituals for spirit medium neophytes. Thus, both chapters discuss materialization not only in terms of the materials of which they are composed, but also in regard to the cultural mechanisms that bestow them with magic power, as well as in regard to the social consequences these practices bring about. By drawing analogies to the transformation of the religious landscape of Song Dynasty China as studied by Hansen and Hymes,12 chapter 3 further shows how deities are anthropomorphized, personalized, and localized by rural practitioners. Employing fieldwork data and local legends from one of her field 11 Robert P. Hymes, Way and Byway: Taoism, Local Religion, and Models of Divinity in Sung and Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 12 Hymes, Way and Byway; Valerie Hansen, Changing Gods in Medieval China, 1127-1276 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990). BOOK REVIEWS 89 sites, Lin demonstrates how a distinctively local pantheon has emerged and changed in relation to larger socioeconomic transformations. Similar to Hansen’s analysis of religious transformations in Song China, Lin observes the emergence of translocal deities following the economic migration of rural residents across the island since the 1970s. This development has fostered the spread and commercialization of their cults, but it has also served to distance local worshippers from their gods. In sum, part 1 shows how deities are localized and personified into concrete beings with whom local residents develop unique relationships. The processes of materialization thus offer people the opportunity to experience deities, their looks, personalities , and characteristics. This part of the book vividly demonstrates that both god statues and spirit mediums work to stabilize the relationship between gods and devotees , thereby establishing bonds of mutual obligation and convincing the people that “the god...