This remarkable ethnography brings together, in alternating description and analysis, several themes rarely examined together in Chinese studies: folk religion, masculinity, and social marginality. At its core is the participant observation by the author—who started out as “a student of the martial arts”—of the military retainer (Jiajiang) troupe that made him one of its performers.
With his title, Boretz playfully modifies the standard categories of Chinese religion proposed by the Taiwan anthropologists David Jordan and Arthur Wolf in the late 1960s, replacing “ancestors” with “gangsters.” Unlike earlier students of folk religion, including festival troupes, his point of departure was an effort to understand what role martial performance, sometimes violent, played in the performers’ personal lives (p. 8). The ensuing ethnography led him into the underside of Taiwan society, with its gambling, heavy drinking, and small-scale vendettas. Arguing that performance dynamically links the social and personal with the religious, he shows how the stories of individuals and their lives refract the familiar metaphoric world of folk religion back into the everyday. Martial troupes control community turf that is supernaturally defined; gamblers seek the gods’ advice; and gangsters use religious idioms in speech and action and identify with Handanye, a god of “unholy luck…and extortion” (p. 104). The passed-down mythology and ethos of the supernatural underworld are, then, continuous with the marginally criminal urban substrata. And the working-class performers are not passive recipients of culture but actively develop cultural traditions in performance and storytelling.
The book's central organizing focus is the Chinese culture of masculinity (Chapter 2). Male ritual violence is understood in the context of the Jianghu (rivers and lakes) (Chapter 5), an inchoate brotherhood beyond the law, the subject of innumerable stories set in the remote and immediate past, where martial arts are practiced, honor vigorously sought, and face zealously kept. Men of prowess are not necessarily social outsiders. Ritual displays of violence, for example in temple forecourts, reproduce the structures of patriarchy as well as speaking to, and for, men who are not bosses. The continuity of Jianghu values and idioms over space and time is convincingly demonstrated here, but the ritualized expressions of masculinity, from Li Bo to Bruce Lee, are always historically located.
Boretz's main field-site was Taidong—a periphery in Taiwan, itself peripheral to China. He suggests in considerable detail (Chapter 3) that its marginality has been conducive to the undercurrent of violence described in his field anecdotes. The county remained largely Austronesian and cut off from the rest of the island, except by sea, through the Chiang Kai-shek era. In the 1990s, the frontier mystique persisted even as roads were opened, and many Han Chinese who had fled debts or legal charges in the western plains retained the self-image of assertive masculinity. Patrilineal and temple structures had had no time to appear, leaving a relatively fluid society that offered scope to men of prowess. Chapter 4, “Fire and Fury” compares the Handanye firecracker display with a competitive but unreligious Torch Festival on another frontier, Dali in Yunnan province, an assimilated Bai Chinese society with equally stark topography and equally vexed ethnohistory. It is not clear, at least to this reader, whether violence in ritual and other forms is more characteristic of former frontiers than in the underbelly of cities and their suburbs. In any case, in both Taidong and Dali many locals seem to imagine themselves (and present themselves to others) as wild people in a wild place, a tendency exaggerated by the commercial lure of tourism, which has in turn reshaped their rituals.
Chapter 6, “Wine, Women and Song,” describes some of Boretz's fellow troupe members at leisure. Drinking, as visitors in Chinese societies are ever reminded, is highly ritualized and strictly male, unless paid women attendants are present. Boretz draws attention to intense competition among the carousers, to martial metaphors (“drinking duels”), and to underlying notions of honor. As in Japan's big-corporation nights-out, he suggests, carousing amplifies individual identity, cohort cohesion, and hierarchy in, among, and beyond Taiwan's small-firms. He construes karaoke as a performance among friends who are amateurs, a cooperative not competitive ritual. The episodic performances of masculinity in bars are observed with sympathy rather than irony and make for lively reading.
In one of several, more theoretical, excursions a short concluding chapter casts light on the role of ritual (and carousing) in framing ambivalent attitudes towards fathers, and on performative creativity and emotion in representing the martial wu ideal.
As ethnographer Boretz not only proved himself in the idioms of his field companions (in martial arts, public performance, and carousing) but ventured to a second field site that could test his theories of Chinese gender and performance. Despite an eye-catching cover portraying a troupe member in the act of self-mortification, he does not sensationalize his topic. Nor does he dramatize his own role. Readers will be rewarded with an intensively researched and often illuminating case study dealing responsibly with anthropology, sinology, local history, and religious studies, and contributing insights in all these disciplines.
