Ethnographic research on religion in Taiwan, particularly that which focuses on vernacular religion, demands great time, effort, and humility for any chance to honestly engage with the people and material that such complexities present. The best studies are able to make the leap from the precise intensity of the particular to saying something meaningful beyond any specific context. Money God Temples in Taiwan: Transcendence and Metaphysics in Chinese Religion delivers a well-researched thick description of a uniquely Taiwanese subject to make a point that goes well beyond immediate sociohistorical concerns. As its subtitle suggests, Fabian Graham’s ambitious monograph delves into the phenomenological mechanisms by which local gods dispense real money to real adherents, and his analysis demands thoughtful reconsideration of how the concept of “exchange” defines ritual. Money God Temples in Taiwan offers a fascinating look into how vernacular religion “works” in Taiwan and promises to help reshape the analytical apparatus to describe what is happening on the ground.
Fabian Graham offers the first monograph-length study of Money God (caishen) traditions. While the practice of burning ritual money (joss paper) as ritual exchange to the gods has long been acknowledged as part of Chinese vernacular religion, Money God Temples in Taiwan focuses on what it defines as the uniquely Taiwanese practice of temples loaning out real money (New Taiwan Dollars), cash that moves from the gods of wealth to practitioners. It offers readers a glimpse into one of the most popular aspects of contemporary religious practice as a reflection of the dynamic changes from when the first Money God Temple officially opened in Taiwan in 1931 to the present day.
The book’s strength is its thick description combined with insider accounts, all informed by the ontological turn in anthropology. Graham’s work approaches the exchange between practitioner and Money God through the lens of multiple ontological realities, thus contributing to recent scholarship like Poul Andersen’s Paradox of Being (2019) on how Daoist ritual can inform phenomenology. In particular, Graham uses Jacques Derrida’s concept of aporia—inherent paradoxes that reveal gaps of logic—to frame the problem of “exchange” as it occurs in caishen practices. The work argues against formulations of ritual that posit an exchange of human material offerings in return for divine spiritual benefit as a “gift” (gesturing to Marcel Mauss’s influential 1925 essay on social theory), as the quid pro quo exchange itself presents a paradox of no longer being a “gift” in the ideal sense. On the contrary, Graham aims to show how the unique dynamics of caishen rituals recast the exchange of spiritual offerings for material benefit, throwing conventional theories of exchange into doubt. By framing Money God temples through Derrida’s notion of the “true gift”—one that has no clear benefit nor clear motivation—Graham argues for a critical reconsideration of how people and their gods relate to each other in Taiwanese vernacular religion.
Money God Temples in Taiwan is an ambitious work, covering a lot of ground in the 170 pages of the main body. The book is split into two roughly equal parts—“Ethnography” and “Analysis”—but each chapter of both sections actually contains a thoughtful mix of both ethnographic content and insightful analysis. The integration works well given the overall goal of the book. The relatively short chapters end with endnotes and citations (in place of an overall Works Cited), and are full of beautiful black–and-white images, mainly photographs taken by the author during fieldwork. Two Appendices list the research temples visited and provide the Chinese for technical terms; the index is useful.
Chapter 1 serves as the theoretical basis for the book. It introduces the reader to the social phenomena of Money Gods in Taiwan, outlining both the challenges they present to established ritual theories of “gift” exchange (beginning with Marcel Mauss) and the potential of aporia to rethink the relationship between people and their gods—what the author calls an “explanation of why paradoxical ambiguities hidden within Chinese religious cosmology render money god exchanges a transcendent approximation of Derrida’s true gift” (p. 9).
Chapters 2–4 offer a brief account of the historical context in which different Money Gods came to be—including the Wutong, Zhao Gongming, and Tudi gong—along with a description of the social history of caishen practices and their popularity. These three chapters borrow heavily from secondary scholarship and work together to set the sociohistorical background for the analysis of contemporary fieldwork to come. While the chapters do usefully situate this understudied phenomenon of Money Gods, one gets the impression that the author was in a rush to get to the “good stuff,” leaving gaps in the historical account along the way. The ambition to do everything in such a narrow space demands such a breakneck pace that the reader may overlook details.
Chapter 5 is a highlight of the book: it paints an intimate portrait of the Daoist Master Liao Zongdong, cofounder of the Money God Temple Shiding Wulu Caishen Miao. The author’s careful thick description, from the warmth of the tea cup Master Liao poured to the wonder of the dreams he recounted, brings the experience of Money God Temples to life. The author details his own ritual experiences as Master Liao led him through the process of making an offering to the caishen, and interjects both personal commentary and theoretical analysis of what is happening in the moment. The chapter reads something like a diary entry and thus underscores the critical importance of individual ontological experience, which undergirds the book’s argument for taking such accounts of ritual seriously. The lack of clarity that the author feels in the offering process helpfully exposes the overall sense of ambiguity in just how exactly the exchange of spirit money for legal tender is supposed to have worked. This kind of vulnerability is all too rare in ethnographic accounts and, in turn, opens the door to theorizing with Derrida’s “true gift,” where one is not beholden to another in the exchange.
Chapter 6 concludes the “Ethnography” section by describing alternative ways in which the common practice of burning paper money benefits Money God Temples and practitioners alike. Through the concept of “bu caiku” (replenishing the treasury), the chapter details how other logics, including Daoist theories of “life-debt” and broader considerations of karma, play into motivations and understandings of paper-money offerings at caishen temples.
The second half, the “Analysis” section, deploys a wide array of analytical perspectives to make sense of the phenomena described in the first half. Chapter 7 uses quantitative data that highlight popularity trends among Money God Temples, running the numbers on how Money God Temples operate to financially benefit both parties (i.e., temple and practitioner) in the exchange. Chapter 8 describes how the proliferation of caishen practice reflects economic and political changes in Taiwan. Noting that, unlike other vernacular religious phenomena, Money God Temples are not thriving elsewhere, the chapter offers thoughtful speculation on what makes the Taiwanese context unique. Graham demonstrates that the study of Money God Temples offers poignant avenues into contemporary Taiwanese Studies.
Chapter 9 concludes the book by delving further into the phenomenological stakes of how efficacy in Money God Temple exchanges works through the kind of paradoxes described by Derrida’s aporia. It raises the question of what the active agents of caishen and practitioners get out of the exchange, carefully going through a range of theories for positing different potential ritual exchanges: from those that privilege the sense of acknowledgment to those trying to calculate exactly how much ling (numinous power) changes hands. Unsatisfied with such explanations, Graham concludes that the particular exchange found within Money God Temples transcends any quid pro quo context to occur in a moment beyond any particular moment, in what Derrida claims to be “a time without time” (p. 169). Here, the book moves from ethnographic observation and analysis into what it describes in its subtitle as “Transcendence and Metaphysics in Chinese Religions.” By looking at the process of exchange through the inherent paradoxes it presents, the analysis seeks to land outside of the subjective experience. Of course, doing so itself presents the inherent paradox of remaining confined within the horizons of authorial subjectivity. But one gets the sense that such paradoxes are exactly where the reader must settle to begin to appreciate how the aporia of Money God exchanges really works.
In many ways, Money God Temples in Taiwan reads as a personal memoir detailing Graham’s unique access to the local history, actors, and rituals surrounding contemporary caishen practices. The personal account of this unique phenomenon is at once limited and deeply sincere and revealing. This tension persists throughout the pages of the book. One gets the sense that the work is torn between feeling compelled into giving a sociohistorical accounting of caishen in Taiwan and what the book really wants to do—deeply engage with the individual ontologies of those involved with the practice (including those of the author). Money God Temples in Taiwan deserves admiration for its ambitious efforts to both record overlooked social behavior and connect the particularities of such social phenomena to broader phenomenological discourse on what is “real.” While the attempt to cover so much ground in so little space often leads to quickly glossing over historical context and sometimes to overgeneralized explanations, the overall point of the book stands out: it is a call to critically reflect on the mechanisms by which ritual works. Fabian Graham’s study demands that scholars take seriously the multiple realities of those engaged in such practices. When we do, we all stand to gain from the ways in which even uniquely local Taiwanese ritual speaks to broader discourse well beyond the horizons of sociohistorical specificity. Money God Temples in Taiwan: Transcendence and Metaphysics in Chinese Religion makes a valuable contribution well beyond the interests of Taiwan Studies.
