Wei-Ping Lin's goal in this book is to explain how magical power is materialized—that is, embodied and felt—in Chinese popular religion. Lin based Materializing Magic Power on recent fieldwork (1995–2011) that began in several agricultural villages in southwest Taiwan and concluded in a city in the north of the island, after villagers moved there to find work with better pay. She sets her ethnographic findings in the context of the analytical literature, giving us a study that is both ethnographically and analytically strong.
The first way religious magical power is materialized is through the god statues that are a central feature of the religious process. In the villages, the inhabitants themselves made the statues that would preside in the community temple. Each step, from the initial blocking-out of the deity's form, to giving it specific shape, to placing symbolic objects in its secret cavity, to covering the statue in gold foil and painting in its eyes, was performed in a prescribed manner with appropriate ceremony.
In form, color, and decoration, these statues resembled Daoist statues, with impassive yet stern faces, elaborate robes, and headdresses. But these were gods of popular religion, a broader tradition, usually representing a local family's ancestor. In the Wannian Village, for example, the ranking deity was Dadaogong 大道公, or “Duke of the Great Way,” claimed by the Gao family as their ancestor. Villagers formed a close and almost personal bond with their temple deities. In times of sickness or other personal crises, they might borrow a smaller copy of the god from the temple and take it to their home for a few days, in order to have the god's magical power (lingli 靈力) within the family during its time of troubles.
The second way religious magic is materialized is through the spirit medium (jitong 乩童). This refers to the shaman who could be possessed by the god in order to transmit the god's wishes and instructions to those in need of assistance. Spirit mediums are an often-seen feature of popular religion in Taiwan, where they are linked to planchette writing because of its widespread use in Taiwanese communities.
Local community members selected the medium from among the men in their village whom they would confirm in that role after a series of trials and ceremonies. After he fell into a trance, the spirit medium needed an assistant to help convey the possibly semi-coherent sounds or writings coming from the god. Villagers knew that an effective medium needed to be approved by the gods for his role and they felt that when he was possessed the medium was basically a tool of the gods, so they did not necessarily see the medium as a weird or poorly socialized person. In fact, the more active the medium became to help ameliorate family issues, the more he was respected as an agent of the gods who helped to bond the community together.
Because of the industrialization and increasing urbanization in Taiwan starting in the 1970s and 1980s, the local gods of the rural southwest Taiwan villages Lin was studying and their spirit mediums began to relocate to Bade City in Taoyuan County (桃園縣八德市) in northern Taiwan where factory and construction work could be found. Urban life-ways were not those of the rural villages, and one of the contributions of this book is the deft manner in which Lin is able to lay out the changes that took place as the villagers recreated as best they could the religious and community ties that had sustained them for generations in their villages.
Lin explains many changes; for example: the former villagers no longer live in close proximity to each other, borrowing a statue to take home is no longer the practice, people unknown to the medium or to the religious community might call on their cell phones to request the deity's help with a personal matter, and the medium has to devote more time to administrative and logistical matters in order to keep the now more far-flung and less-intimate community functioning.
This study demonstrates how the gods and the spirit mediums who were connected to the people of the original village continued to bind them together after they moved away and became a more urbanized and amorphous community. In the urban setting, the community was able to attract and absorb new members, and in the process a number of their earlier religious practices and those of the spirit mediums were modified. But the underlying rationale and logic of the earlier forms of activity remained. Research scholars will be referencing this work for decades to come, and because of the many perspectives raised through its clear exposition, Materializing Magic Power is perfect for graduate or undergraduate seminars.
