Goddess across the Taiwan Strait: Matrifocal Ritual Space, Nation-State, and Satellite Television Footprints
The said “return of the religious,” . . . is not a simple return, for its globality and its figures (tele-techno-media-scientific, capitalistic and politico-economic) remain original and unprecedented.
Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge”
This essay examines complex interactions among the nation-state, popular religion, media capitalism, and gendered territorialization as these are inflected across the Taiwan Strait. Relations across the strait have been fraught with political tension and military preparations over the question of whether Taiwan is part of China or an independent state. Since the 1999 presidential elections in Taiwan, the new government there has been more vociferous about Taiwan independence, and mainland China’s Communist Party has responded with more vigorous claims on Taiwan, including the launching of a warning missile over the island. Under these conditions, it is all the more remarkable that in recent years there has been an increasing number of religious pilgrimages and exchanges across the strait, and that, in 2000, one such pilgrimage by Taiwanese worshippers of the maritime goddess Mazu to her natal home in Fujian Province was broadcast live from China back to Taiwan via satellite television.
I conducted fieldwork on popular religion and media development in Taiwan for four months in 2000 and 2001 and traveled with Dongsen Television News Station (ETTV News) from Taiwan to China in July 2000, observing their reporters and technicians deliver live satellite television coverage of the historic pilgrimage.1 In contemporary Taiwan, Mazu is the most popular cult deity: her temples are the most numerous, and it is estimated that 70 to 80 percent of Taiwanese worship her in some form. The pilgrimage in 2000 was organized by one of Taiwan’s most prominent Mazu temples, Zhenlangong (Zhenlan Temple) in the central Taiwanese town of Dajia. This mediatized pilgrimage to a female deity propelled a record number of worshippers—most of them lowermiddle- class and rural women—across the politically tense Taiwan Strait to the Mazu goddess cult’s ritual center on Meizhou Island, part of mainland China’s Fujian Province. It was a historic occasion and “media event” ( Dayan and Katz 1992), in which the forces of popular religion engaged the largest ever contingent of Taiwanese media crews in order to solidify their national position and engage with the grassroots religious revival in China.
This mutual deployment of religion and the media took place against the larger historical backdrop of the emergence of the modern nation-state in China and Taiwan. It has often been observed that modern states are predicated on territoriality, the fixing and monitoring of populations, and the patrol of state borders ( Anderson 1991).2 Anthony Giddens draws a useful distinction between frontiers and borders when he writes that the frontiers of archaic empires or premodern states were marginal areas at the periphery, where “the political authority of the centre [was] diffuse or thinly spread,” areas occupied by tribal communities not fully colonized by archaic states. Borders, however, are found only with the rise of modern nation-states and the global state system. They are sharply and clearly demarcated and, despite their location at the edges of the nation-state, convey a state presence (through border patrols, custom checkpoints, and media messages) equal to that of the political capital ( Giddens 1987: 50).3 Modern state territorialities in both Taiwan and China have developed ways of excluding, containing, or rechanneling deterritorializing forces such as capitalism ( Deleuze and Guattari 1987), migration ( Scott 1998), the transnational media, and, more recently, religious pilgrimage.
Television’s power to promote cultural integration ( Ang 1996: 5) has not been lost on nation-states, which have established or guided national broadcast systems and control media access, media importation, and programming to varying degrees. Whereas nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century nationalisms relied on newspapers, now nation-states actively deploy television to construct what Benedict Anderson (1991) calls the flattened, homogenized, monolingual, and simultaneous space-time of the national imaginary. In the United States, we still see the role of the state in the federal government’s ironic (perhaps cynical) use of the First Amendment to establish an internal cultural space of national identity by blocking local governments from creating regional media audiences and by limiting foreign media access to U.S. airwaves ( Price 1994). The lack of cosmopolitanism in American television and other media served well in building popular support for the war on Iraq in 2003.
The advent of satellite and cable television and the Internet has disrupted the correspondence between state geographies and electronic communities ( Morley and Robins 1995). Not only can satellite television disaggregate established audiences, it also creates new ones across and within national boundaries. Euro-American transnational media began using satellite broadcasts in the 1960s, and these media are still dominant today in terms of their global reach, services, and programming (Parks 2002). But in the twenty-first century, we also see the emergence of regional global satellite services that transcend nation-states and challenge the hegemony of Western global media. Increasingly, as Michael Curtin (n.d.) suggests, transnational cultural-civilizational media communities drive the regional production of media and challenge the dominance of Hollywood, currently the one production center that has truly global reach. An influential regional televisual medium is the Al Jazeera satellite news station operating out of Qatar and serving 35 million Arabic speakers in twenty-two nations ( Ajami 2001; Salamon 2002).
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Notes
I thank the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for funding this research; the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, for providing a research base in Taiwan; Dongsen Television News for allowing me to accompany their crew to Fujian; and Dong Zhenxiong of Zhenlan Temple and Zhang Xun for my interviews at the temple. I am grateful to Lin Meirong for inviting me to present this essay at the International Conference on Mazu Belief and Modern Society, at Chaotian Temple in Taiwan, in May 2001; and to Chin Chuan Lee for organizing the China Times Conference, “Media, Nationalism, and Globalization: The Case of China,” at the University of Minnesota School of Journalism, Minneapolis, in May 2001. Versions of this essay were also presented at the American Anthropological Association meeting in San Francisco, in November 2000 (thanks to Jeff Himpele); the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J., in December 2000; the Department of Cinema Studies, New York University, in February 2001 (thanks to Anna McCarthy); and the Institute for Chinese Studies, Oxford University, in May 2003 (thanks to Vivienne Shue). Many thanks also to Beth Povinelli, Jing Wang, Chin Chuan Lee, Monroe Price, and Michael Curtin for their comments on the essay.
- The English word pilgrimage is used to translate the Chinese term jing xiang (literally “presenting incense”). The Chinese term implies that by burning incense, pilgrims make contact with the deity in a temple far above them in the ritual hierarchy. See Naquin and Yu 1992 for a key introduction to the Chinese tradition of pilgrimage.
- In the transition from archaic empires to modern nation-states, Benedict Anderson (1991) has noted a process of “flattening,” in which a hierarchical, sacred court center fading out to indistinct peripheries gives way to a homogeneous space of egalitarian comradeship bounded by clear-cut national borders.
- Anthony Giddens (1987) notes that even when walls were built by such empires as China and Rome, the walls did not divide a population or mark cultural boundaries, since often people on both sides of the wall continued to share a common culture without having to change their identities.