Gods, Nations, and Spatial Politics of Identity: Ang-kong Festival of Taipei Basin（1895-1945）
Date Issued
2007
Date
2007
Author(s)
Lin, Chuan-Kai
DOI
zh-TW
Abstract
This text uses the Ang-kong cults of Taipei basin as source material to discuss an aspect of the spatial transition history of Taipei basin since the Ching Dynasty. My discussion is divided into two parts: in the first part, I aim at analyzing the ritual and myth of the Ang-kong cults to explain that the Han folk’s cultivation of the Taipei basin is not merely a way of livelihood but also a symbolic order of the production area and a localized historical memory. In the second part, I turn to survey the period of the Japanese rule and the post war era to explain how the country’s administrative transition could influence the spatial pattern of the Han folk’s popular beliefs’ output, among which the Japanese empire and the KMT government’s nation-building project are of the greatest influence.
The operation of the ceremony of Ang-kong is different from the so-called “religious sphere” theory or the spatial model made by the development of Han hamlets with temples built. The spatial order inside the hamlets is produced through the imagination of the moving of the gods and army “outside the hamlets.” Rituals and myths not only produce the localized time-space order but also let people image the distant great empire through this hazy way. In chapter five I would explain the awareness of the spatial quality of the local belief of Han by Japanese empire, and they also regarded this belief as the main disturbance of the construct of the imagination of Japanese nationality or the space of “Shinto”. But due to the limitation of the colonial knowledge and the constructional interstice of their spatial strategy, it wasn’t well executed in Taipei basin. In chapter six, I point out the KMT government, who kept their nationalism ideology from the early years of 1910s, also regarded the local belief of Han as the disturbance of stepping into a “modern” nation. But in the process of totally forbidden, they found it was difficult to enforce so they changed to develop a tactic to include gods such as Ma-Tzu in “national culture”, and planed to unify the ceremonies of Han in Taipei basin as the ceremony of Ma-Tzu.
To summarize the whole context, I try to express how people experience the “rule” or “intervention” of the management modes of a modern country in scenes of local society. In this process, people might not understand the sequence of the forming of national policies, but they draw up explanatory tactics to interact with the government through the symbolic resources in the existed local knowledge system. But in such interaction the existed sequence of space was changed by this influence, in the example of Taipei basin, it causes the rise of Ma-tzu belief and the relatively fall of Ang-kong belief. This context regards the local belief of Han is definitely influenced in the effect of a huge system and not a relatively closed local affair.
Subjects
尪公
漢人民間信仰
日本民族主義
民族建構
Ang-kong
Han folk religion
Chinese Empire
Japanese Nationalism
Chinese Nationalism
Shinto
nation-building
production of social space
Type
thesis
File(s)![Thumbnail Image]()
Loading...
Name
ntu-96-R93544027-1.pdf
Size
23.53 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum
(MD5):0fdd9d32b99a158657bbc4a049f9d1e0