The Evocation of Religious Experiences and the Reformulation of Ancestral Memories: Memory, Ritual, and Identity among Bankim Catholics in Taiwan

This thesis is concerned about how Bankim Catholics perceive their past through Catholic feasts and rituals, and how they reformulate their identity through the culturally patterned ways of experiencing and understanding their history in the foot of mountain area on the Pingtung Plain. Approaching these questions by the perspectives of religious experiences and ancestral memories, I explore how Bankim Catholics evoke relevant elements of past memories through bodily sensations and emotions in the ritual performances, how they experience a simultaneity with the past through cyclical reenactment of the yearly-round Catholic feasts and rituals, and how they construct their identity through reformulating the “ancestral” traditions.
During the long processes of forced migration and religious persecution, Bankim inhabitants disconnect with their ancestral past. In their embodied and enacted forms of past memories, Bankim Catholics repetitively experience feelings of “suffering,” “being displaced,” and “uncertainty,” and continually articulate the past and the present through the principle of “repetition of the relevancy.” Moreover, Catholicism turns Bankim into a particular place for incorporating displaced refugees and persecuted believers from different origins, and replaces different ancestral traditions by Catholic culture. Therefore, Bankim Catholics emphasize Catholicism as their ancestral tradition, which over-all replaces ambiguous past of pagan ancestors. Through forgetting and selection, they re-define their ancestral traditions and construct their contemporary self-identity.
The other purpose of this thesis is to challenge the Pingpu study in Taiwan. Based on the assumption of ethnicity, researchers of the Pingpu study construct images of reified and objectified “Pingpu” cultures; furthermore, these academic discourses form essentialized identity among “Pingpu” people. However, I argue that the idea of historicity is more suitable for us to understand how people as historical actors are able to create their own understanding of history and past actively, and how they construct their historical agency to think about the present reflexively.