Essay on rituals

The Woman Who Didn't Become a Shaman Author(s): Margery Wolf Source: American Ethnologist, Vol. 17, No. 3 (Aug., 1990), pp. 419-430 Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/644854 Accessed: 06-01-2018 05:46 UTC

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the woman who didn't become a shaman

MARGERY WOLF-University of Iowa

In the spring of 1960 in a then-remote village on the edge of the Taipei basin in northern Taiwan, a young mother of three lurched out of her home, crossed a village path, and stumbled wildly across a muddy rice paddy. The cries of her children and her own agonized shouts quickly drew an excited crowd out of what had seemed an empty village. Thus began nearly a month of uproar and agitation as this small community resolved the issue of whether one of their residents was being possessed by a god or was suffering from a mental illness. For Mrs. Chen, it was a month of misery and exultation; for the residents of Peihotien, it was a month of

gossip, uncertainty, and heightened religious interest; for the anthropologists in the village, it was a month of confusion and fascination.

Mrs. Chen herself had less influence over the outcome of her month of trial than a foreign

observer might expect. Even Wang Ming-fu, a religious specialist who lived nearby and who was given credit for making the final decision, was only one factor in a complex equation of cultural, social, ritual, and historical forces. In the pages that follow, I will attempt to reconstruct

the events of that spring from field notes, journal entries, and personal recollections and eval- uate what happened from the perspective of the anthropologist. I am not concerned here with shamanism per se, but with the social and cultural factors that were brought to bear by various members of the community in deciding whether Mrs. Chen was being approached by a god who wished to use her to communicate with his devotees, whether an emotional pathology included fantasies of spirit possession, or whether, as a few maintained, her feckless husband hoped to use her as a source of income.

In the hours following Mrs. Chen's precipitous trip into the mud of the rice paddies, an enor- mous amount of information traveled through the village about her recent behavior, her past,

and the attitude of her family and neighbors. The day before, she had taken her six-month-old baby to her sister's house and left her. She had been complaining to her husband that there was a fever in her heart. She had beaten herself on the chest, pleading to be left in peace, and had jumped up and down on the bed so violently that it had broken. Her husband, commonly re- ferred to in the village as Dumb T'ien-lai, had told one of their neighbors that she was probably going crazy "again." Nonetheless, he had done nothing about it until her very public display. Informants who were in the crowd that gathered as neighbors pulled her out of the paddy and took her back to her house reported that she begged to be allowed to go to the river to "meet someone" who was calling her. The nearby river is considered a dangerous place, full of ghosts who have either accidentally drowned or committed suicide. Water ghosts are infamous for trying to pull in the living to take their place in the dark world of unhappy ghosts.

When a Taiwanese village woman began to display shamanistic behavior, her neighbors had to decide whether she was being called by a god to speak for him, possessed by a ghost, exploited by her husband, or crazy. Although she had many of the attributes of a successful tang-ki, or shaman, she was finally labeled crazy because of her marginal status in the community and in the male ideology. [China, Taiwan, gender, shamans, self]

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As the long afternoon wore on, I heard other reports. People said that she pleaded with her

husband, Chen T'ien-lai, to give her incense so that she could apologize to "the god who crossed the water." When he lit the incense for her, she began to tremble all over, her eyes glazed, and she began to talk in a loud male voice. One of the oldest women in the village, a woman known for her religious knowledge, came to see her and told T'ien-lai that he should call in a tang-ki (shaman)1 to see if she had met a ghost. By then, however, Mrs. Chen's husband had finally taken some action on his own, and the ranting woman was hauled off under some kind of restraint in a pedicab to what was described to me as a "mental hospital" in the nearby market town.

During the three days that Mrs. Chen was out of the village, the Chen family was part of every conversation. Arthur Wolf, our assistant Wu Chieh, and I collected information about the Chens

whether we wanted it or not. We discovered that even though the family was extremely poor, Mrs. Chen went regularly to the temple in Tapu and visited other temples within walking dis- tance. Whenever her children were ill she consulted tang-ki in Tapu and neighboring areas. At home, she burned incense and made offerings daily to both her husband's ancestors and a variety of spirits and gods. We learned that although she was painfully shy (we had had much less contact with her than with most other vi I lagers), Mrs. Chen was a fiercely protective mother

who had quarreled in recent months with a woman from the Lin household when Mrs. Chen's young son had been slugged by a Lin boy. The Chens had lived in the village for nearly ten years, but by village tradition they were still considered newcomers-it took at least a gener- ation for a new family to be accepted among those whose grandparents and great-grandparents had been born in Peihotien. Until then, newcomers were expected to behave like guests, and guests were expected to watch their hosts' faces. It was a Lin village.

When Mrs. Chen returned to the village, pale and drugged, her mother, Mrs. Pai, was called in by Chen T'ien-lai to "help out." Mrs. Pai had none of her daughter's shyness, and the vil- lagers soon learned from her that her daughter had had one previous "episode" of this kind of

behavior. When she was a young adolescent the family had come upon hard times and had been forced to give her away "in adoption" to a family in need of a servant. The girl had done fairly well until "something happened" about which the mother was vague in detail but implied that a member of the family had either raped or attempted to rape her. The girl had run away to her mother, been returned to her adoptive family, and within a few weeks been sent back to

her parents by the adoptive family because "she was crazy." She stayed with her natal family until her marriage. There had been, according to her mother, no recurrence of erratic behavior.

Mrs. Pai also cast new light on what might have precipitated her daughter's current distress. It seems that a couple of weeks earlier a sizable sum of money had been lost from the pocket of her jacket. Mrs. Chen's son said he had seen his father take it before he went out to gamble one night, but Chen T'ien-lai denied it. Mrs. Chen blamed herself for the loss, but at times seemed convinced that it had been stolen by someone from the Lin household. At some point in the days that followed, the money was miraculously found (probably supplied by sympa- thetic villagers), but the expectation that this would end the problem was disappointed.

Within 48 hours of her return to Peihotien, Mrs. Chen was again drawing crowds. First, she told her mother that she must bai-bai (worship) to "the god who crossed the ocean," a god unknown to Mrs. Pai. The old woman I mentioned earlier informed Mrs. Pai that this was prob-

ably Shang Ti Kung (a local god) and that it cost only one New Taiwan dollar (a few cents) per day to rent an image. She also urged her to bring in Shang Ti Kung's tang-ki to ask what was wanted. All of this was done the next day and, according to a neighbor, the tang-ki said that Mrs. Chen had met a ghost. Later that afternoon the image of another god, Wang Yeh, was brought in, but Mrs. Chen still was not at peace. The next day, Mrs. Chen, according to her husband, leapt out of bed shouting that the god was in her body and that T'ien-lai must go at once to get the god's image so that she could bai-bai to him. They tried to humor her and finally,

because she was getting more and more frantic, agreed to purchase the image. However, nei-

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ther Chen T'ien-lai nor his mother-in-law recognized the god she described. As Chen T'ien-lai was discussing this problem with some neighbors, his mother-in-law came out of her daughter's

bedroom and announced that the daughter, using a strange voice, had told her the exact place to purchase the god's image. She sent her son-in-law on his way and, according to my infor- mants, Mrs. Chen calmed down and went to sleep as soon as she heard that he had gone to purchase "the right god."2

Once the new god was put on the Chen household altar, however, the activities in the Chen

courtyard changed dramatically. Mrs. Chen began to "dance" like a tang-ki, speak in a strange language, and make oracle-like statements. For nearly a week, whenever she came out of the house, crowds would gather and she would "perform." We did not attend all of her sessions, but we were told that she revealed knowledge about people's personal lives that "only a god" would have. She behaved and spoke in ways that were most uncharacteristic of the withdrawn, depressed woman to whom the village was accustomed.

One session in which our research assistant was involved is a good example. I quote from our field notes:

Mrs. Chen suddenly jumped up and pointed at Lin Mei-ling and told her to approach. Lin Mei-ling had been chatting with some other women about some medicine she had put on her eyes, which ap- peared to be infected. She looked quite scared, and the others had to push her forward toward Mrs. Chen, saying, "Go on, see what she has to say." As soon as Lin Mei-ling reached her, Mrs. Chen touched her eyes and said, "All right. This one will be well." She sounded as if she were reading a formal notice. Mrs. Chen then returned to making bai-bai motions with her hands, saying: "Your husband is a good man. He has a kind heart. He took me home one night on his bicycle. Your family will have peace and won't have any troubles." Lin Mei-ling was holding her baby, who began to cry very loudly. Her mother- in-law came up and tried to take Mrs. Chen's hands off Mei-ling, telling her that the baby was crying because she had to urinate. Mrs. Chen pushed her aside and said in a loud commanding voice, "Never mind." She then began to handle the baby, saying, "You will have peace and you won't have any trou- ble. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter." To Mei-ling she said, "In these days everything will be all right for you. Everything will be all right." She made more bai-bai motions and then told Mei-ling to go home and not speak with anyone on the way. "Do you understand?" she asked. Mei-ling was still smiling, but she was probably quite frightened, for her face had turned white. She left and Mrs. Chen knelt on the threshold, making more bai-bai motions. She called our assistant, Wu Chieh, to come to her.

Wu Chieh was frightened and didn't want to go forward. She asked another woman what to do and was urged to comply. She was told, "Nothing is wrong. The god is in her body, that's all." Several people pushed Wu Chieh, including Mrs. Pai, Mrs. Chen's mother. Mrs. Chen moved her hands over Wu Chieh's body and face and then took her hands and began to "jump" like a tang-ki. Some of the people in the crowd laughed and said, "She wants to dance with you, Wu Chieh." Mrs. Chen said, "Older Sister, you come and you are very kind to all of the children. From the top of the village to the bottom, all of the children call you Older Sister. Do you like that? Do you like that?" Wu Chieh was speechless with fear. Mrs. Chen's mother told her to say something, and Wu Chieh blurted out, "Yes." Mrs. Chen hugged her close and put her face against Wu Chieh's. Mrs. Pai said, "She wants to kiss you." Mrs. Chen shouted, "No, no, no!" Her mother quickly said, "No, I am wrong. I am just an old lady who doesn't understand."

Mrs. Chen told the crowd through gestures (reaching in her pocket, smacking her lips, and so forth) that Wu Chieh gives the children candy. "Children, adults, and old people are all the same. You know that, right?" Wu Chieh nodded. Mrs. Chen then began to make wide, sweeping bai-bai gestures and pronounced, "People should not be judgmental, saying this person is good and that person is bad." Then she began to jump around the yard, and an older woman hissed at Wu Chieh, "Stupid child, aren't you going to run away now?" Some little boys were giggling and saying, "This crazy lady is dancing and poor Wu Chieh is going to have to wash all of her clothes." (Mrs. Chen was dirty from kneeling and falling in the dusty courtyard.) Mrs. Chen immediately turned on the boys and shouted, "Go away if you don't believe. Go away." She waved them off as if they were curious chickens, and they scattered like chickens. She turned again to Wu Chieh and rubbed her hands, telling her that everything would be peaceful with her.

As she talked, she continued to make bai-bai motions and to jump about, and finally she fell over backward on the ground. She lay there for some time, and Wu Chieh said that when Mrs. Chen opened her eyes, only the whites were visible. After a bit, Mrs. Chen got up and told everyone to go away, saying, "If you don't and you meet something bad [by implication, a ghost], don't blame me." People moved off to the edge of the yard, some of them whispering, some of them laughing, but after a bit the crowd slowly began to edge back toward the house. Mrs. Chen told Wu Chieh, "Because they bully me, I am not willing to continue. Do you understand? You must take me out. Do you understand that?" Wu Chieh kept agreeing at the urging of Mrs. Chen's mother, but she wasn't at all sure what was expected of her.

Mrs. Chen told Wu Chieh to go home again and not to talk with anyone she met on the way. "Listen to what I say or it won't go well for me. After you go home, then come back and take me into the house."

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People urged Wu Chieh to leave then, so she started to walk away, but Mrs. Chen called her back one more time. "I haven't finished talking to you yet," she said. "If you don't listen to me things will go badly for you. Do you understand? Now, hurry up and go home and then come back and take me to my room. Will you do that? If you don't, I will come to your house and find you." She repeated these instructions several times and added, "When you come back, if I am still talking to these women, you stand here and don't say anything, do you hear?" This was all said in a loud commanding voice, totally unlike her normal voice, according to Wu Chieh. Mrs. Chen grabbed both of Wu Chieh's hands in one of hers and gestured with the other in the "counting" motions of a tang-ki who is "calculating" what goes on in the world. (This is considered an indication of the god's omniscience.)

Wu Chieh finally extricated herself from this session, but returned in a few minutes and led

Mrs. Chen, still gesturing and talking oddly, into her bedroom, where she got her to lie down. Wu Chieh then fled, but Mrs. Chen did not forget her. She called for her attendance several times over the next few days. Unlike Mrs. Chen, who had spent ten years in the village and was still an outsider, Wu Chieh in the year she had lived in the village had become everyone's confidante, everyone's friend, even Mrs. Chen's.

I have included this long quote from our field notes to give the reader a sense of Mrs. Chen's performances to compare with the description of the session of an experienced tang-ki that will

be quoted below, and also to provide a glimpse of the way in which some of the villagers responded to this event. Village opinion was divided at best. Before Mrs. Chen was finally taken

away "for a rest" by her mother, several village women reported smelling "puffs of fragrant air" in her room, a sure sign that a god was present; several others reported that she had told them things that only a god could know about their family affairs; she had tormented the Lin family, who had treated her so harshly over the quarrel between their children; she had been visited by a doctor who had given her heavy doses of tranquilizers; and she had held many sessions not unlike the one described above. Finally, old Wang Ming-fu, who was considered the expert in the region on matters of religion and ritual, came to talk with her. Their conver- sation, of which we never got a complete report, was not a happy one. He left in a huff.

We began to detect a change in village attitudes shortly after Wang Ming-fu's visit. Dumb T'ien-lai was enjoying the spectacle far too much and talking too openly about how expensive it was for him to have his wife providing free advice to anyone who asked for it. Mrs. Chen spoke too often and too much about herself as Mrs. Chen rather than behaving as a vehicle who was unaware of her pronouncements while "in trance"; her speeches rambled on too long and lost the enigmatic quality that brings authority to the tang-ki. And the fact that Wang Ming-

fu was unlikely to recommend that she go to a temple where other tang-ki got training and experience seemed to end the matter. Within a week, people had begun to refer to her as "poor Mrs. Chen," to regard her displays as a nuisance, and to pressure members of her family "to do something."

Before I explore in more detail how and why this decision was reached, some background on shamanism, or spirit possession, in China and Taiwan and its role in folk religion is neces- sary. I will not try to sort out the peculiar amalgam of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism that is involved in folk religion in Taiwan in particular and China in general. Suffice it to say that there are Buddhist temples and monasteries and that their adherents and practitioners are distinguished by dress and diet. There are no Taoist temples, but folk temples devoted to local gods are usually the locus of the activities of Taoist priests and of the lowly spirit mediums (Jordan 1972:29). The average Taiwanese citizen will make use of Buddhist and Taoist practi- tioners as the need arises, sometimes entertaining both during funeral rituals. Temples nearly

always have at least one Buddhist worthy on their altars, and Buddhist temples sometimes have shrines for local gods in side alcoves. To add to the confusion, spirit mediums in rural areas often provide services from their own home in front of their ancestral altar-which is also a shrine to their particular god-or in the home of the family requesting the help of their god. In

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urban areas some tang-ki have shop-front shrines to their gods, and the most successful have cults of followers who may themselves perform in trance (Kleinman 1980:232).

In his study of folk religion in a Taiwanese village, David K. Jordan describes the function of

the tang-ki at the village level:

The tang-ki are the prime rural religious arbiters. It is they who diagnose a given case of familial or village disharmony as caused by ghosts; it is they who explore the family tree or the village forts for possible ghosts and their motivations; it is they who prescribe the cure. Spirit mediums drive harmful ghosts from the village; spirit mediums perform exorcisms; and spirit mediums represent the august presence of the divine at rites performed in their name. It is likely that in the past it was the spirit mediums who had the final voice in alliances between villages [in local wars]. [1972:85]

But, as Jordan goes on to warn:

The tang-ki is not a free man [sic], and his imitation of the gods is not a matter of his own caprice. Not only must he perform in trance (and therefore presumably not be guided by capricious desires but only by unconscious directives), but he is subject to charges of being possessed by ghosts rather than by gods should he become incredible. [1972:85]

And if the tang-ki is deemed possessed by a ghost, like any other villager, he or she will have his or her soul called back by another practitioner, essentially ending his or her legitimacy as a shaman.

My own experience with shamans in Taiwan was much more limited than that of Jordan, in

part because religion was not the primary focus of my research or that of my coresearcher, Arthur Wolf, and in part because the villages we worked in did not have a resident tang-ki. In Peihotien, villagers used the services of an itinerant spirit medium who visited the area every few weeks or, late in our stay, of a young man who was attached to a temple in a nearby market

town. Neither of these men seemed to have the kind of influence as "religious arbiter" that Jordan describes. Our field notes and the cases the staff recorded of visits to tang-ki certainly

show that most villagers were "true believers," but we also heard a good deal of the cynicism that Jack Potter (1974) described when villagers assigned self-serving motives to some of the in-trance pronouncements of local shamans. I do not mean to suggest in any sense that I doubt Jordan's analysis for Bao-an, but only that our informants judged shamans on the basis of their

success in solving individual problems-on how ling (strong) their gods were. Had I had the foresight to interview more widely, I might have found that spirit mediums had more influence

on community matters than I assumed at the time. Considering the case I am discussing here, this would have been an extremely valuable piece of information.

In northern Taiwan, the source of my data and much of the secondary material to which I refer, the village shaman is considered simply a conduit between a god and his or her petition- ers. During festivals celebrating the god, the shaman is expected to put on a display of bodily abuse, such as lying on a bed of nails or lacerating the body with swords or a prickball. Al- though this is often called "mortification" in the literature (Jordan 1972:78), the purpose is not to subjugate the flesh as in early Christian ritual, but to prove that the god does not allow his vehicle to feel pain from these injuries and will protect him or her from permanent damage. The injuries do seem to heal rather quickly, and most observers comment on the absence of any expression of pain. Some shamans draw blood during each session, others only at major public events. In private sessions they rarely stage such ordeals, but they always trance.

In the literature there are a number of excellent descriptions of the performances of Chinese

shamans. Some focus on the more spectacular (and bloody) feats of tang-ki on festival days, when they are showing off the power of their gods (see, for example, Elliott 1955), but a few give us a village perspective. Potter (1974) provides a particularly full picture of what amounts to a villagewide seance in the New Territories in Hong Kong, a seance in which the spirit me- dium travels through the underworld of spirits, chatting with the departed relatives of fellow villagers and allowing them to convey messages, warnings, threats, and reassurances to the living. A description by Katherine Gould-Martin (1978:46-47) of a tang-ki's session in a market town not far from Mrs. Chen's home captures the relaxed familiarity of Taiwan shamanism. The

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god who speaks in Gould-Martin's account is Ong-ia-kong, and a cult has formed around the image of him in the living room of a very devout but otherwise not unusual family. The tang- ki, a laborer in his forties who lives two doors away from this family, trances every night after

dinner. While petitioners, believers, or just neighbors gather to observe, comment, or seek help,

the tang-ki wanders about the room, lights a cigarette for the god, exchanges a few words with him, and chats with friends in the crowd. In time an assistant begins to burn spirit money and to chant. As the tempo of the chant increases, the tang-ki begins to shake, tremble, and then to

jump about, finally banging his head on a table. As Gould-Martin describes it:

Once the tang-ki's head comes down, the assistant stops chanting and begins to read off the first case: "believing man or woman," name, birthdate, address, problem. During the reading the tang-ki starts to make sounds in a strange falsetto. He continues for some time. This is considered to be the god speaking in his native dialect, i.e., that which was spoken in his area of the Chinese mainland in the T'ang Dynasty. No one can understand these sounds. The actual advice is given in Taiwanese in a voice similar to the tang-ki's normal speaking voice, but deeper, more forceful, more inflected. The sentences of advice are often followed by, "Do you understand that?" They are interspersed with the falsetto noises. Often there is some discussion. The patient asks the god or the tang-ki's helper a question. The god speaking through the tang-ki may reply or, if it is simple or the god seems annoyed, then the helper or even another patient or listener may answer the question. The god does not like to repeat himself and will be annoyed at that, but he will answer further questions. At the end the god, speaking through the tang-ki, says, "next case" and lapses into soft falsetto while the data of the next case are read to him. 11978:46]

Once the tang-ki has completed the evening's requests to Ong-ia-kong, he is brought out of his trance by the assistant's burning of more spirit money, washes his hands and face, and chats with whomever is left in the crowd; his evening's work is then over. The money contributed is divided up among the assistant, the tang-ki, the host family, and a money-box designated for the god's birthday celebration and a temple the group hopes to build in his honor.

The problems brought to tang-ki are varied, ranging from illnesses in humans and animals to

economic setbacks to marital disputes to fears of infertility. In 1958-59, Arthur Wolf and his field staff collected more than 500 observations of villagers' visits to a local tang-ki. Over half

of the problems brought to the tang-ki concerned illness: 53 percent of the women asked about

their own or a family member's ill health, and 56 percent of the male visitors sought help for illness. Another 16 percent of the women inquired about domestic discord, and 15 percent of the women inquired about their fortune and/or asked to have it changed. Male clients did not ask as much about family disputes (4 percent) and were more interested in having their fortune tended to (14 percent), seeking help with sick animals (12 percent), or getting advice on finan- cial decisions (8 percent). The following examples indicate the kind of information and acuity required ot a practicing tang-ki:

An old lady asked for advice about her husband, who was seriously ill. The shaman said: "He should have been dead by now. Your husband should have been dead yesterday. However, due to 'strength- ened fortune and added longevity' [perhaps from earlier treatment?], he has been able to reach the age of 73. His original life was for only 69 years. Even so, it looks to me as if he were supposed to have died yesterday. If he survives the first day of the coming month, he will have great fortune. You can then come to me to further strengthen his fortune, but not before." He gave her a hu-a [charm paper].

A 1 7-year-old boy asked about a large protuberance under one of his knees. The shaman said: "You have disturbed some ghosts at night." People in the boy's family admitted that he often ran around out- side in the evening and said that the swelling had become larger and more painful in recent days. The shaman gave him a hu-a and told him to see a doctor.

An old lady inquired about her lost gold chain. She said she had come several days earlier, but after four days of searching, she had still not found the chain. The shaman said: "Members of your family do not get along with one another and are quarreling. It doesn't matter that you have lost this chain. The quarreling is more important. Take this hu-a home and burn it to ashes, mix the ashes in water, and sprinkle it on the roof. You will be in harmony and only then will the chain reappear."

A middle-aged man asked about his chickens. "I have raised some chickens and they seem to have a lot of sickness lately. I don't know whether they have offended some dirty thing or there is some epi- demic." The shaman said: "You did not choose a good date when you built the chicken house. Besides, you have offended the fox ghost. Cleanse the chicken house three times with hu-a ashes in water. Offer sacrifices to make the fox ghost go away. Then, everything will be all right."

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As Kleinman (1980:218ff.) also notes, a client's interview with a shaman often takes only a few minutes (although as much as two hours may be spent talking with the assistants and by- standers). In order to address the problems brought before her or him, a tang-ki must have a quick mind as well as a keen understanding of human motivation. Most tang-ki recommend medical help for obvious illness and, where appropriate, are also likely to recommend the as- sistance of other ritual specialists, such as geomancers and herbalists. They also practice a cer- tain amount of psychotherapy (Kleinman 1980). In the examples above, the old woman with the seriously ill husband needed resignation coupled with a bit of hope; the boy clearly needed to see a doctor; a dirty chicken house might have been causing the man's chickens to get sick; and the old lady who came back because the tang-ki's last bit of advice hadn't helped her recover her gold chain needed distraction-and all families have quarrels.

A successful tang-ki must be quick-witted and alert to the needs of his or her clients ("guests" is the literal translation of the term used). Other researchers (Elliott 1955:92; Gould-Martin 1978:59; Kleinman 1980:217; Potter 1974:210, 214) have suggested that tang-ki's successes often rest on their knowledge of the social and economic background of their clients. Kleinman

(1980), who interviewed and observed urban tang-ki in Taipei, comments extensively on their sensitivity to potential tensions in the Chinese family, even if the particular client/patient does not happen to be known to them.

These "job qualifications" are, obviously, derived from the observation of professional, ex- perienced shamans. My concern in this article is why Mrs. Chen was eventually considered not to be tang-ki material, why she was never allowed to reach this stage. A number of scholars have discussed the means by which spirit mediums are identified in China, and they report pretty much the same set of expectations (Elliott 1955; Jordan 1972; Kleinman 1980; Potter 1974). Tang-ki come from modest socioeconomic backgrounds; they are preferably illiterate; they must be sincere and honest; they must display clear indications that a god has chosen them to be his vehicle. People fated to become shamans are originally fated to have short, harmless, unimportant lives, but their lives are extended by the gods who possess them in order

that their bodies may be put to good use. Many spirit mediums tell of illnesses in which they were brought back from the dead, after which they are troubled by a god who sends them into

trances. Nearly all tang-ki in Taiwan report that they struggled against possession as long as they could but finally had to give in to the god's will. In Singapore, according to Elliott, some young men choose the life and train for it, but only after "something happens" to convince them that a god wants to enter them (1955:163). Tang-ki, incidentally, must not charge money for their services, but it is assumed that reasonable gifts will be made by grateful clients. I sus-

pect that in rural Taiwan, few tang-ki receive enough in contributions to support themselves without another source of income (Gould-Martin 1978:62-63; Jordan 1972:75). As Jordan re- ports, in rural Taiwan there are few "divine rascals" because the living is too poor (1972:75).

Anthropologists frequently entertain the theory that spirit possession serves to provide a role

for the emotionally disabled, the psychotic, or the epileptic. Kleinman, who studied the tang- ki in Taiwan primarily as healers, dismisses this explanation as impossible because of the com- plex behavior required of shamans:

Shamanistic healing clearly demands personal strengths and sensitivities incompatible with major psy- chopathology, especially chronic psychosis. Thus my findings argue against the view that shamanism provides a socially legitimated role for individuals suffering from schizophrenia or other severe psychi- atric or neurological disorders. [1980:214]

Kleinman has extensive case material that includes detailed observations of tang-ki sessions as well as interviews with both shamans and their clients. His conclusions and those of others

who have studied the Taiwan tang-ki are in accord with my own observations. Nonetheless, the behavior of the beginning tang-ki and even of experienced tang-ki when

they are going into trance might well be confused with that of a person who is deranged. (See, for example, the description by Elliott [1955:63].) And Kleinman himself provides us with a

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long case study (followed over three years) of a Hakka businessman suffering from acute anxiety

and a variety of debilitating physical symptoms, who solved (to his and the shaman's satisfac- tion) his problems by "accepting the god" of the shrine, trancing, and essentially playing the role of lay shaman in the cult (1980:333-374). What Western observers might classify as men- tal illness is not necessarily so classified in Taiwan or China. The Hakka businessman in Taipei was treated for his problems for some time before he was defined as "troubled by the god" who wished to use him as a vehicle. Another of Kleinman's cases, one he classified as "acute, re-

current psychosis associated with normal inter-ictal behavior and provoked by acute stress pro- ducing extreme fear," was that of a 34-year-old mother of three who frequently attended tang- ki sessions (1980:166-169). When she began to trance regularly at one of the shrines and "asked that shrine's tang-ki if she could become a shaman ... he told her no (an unusual re- sponse), because it was 'too early' and she was 'not yet ready.' " According to Kleinman, the tang-ki did so because "the patient was unable to control her trance behavior and acted in- appropriately during her trances" (1980:167). The Hakka businessman seemed to have similar difficulties at the outset, but nonetheless was accepted readily as a lay shaman.

Mrs. Chen, our heroine from Peihotien, was eventually deemed "crazy" by her community,

or, as Kleinman might more delicately phrase it, to be showing signs of psychopathology. Why? She had as many shamanistic characteristics as others who went on to full tang-ki status. Her origins were humble; she was functionally illiterate; she was sincere, devout, and kind-hearted; she had led a harmless and unimportant life; she had a history of psychological breakdown that could be attributed to the god's attempt to make her his vehicle; she had resisted as long as she could; she went into trances and spoke in a voice other than her own. For a fortnight she con-

vinced a fair number of respectable villagers that a god was making his wishes known to them

through her. Her lack of finesse in her public performance seemed no more inappropriate than that of other novices described in the literature.3 Why, then, did she not qualify as a likely

apprentice for training?

Unfortunately, we must depend on anthropological hindsight and the randomly recorded voices of villagers for the answers to these questions. Had Mrs. Chen become a tang-ki in Peiho- tien, we would have pages of field notes on her subsequent career, for having a tang-ki in one's

village is a source of considerable prestige (Jordan 1972:81) and certainly something that an anthropologist would want to document, no matter how peripheral ritual behavior might be to his or her project. But having a near miss became close to a nonevent. We recorded some conversations and asked a few questions, and then quickly turned to other issues. However, even without focused and detailed interviews with Mrs. Chen's neighbors, we can explore

some of the reasons why her misery was not validated as divine visitation. From the perspective

of her village neighbors, the question was not merely whether she was hallucinating the voice of a god or the god was in fact speaking to her. The question included another (for many vil- lagers) more likely alternative: that a malicious ghost rather than a god was tormenting her. When another practitioner diagnosed her illness as a ghost problem this might have ended the matter, but his treatment appeared to have no effect on Mrs. Chen whatsoever, indicating to her would-be followers that his diagnosis was wrong and the god-possession theory was still

the best explanation for her behavior. To understand why Mrs. Chen was not accepted as a vehicle for her god, we must look more

closely at her position in her community. A diagnosis of "mental illness" is even less likely to produce a response of care and concern among Chinese villagers than it is among Americans. As long as a family member's oddities can be hidden or explained away, they will be; and whatever they may think privately, the neighbors will go along, for, after all, they, their parents,

and their grandparents have lived and worked side by side with this family, sometimes for cen-

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turies. Condemning someone with whom your family has that kind of relationship to a status that removes him or her from participation in society as a fully adult human is not done lightly.

One might say that the person's genealogical legitimacy in the community is too high. In the hierarchy of attributes of legitimacy, Mrs. Chen simply did not rank highly enough to

protect her from dismissal as a "crazy"; for the same reason, various members of the com- munity who might have recognized her as a potential tang-ki decided it was not worth the risk. To begin with, her gender was against her. There are respected female tang-ki, but not very many of them. Tang-ki are expected to be and do things inappropriate for women, and even though the extraordinary circumstances of a god's demand should make it all right, the sheer incongruity of the expectations of a god's behavior and those of a woman's behavior are enough to create misgivings. Tang-ki, even when not in trance and speaking with a god's voice, must be assured and competent individuals. Mrs. Chen's everyday behavior did not inspire this kind of confidence, nor did that of the only known male relative associated with her, Dumb T'ien-lai.

Even had Mrs. Chen been male, I suspect that her legitimacy would still have received closer scrutiny than that of most men in the village. As noted above, the Chens were "outsiders" in a Lin village. They had no relatives in the area whose genealogy would vouch for their respect- ability. They were better off than the one or two mainlanders who lived nearby and who were

considered totally untrustworthy because they had no family anywhere in Taiwan who could be called to account for whatever transgressions their sons might commit. Nonetheless, the Chens by virtue of their newcomer status remained objects of suspicion, people who were con- sidered slightly dangerous because they had no family whose face their misbehavior could ruin. The arrival of Mrs. Chen's mother helped, but the presence of her father and his brothers would

have helped even more. And here again, her gender was against her, for women are considered only adjunct members of their husbands' families and temporary members of their natal fami- lies. There is no solidity, no confidence in ties through females to families about whom one knows nothing.

At another level of abstraction, Mrs. Chen's failure to be judged a tang-ki in the making comes down to her ambiguous status in terms of the Chinese concept of the family. Any tang-

ki treads dangerously near the edge of respectability in relation to Chinese notions of filiality, and Mrs. Chen's situation tipped her into the area of violation. From the point of view of the Chinese villager, an individual is only part of a more important unit, the family, and the indi- vidual's personal inclinations must be subordinated to the needs of that family. Choice of ed- ucation, occupation, marriage partner, even of medical attention, should be determined by family elders in terms of what is best for the group-and often that group is conceived of as a long line of ancestors stretching into a hazy past and an equally long line of descendants stretching into an unknowable future. The individual is expected to be selfless-even his or her

own body is the property of the ancestors. I have seen innumerable village children harshly punished by their parents for playing so carelessly as to fall and injure themselves, thus dam-

aging the body that belongs to the family. Jordan (1972:84) also mentions this idea in relation

to tang-ki who regularly slash, cut, and otherwise mutilate their bodies in service to their god. Although divine intervention is supposed to prevent any permanent damage to the ancestors' property, the tang-ki nonetheless violates one tenet of filial piety.

More important, tang-ki as tang-ki are serving another master. They are expected to be totally

selfless in that role as well, submitting themselves fully to the god's will in order to enable the

god to solve his followers' problems. In fact, the needs of the ancestors and of the possessing god rarely come into conflict, for when out of trance, the tang-ki can fulfill all of his or her obligations to parents, grandparents, and so forth.4 However, in theory, the tang-ki has given his or her person to a god to do with as he will. Thus, the tang-ki submits to the god that which

belongs to the ancestors. This may make the tang-ki's filial piety suspect, but it also highlights the sacrifice the god requires of his vessel. Mrs. Chen's assumed (although demonstrably in-

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accurate) rootlessness may very well have served to devalue the selflessness of her generosity in submitting to the will of the god.

Had Mrs. Chen been a wife or daughter of a Lin, there might actually have been strong pres-

sures on her to accept the nomination of the god whether she wished to or not. In an intriguing

study of shamanism in contemporary China, Ann Anagnost describes the social pressure put on a woman to assume the role of shaman (1987:52-54). During a period of failing health, Zhu

Guiying exhibited symptoms that were interpreted as spirit possession. Sought out by fellow villagers as a healer, she at first resisted, but finally submitted to the social expectations of her neighbors. As Anagnost puts it, "To refuse this role would have been tantamount to a denial of social ties and the forms of reciprocity and obligation that bound the community together" (1987:53).

I wish I had been able to pursue Mrs. Chen's case in the years that followed this incident in Peihotien. It is conceivable that in another setting, one where she was known in the context of

a family, she might in fact have been encouraged to continue her interactions with the god who approached her in Peihotien. If, for instance, she had moved to Taipei and become involved in some of the cults surrounding well-known urban tang-ki, she might have continued to go into trance and might have become a valued member of one of the groups that Kleinman (1980) describes, thereby finding peace and status. In Peihotien she was too low in all of the hierar- chies to achieve legitimacy as a full member of her community. As a result, she was not able to overcome her anomaly in either world-that of the village or that of the possessed.

Mrs. Chen failed to become a shaman, by one set of measures, because of the structural context in which she lived; she was an outsider-socially and genealogically. But her failure might be accounted for by another set of reasons, reasons even more intimately associated with

her gender. Feminist theorists, exploring the construction of the gendered self in white middle-

class North Americans, suggest that the male self is based on a set of oppositional categories (good/bad, right/wrong, nature/culture, and so forth) and that male selves are more rigidly bounded, more conscious of a distinction between the self and the other than female selves are

(Chodorow 1974; Gilligan 1982, 1988; Hartsock 1983; Martin 1988). A female-perhaps be- cause, as Chodorow (1974) suggests, the female infant does not need to transfer her identity

from her original female caretaker-has a less bounded self. It is not tied into oppositions be- tween self and other, but is constructed instead from connectedness and continuities.5 A good

tang-ki must be able to separate his or her behavior as a tang-ki from his or her everyday be- havior. With a self constructed out of dualisms, a male may find it easier to keep his relations

with his deity separate from his conscious mental life. Mrs. Chen clearly could not. In time, Mrs. Chen might have been able to achieve this separation-other female tang-ki

have. But Mrs. Chen had a special problem. Elsewhere I have explored the construction of the Chinese female self and have suggested that it is highly dependent on the meaning given to the

individual by others (Wolf 1989). Whereas the Chinese male is born into a social and spiritual community that has continuity not only in life but after death, the Chinese female is born into a social community of which she is only a temporary resident, and her spiritual community after death depends upon whom she marries or, more important, whose ancestors she gives birth to. A Chinese boy's self is defined by this certainty, this continuity. A girl's sense of self

develops in an environment of uncertainty-if she isn't sufficiently modest, she won't find a good family; if she isn't obedient, no mother-in-law will want her; if she is willful, she will have trouble with some unknown husband. She reads who she is in the approving or disapproving faces of those around her. The trauma of Chinese marriage, in which a very young woman is

transferred to a distant village where she knows no one, not even her husband, creates for a woman a crisis of identity that is only resolved by the gradual acquisition of a new set of mirrors

in which she can identify herself. Mrs. Chen came to Peihotien a stranger, and a stranger she remained. There was no family to smile or frown, no mother-in-law to approve or disapprove of her behavior, and only a husband who was himself a stranger. Without ties to a family that

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had an accepted place in the village social system, when Mrs. Chen was no longer a novelty, she ceased to have an identity. She was an outsider who was neither dangerous nor useful, and she was more or less ignored. She was in fact nameless, having lost her personal name at mar- riage (Watson 1986). Unlike other brides, her self was never reconstructed, and her mirrors remained cloudy, except for the self she saw reflected in her children and in the conversations she had with the various gods she visited.

I continue to wonder whether or not Mrs. Chen, on that fateful day when she threw herself

into the rice paddy, was not, as some claimed, trying to get to the river. Suicide (often by drown-

ing) is a solution for many (younger) Chinese women who have trouble creating a new self in a strange place. Perhaps when she was pulled out of the muck of the paddy, she made one final attempt to join the social world of the village by way of a god who had more reality for her than

the people among whom she lived. Unfortunately, her self was so poorly established that she could not carry it off. The self that spoke with the gods could not be used to construct a self that

could survive in a social world constructed by strangers.

notes

Acknowledgments. I am grateful to my field assistant, Wu Chieh (fictitious name), who played a central role in the events discussed here, for her patience and persistence. I also want to thank Arthur Wolf, who made me a part of that first field experience. Mac Marshall and three anonymous reviewers have made suggestions that improved this manuscript significantly. I appreciate their help.

1I use shamanism and spirit possession interchangeably and refer to the practitioners as shamans, spirit mediums, or tang-ki, the last being the local term in Taiwan.

2We never did get a name for this god, who needed a special paint job (with half his face black and half white) but still looked and acted very much like Shang Ti Kung to some of the people in the village who knew about such things.

3Jordan describes the initiation of another village woman: "Throngs of village people looked on as she flailed her back, shouting, sputtering, drooling, and muttering. When it was over, she was, willy-nilly, a tang-ki" (1972:167).

4Gary Seaman (1980:67) reports that early in their careers shamans are ritually adopted by the gods who possess them-these gods literally buy the young shamans from their parents. I had not heard of this in northern Taiwan.

51 am keenly aware of the dangers of applying theoretical concepts developed from Western data to the analysis of personalities constructed in a very different culture. This hypothesis in particular seems fraught with cultural pitfalls: among them the fact that Chinese children, unlike white middle-class American chil- dren, usually have a variety of female caretakers during their early childhood. Whether or not the expla- nations hypothesized by Chodorow (1974), Gilligan (1982, 1988), and others have cross-cultural viability remains to be seen, but some aspects of the resulting gender differences they describe in adults do appear to translate. See, for example, Martin's (1988:1 73ff.) description of a female ideology in funeral ritual that emphasizes "the unity of opposites" in contrast to a male ideology that shows "constant efforts to separate opposites"; see also Watson (1986), who uses personal naming practices in China as evidence of differ- ences in personhood. Gender differences in personhood and the construction of the self in Chinese society are a much neglected topic. Much of the research either asserts that there are no differences (for example, Tu 1985) or ignores gender completely (for example, Yang 1989), by default taking the male self to be the Chinese self. I have begun to explore some of these ideas elsewhere (Wolf 1989 and in a manuscript in progress), and it is a rich area for investigation.

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submitted 27 July 1989 accepted 9 October 1989

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