Religious Studies
Introduction
Pen-Hsuan
Lin (Professor and Chairman, Department of Cultural Tourism, National United
University)
Special Issue Article
1. The
Developmental Contexts of the Phenomenon on Direct Communication with
Supernatural Spirits: An Exploration of Native Spiritual Movement in
Contemporary Taiwan
Mei-Jung
Lin (Professor, Institute of Religion and Humanity, Tzu-chi University)
Fong-Ming
Lee (Ph. D., Department of Ethnology, National Cheng-Chi University)
2. In
and Out Religion: the Spiritual Practices of Taiwan’s New Agers
Chia-Luen
Chen (Associate Professor, College of General Education, Hungkuang University)
3. The
Review of “Conditions for Registration of the Temple” from the Religious Group
Autonomy
Yue-Dian
Hsu (Distinguished Professor, Dean of College of Social Sciences, Department of
Law, National Cheng Kung University)
Wen-Han
Tsai (Master, Department of Law, National Cheng Kung University)
Research Article
4.
Populism in Contemporary Taiwan: Forming Images of ‘The People’ Against
‘Others’
Yu-Ting
Huang (Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Sociology, Tunghai University)
Ruey-Ming
Tsay (Distinguished Professor and Vice President, Department of Sociology,
Tunghai University)
5. On
Common Sense and Imagination in Historiographical Research: A Case Study of
Decoding Two Primary Sources in the Compiling History of the Comprehensive Mirror
Chia-Fu
Sung (Assistant Professor, Department of History, National Taiwan University)
Research Note
6. Affect,
Fieldwork Techniques, Being, and Anthropological Knowledge
Weining
Cheng (Assistant Research Fellow, Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica)
Special Issue Article
The Developmental Contexts of the Phenomenon on Direct
Communication with Supernatural Spirits: An Exploration of Native Spiritual
Movement in Contemporary Taiwan
Mei-Jung
Lin (Professor, Institute of Religion and Humanity, Tzu-chi University)
Fong-Ming
Lee (Ph. D., Department of Ethnology, National Cheng-Chi University)
Many religious people in Taiwan tend to claim that they have the
ability to communicate with deities or Buddha directly. These people scattered
here and there in private temples, shrines private houses or local temples.
Even in their own free associations, they offer all sorts of religious service
to friends, believers, or whomever they have met. Some of them are specialized
in healing people, some provide advices for dealing with personal difficulties.
Today, they can do more of the things that traditional shamans (Tang-gi) could
help to people.
Those people who can communicate with deities are addressed as
Tong-ling-ren in this paper. How these Tong-ling-rens share the common cultural
root with the traditional shamans (Tang-gi), or not? How they come out on the
stage of Han Chinese folk religion and turn into a conspicuous phenomenon? What
sorts of socio-cultural or historical contexts and what kind of social change
in current Taiwan are involved with this phenomenon? How may this phenomenon
related to certain new or old religious tend? And what kind of roles may these
Tong-ling-rens may play in Taiwan society? All these questions will be answered
by two authors. This paper is to point out the characteristics of Tong-ling
phenomenon, and some underlying contexts for such getting popular in
contemporary Taiwan society.
Keywords:
Tong-ling-ren, Spiritual movement, Ling-gi, Tang-gi, Shaman
In and Out Religion: the Spiritual Practices of
Taiwan’s New Agers
Chia-Luen
Chen (Associate Professor, College of General Education, Hungkuang University)
The New Age Movement is seen as a new kind of spiritual quest, one
that has obscured or diminished the boundaries between religious organizations,
identities, and institutions in many ways. This paper explores the multiplicity
and diversity of spirituality practiced by Taiwan’s new agers, and it’s
relation with religion. According to the contents in the interview, I discern
five recognition types and four action types among Taiwan’s new agers. The five
recognition types are typical new age prototype, liberal new age prototype, new
age radical type, Buddhist and/or Taoist fusion type, and inclusive fusion
type. The four action types are the mobile to static type, the conversion type,
and the integration type, in addition to those who have no previous contact
with religion as the non-religion type. The empirical evidences show the
multiple relationships between new age spirituality and religion. Some of them
are dereligion, while others are pro-religion. The multi-facet relationships
between new age spirituality and religion is quite accord to the syncretism and
selfspirituality of new age practices.
Keywords:
the New Age Movement, religion and spirituality, anti-religion, religious
market, individual spirituality
The Review of “Conditions for Registration of the
Temple” from the Religious Group Autonomy
Yue-Dian
Hsu (Distinguished Professor, Dean of College of Social Sciences, Department of
Law, National Cheng Kung University)
Wen-Han
Tsai (Master, Department of Law, National Cheng Kung University)
When religion meets law, that is religion as part of the
administration, is more complex in our multi-religious environment. In addition
to the draft of the Religious Groups Law, which is still in the review process,
there is only “the temple ordinance” in the religion relevant laws currently.
The rest are all executive order. When we questioned “the temple ordinance” is
outdated, and proceed with the draft of the Religious Groups Law, all the
executive order, which is as today's most important religious administrative
legal basis, are often been ignored.
Therefore, the Article will start with the Supreme Court 2006 No. 445
Civil Judgment, clarify the controversy associated with “the temple ordinance”.
And then this Article will build the guarantee of the religious group autonomy
under the Constitution, which around the religious groups. Finally, go back to
review the temple ordinance from the religious group autonomy.
Keywords:
conditions for registration of the temple, religious group autonomy, religious
group, freedom of religion, the draft of the Religious Groups Law
Research Article
Populism in Contemporary Taiwan: Forming Images of
‘The People’ Against ‘Others’
Yu-Ting
Huang (Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Sociology, Tunghai University)
Ruey-Ming
Tsay (Distinguished Professor and Vice President, Department of Sociology,
Tunghai University)
Populism is frequently a keyword in critiques of Taiwan’s democracy.
The goal of this paper is to determine the predominant theme of Taiwanese
populism over the past two decades in an environment where two prominent
populist leaders have promoted different modes of populism. According to recent
analyses, the core idea of populism is imagination of community, which starts a
rivalry between two groups--‘the people’ and ‘others.’ The authors point out
the argument that Taiwan’s populism was cultivated from the above is not
sufficient in light of the social origin of the people’s imagination. We also
note that the emergence of social forces starting in the late 1980s and lasting
into the 1990s made a significant contribution to the beginnings of Taiwanese
populism. Two populist leaders enhanced these social forces via calls for
political reforms and a sense of Taiwanese nationalism: Lee Teng-hui positioned
Kuomintang Party conservatives as ‘others,’ while Chen Shui-bian combined the
ideas of ‘antiprivilege populism’ and nationalism to label the KMT as
consisting of privileged elites, corrupted politicians, and China advocates.
This paper concludes that a continuous axis exists within Taiwanese populism
despite the existence of different political actions.
Keywords:
populism, democracy, communities, ‘the people’, the ‘others’
On Common Sense and Imagination in Historiographical
Research: A Case Study of Decoding Two Primary Sources in the Compiling History
of the Comprehensive Mirror
Chia-Fu
Sung (Assistant Professor, Department of History, National Taiwan University)
This paper focuses on how difficult it is to transcend scholarly
common sense and allow imagination to play a role in the decoding of already
wellknown primary sources while conducting historiographical research. The case
in point is from the compiling history of the classic Comprehensive Mirror to
Aid in Government. I will demonstrate that, if we can put aside the
conventional view and take up the hermeneutic risk, two commonly cited textual
sources, from Li Tao’s Xu zizhi tongjian changbian and Sima Guang’s Sima
wenzhenggong chuanjia ji respectively, could and should be re-interpreted in
accordance with the language in the 11th century China. By doing that, certain
hitherto unexpected possibilities of the connection between the Comprehensive
Mirror and the earlier historical encyclopedia Cefu yuangui can be opened up.
Imagination, as a new way of reading and connecting textual sources, does not
occur ex nihilo but grows out of the juxtaposition of an outside theoretical
inspiration. This is the point where Michel de Certeau’s heuristic notion of
historiographical operation as a configuration of place, procedures, and
products of writing history enters near the end of the paper. Including de
Certeau is not only a gesture of foregrounding my personal aspiration, but also
meant as an invitation for all those interested in the history of history to go
beyond the dichotomy of objectivism and subjectivism and take the practice
serious in future studies.
Keywords:
Event, Common Sense, Historiographical Operation
Research Note
Affect, Fieldwork Techniques, Being, and
Anthropological Knowledge
Weining
Cheng (Assistant Research Fellow, Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica)
This paper examines myriad of experiences, confusion and anxiety due
to how the gender identity of an anthropologist is perceived and brought into
affective, social interactions in fieldwork in order to delineate how the intersubjective
processes and levels of knowledge-making are undergoing, in which the
ontologies of being-in-the-world, cultural and ethnical assumptions in regard
to gender and affect, ways of life and lifeworlds are brought into dialectical
play. I then argue that fieldwork techniques are in essence part of relational
process of knowledge-making instead of viewing research methods as isolated
from the social reality an anthropologist encounters. In this relational process
of knowledge-making, the awareness of the disparate epistemological and
ontological stances between a researcher and people an anthropologist works
with indeed prompts a researcher to conduct her/his subsequent fieldwork techniques
in line with epistemological inquiries. Echoing the spirit of the ontological
turn in anthropology, especially Marilyn Strathern’s and Viveiros de Castro’s
thesis of the existence of alternative ontologies in local societies, I introduce
a phenomenological vision into fieldwork to capture the existential worlds,
their modes of being-in-the-world, and what concerns them most in contemporary
contexts. Taking as an existentialist field of knowledge the multiple
engagements with respect both to gender and to affective interactions between a
researcher and people she/he works with, I then indicate the dialectical
dynamics of the terrain of different ontologies and epistemologies on both
sides, which definitely elaborates the construction of a quaternary practice of
knowledge proposed by Gwo-shyong Shieh.
Keywords:
Affect, Fieldwork Techniques, Being, Ontological Turn, Quaternary Practice of
Knowledge
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