Bandits, beggars, and ghosts: the failure of state control over religious interpretation in Taiwan

Abstract

Throughout the last century, local temples in Taiwan propitiated socially marginal ghosts in the Pudu (Universal Salvation Festival). The traditional state manipulated the ghost cult in an attempt to enhance its control; the current state is making similar, but less systematic efforts. These efforts largely failed, however, because of the nature of popular interpretation. Popular interpretations of the ceremony experienced several transformations within a basic symbolic framework that defined ghosts as socially marginal beings: ghosts were dangerous outsiders in the commercializing frontier of the 1880s, but they have become the powerless old with the changing family structure of modern Taiwan. Official and elite attempts at ideological control were unsuccessful because the state had no institution that could challenge the symbolic definition of ghostly marginality, or that could channel people's flexible reinterpretations of ghosts. [ideology, interpretation, ritual, Taiwan]