Dialectics of Alienation: Individuals and Collectivities in Chinese Religion

Abstract

This article analyzes religious activities of private worship and public testimony in Taiwan as processes of social and self production. Durkheimian understandings of the genesis and efficacy of collective representations are enhanced by a Marxian appreciation of alienation. 'Alienation' here applies to representations of productive power that invert the real productive relations between producer and product so that the product appears to produce the producer. In the context of Chinese religious activities, two forms of alienation are conjoined in the supernatural power (ling) attributed to territorial-cult gods. First, in the idiom of divine interventions that defend community boundaries, the collectivity's powers of self production (and reproduction) are attributed to the god. Secondly, in a structurally analogous mythology of miracles performed onI behalf of individuals, the person's powers of self-production are also attributed to divinity. Each of these representational tropes invokes the other in a rhetoric of reciprocal authentication that constitutes an important arena of cultural production of, simultaneously, individual subjects and social collectivities.