"Superstition Specialist Households"? The Household Idiom in Chinese Religious Practices

Abstract

This article examines the role of the householder religious service provider and the household idiom in the overall field of religious practice in China. First I will look at the emergence of a new label, superstition specialist households (mixin zhuanyehu), in the PRC, and attempt to situate this emergence within the socio-economic and political context of reform-era China. This label shows how the Chinese party-state now conceptualizes ritual specialists such as spirit mediums, yinyang masters, fortune-tellers, and others who make a living in the popular religious realm (including folk musicians and opera performers who perform at temple festivals, temple caretakers, non-monastic Buddhist and Daoist ritualists, votive offering manufacturers, etc.). Though sardonic and condemnatory in tone, this appellation also puts these people in the larger category of getihu (private business households), whose existence is not only legitimate but even celebrated in reform-era China. I then present a couple of vignettes from my ethnographic fieldwork in Shaanbei (north-central China) to illustrate how householder religious service providers typically work (one vignette on a spirit medium; the other on a yinyang master). While operating upon very different principles yinyang masters rely on esoteric knowledge and ritual orthopraxy, whereas spirit mediums rely on deity power and efficacy both kinds of ritual specialist are religious entrepreneurs taking full advantage of the ”household idiom,” in contradistinction to affiliation with formal institutions such as monasteries, temples, or guilds. Next I look at what I call ”ritual jamming,” referring to the ad hoc coming together of householder ritualists to stage larger rituals in response to some clients' more elaborate needs. I also examine the household idiom and see what advantages it has over the corporatist idiom in terms of ritual service provision at the grassroots level, as well as its ability to weather political suppression. I conclude by offering some speculative comments on the probable future of the household idiom in Chinese religious culture.