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A Poetics and Politics of Possession: Taiwanese Spirit-Medium Cults and Autonomous Popular Cultural Space

My intent in this essay is to discuss cults of spirit possession and healing in Taiwan, to consider the potential for this form of popular culture to create autonomous spaces, and to evaluate the larger social and political consequences of such autonomy. However, before turning to discussion of Taiwan, it would be useful to examine briefly another recent study of possession cults in a perhaps not entirely dissimilar environment, namely, Michael Taussig’s barely fictionalized Venezuela. (Taiwan is also a former colony with a well-developed modern economic sector.) In his Magic of the State, Taussig describes a kind of symbiosis between the state and popular religion, in which the same force that animates the bodies of the possessed is the history, and the historical figures and stereotypes, on which the state relies for its legitimation: “a sixteenth century cacique, an early nineteenth century barefoot black cowboy freedom fighter, . . . the Liberator [Simon Bolívar] himself, coughing blood.” And in thus physically manifesting, making