V
Beyond Hysteria: Subjectivity and Desire
Anthropology has recently shown an interest in the notion of ‘subjectivity’. Corin thinks that this concern with ‘subjectivity’ may be, ‘… a reflection of the inward, narcissistic turn of contemporary Western societies’ (1998: 82). However, the philosopher Duan does not think that this attention given to ‘subjectivity’ is purely a Western preoccupation. She thinks it has been a central matter of concern to Chinese scholars since the beginning of Chinese philosophy (2002: 4).
At first glance, the important Buddhist notions of no self and of extinguishing desire and the Taoist idea of wu wei [no action] would seem to go against any project to promote subjectivity. Because of such ideas in Chinese philosophy, Danto, a philosopher, characterizes Taoism as, ‘…a teaching that aims at stunning the will…’ (1987: 118). Also, many Chinese people have a strong belief in the role of fate as governing their lives.
The ideas mentioned would seem to preclude any role for agency, individuality and desire, all aspects considered to be part of the notion of ‘subjectivity’. However, it is argued in this chapter that the concepts of subjectivity and desire are at the heart of tang-ki worship, and that tang-ki shrines are one place in Singapore where subjectivity is cultivated, although not the only one.
The concept of ‘subjectivity’ has no one meaning in anthropology, and there is the need to use various models of subjectivity (Biehl, Good, Kleinman 2007). ‘Subjectivity’ in anthropology was often thought to be about inner life processes such as fantasy, desire and agency and thus the concern of psychology. Anthropology was seen as being concerned with cultural process and structure. This understanding was often inspired by the works of Geertz and Foucault. However, concerns about desire, phantasy, and agency have increasing become the concerns of anthropology.
The Lacanian idea of the subject is a complex notion that strands the two areas of internal and external processes. It can be seen as being the relationship itself between the individual and the social, between the ego [imaginary] and ‘the Other’ [symbolic], but it is neither the one nor the other. The subject is neither the person determined by structure, ‘the Other’, nor the person outside of structure. The subject for Lacan is never whole but is fundamentally split, split by the entry into the symbolic world. However, paradoxically, this subjection to the symbolic gives some freedom to manoeuvre, some room for desire. Lacan sees subjectivity as a ‘lack of being’ or a ‘want to be’. It thus depends on a continuous engagement in the world in order to achieve some being. In his later works, Lacan talks about subjectivization as the process of becoming a subject, overcoming to some extent but never entirely the determining aspects of one’s being. I see this subjectivization process as leading to the point where a person can in Moore’s terms take up multiple subject positions in the world (Moore 2007: 17).
In this chapter, the significance of subjectivity in tang-ki worship is demonstrated by investigating the notions of individuality and fate and also the discourse used by the tang-ki. It is first shown that despite a strong communal aspect to tang-ki worship, aspects of individuality are also present and valued. Secondly, it is shown that life is not perceived as being entirely ‘fated’ for the Chinese person and thirdly, it is argued that the cultivation of subjectivity is central to tang-ki worship.
Emphasis on the Collective does not negate
Individuality
In anthropological theory, non-Western societies are sometimes characterized as being socio-centric and holistic as against Western societies, which are seen as being individualistic. Marcel Mauss (1985), in his work on the category of the ‘person’ or ‘self’, was one of the first to articulate this viewpoint. Dumont’s (1980) work, using the example of Indian society, is also notable for putting forward this view. However, opposing views have been put forward. Harris, for instance, argues that one should abandon the idea that Indian and European cultures are completely different, and one should see them on a continuum from being individualistic at one end to being social at the other end, the point of interest varying with the particular context (Harris 1993: 15). Babb (1976) analyzes the Hindu ritual of Thaipusam in Singapore and concludes that one can see in this ritual the ‘autonomous individual’ given some value in an otherwise socio-centric culture.
A similar discussion takes place about Chinese societies. Tu (1985), Munroe (1985) and Hansen (1985) all argue for the idea of Chinese society being socio-centric or holistic. The anthropologist, Francis Hsu (1985), argues strongly that Chinese society is orientated to social concerns and is based on family and kinship relations. As a consequence, he points out that amongst Chinese people there is less investment of interest in animals [pets], ideas [commitment to causes such as political ones] and to religion [gods]. Hsu says that religion for the Chinese is mainly functional and utilitarian. He compares this to Western societies, which he sees as less dominated by kinship and so people, consequently, move inwards to psychological and spiritual aspects of a person’s functioning or outwards to political and religious concerns to find some meaning in their lives (1981: 1985).
The psychologists Moneta and Wong would agree with Hsu’s view of Chinese societies. They say, ‘The single most important cross-cultural difference between Chinese and Westerners is the emphasis that cultures place on the individual versus the collective’ (2001: 461). In speaking of East Asian Chinese, the psychiatrist Cheng goes so far as to talk about a lack of personality, and she speaks of the idea of ‘self’ in Chinese culture being organized around role expectations and interpersonal relationships, rather than by the personal choice of individuals (1990: 511, 513).
Kleinman (1997), Elvin (1985) and Lin (1988) all argue against a simplistic dichotomy of Chinese society as being socio-centric and Western society as being individualistic. Lin (1988) contends that it is within the family that we see Chinese people as socio-centric and that outside of the family they can be seen as individualistic and egocentric. While Oxfeld agrees with this conclusion, up to a point, she further develops Lin’s ideas. To her, it is not only in different situations that a Chinese person is either socio-centric or egocentric, but that they are sometimes socio-centric and egocentric in the same situation (1993: 222).
The idea of individuality is brought in here not because it is the essential defining feature of what subjectivity is about, but because at some level there is as Mauss said, in 1938 (1985: 3), and Moore (2007: 24-29) said, more recently, an almost universal sense of an individual self, however this is conceptualized.
Sociocentrism and Individualism in Singapore
It is true that Chinese people in Singapore do not invest a great deal of energy in political concerns [See
Chapter Four
]. However, this has not always been the case and does not seem to derive from the fact that ‘Chinese people’ per se are not interested in politics, as Hsu (1985) suggests. At the time Lee Kuan Yew and the People’s Action Party [PAP] came to power in 1959, there seemed to be a huge interest by Chinese people in political concerns, which even reached down to secondary school level. This interest in politics remained until Lee Kuan Yew and the PAP suppressed all opposition to their policies.
It is less true that Chinese people, at least in Singapore, have no interest or involvement in religion. Christian churches and Buddhist temples in Singapore are full and numbers are increasing, although it seems the number of people that see themselves as Taoists is decreasing.
If any one characteristic of the Chinese way of life in Singapore stood out for me during fieldwork and associating with Chinese people, it was the strong emphasis given to family life. Most families frequently have meals together and small gifts are often exchanged between members of a family, particularly by the women. Many families rally around any member having difficulties. A huge emphasis is given to making sure children have a good education. Christopher’s parents, for example, have provided for all their children to have an overseas university education. His father instead of retiring from work [as he could do] is working to buy each of his children an apartment in the country where they live.
Nevertheless, despite the high value given to family life, I became aware when meeting various families and individuals and getting involved in the life of people who attended shrines and temples that there were sometimes tensions within family life that militated against a centripetal type force to keep people attached to families. I noticed, at times, a strong concern of some of the families I stayed with about my involvement with people outside of their families and sometimes I had to assert myself to overcome these concerns.
Tensions and rivalries in Christopher’s family, especially between him and his sister, Carol, have already been mentioned, making it very awkward for day-to-day relationships between members of the household. In the end, Christopher’s girlfriend had to move out of the house because of the stress caused by her staying in the house. Carol [late twenties] tended to live an independent life, coming and going as she pleased, although she once protested that in the family girls were treated differently from boys. While she has had a boyfriend for seven years, she did not talk much about him and there was little contact between her parents and the boyfriend’s parents.
Apart from tensions within families, I came across other situations where people were not securely embedded in a family network. One man, in his fifties, living by himself with three dogs, had fallen out with his siblings, although he still sees his father regularly. He is the eldest of the children but does not receive the respect expected of his status. This person is concerned about being single and not having any children. He recently established a relationship with a woman and was thinking about adopting a child in the future, although even more recently, he said there have been disagreements over money matters. For a long time, this person has lived frugally and simply. There was a demand from the woman’s family that he obtained a house of his own after he acquired through investments a considerable sum of money.
James, mentioned in
Chapter Three
, although in his thirties and unmarried, still lives with his parents despite not getting on with his father. He frequently comes in late at night to avoid his father.
The picture of the families painted in this chapter can be seen to be strongly socio-centric but there are sometimes strong conflicts and areas of life where the members find ways of acting independently. It would appear, at times, that the involvement of people in tang-ki worship works against the family-centeredness of the Chinese way of life, and that this participation, in part, moves people towards a more individual way of thinking about themselves. However, it is also true that the shrines provide for their members a group that is strongly socio-centric; perhaps providing an experience of ‘communitas’ in Victor Turner’s (1977) sense, although pressures that militated against this could also be discerned.
Anna told me that the first committee she formed for her shrine had split up after a year, due, in her opinion, to some members wanting to make the shrine a type of private club for themselves, whereas she wanted to broaden the membership so as to enable people from the local area to come to it for consultations. Anna said that the present members of her shrine had become like a family to her and they were closer in some ways than her family, something unusual for a Chinese person to say. One of Anna’s brothers attended the shrine about once a month and her mother attended weekly. Apart from meeting her family at the shrine, Anna would not have much time to meet with other members of her family. According to Anna, there had been conflicts in the family over financial matters; a brother and a sister were estranged from her, so her family was not as close as they might have been.
Some women who attended the shrine seemed to find an outlet away from their families and some sense of independence by way of their involvement in the shrine. One reasonably well off middle-class woman, for example, did not work and was not encouraged to go out by her husband, yet was able to participate in some of the activities of this shrine. Her situation was somewhat similar to Christopher’s mother, who for a while had contemplated spending time at the shrine as she had found on moving from Malaysia to Singapore that she had more time on her hands. Her children had grown up so did not need her attention, while her husband discouraged her from working or going out too much. She had a strong interest in singing, mainly of Chinese opera, which her husband did not like, and she still took singing lessons [an interest in singing and karaoke is a favoured pastime of many middle-aged and older women].
Anna had herself been in a somewhat similar position to Christopher’s mother and the other women mentioned; the family was relatively wealthy, the children had grown up and her husband did not like the idea of her going out to work or engaging in anything independent of the family. It seemed, though, that Anna had more securely established her position as an independent woman by becoming a tang-ki than these other women had and without having to be an educated professional. Anna referred to her position as a tang-ki as a profession. While her husband has never been entirely in favour of her involvement in tang-ki worship, he could hardly protest as Anna’s becoming a tang-ki was seen as a calling by the gods rather than Anna’s own decision. In a curious way, then, Anna finds a certain independence by being taken over by a deity, Guanyin, who, as Miao-shan in the myth, led an independent life as a woman.
While it is clear that Anna embodies aspects of individuality in her life, one can also see in those who come to the shrine for consultations a valuing of aspects of individuality. In the main, people come to the shrines because of their own desires, for example, to overcome an illness, to gain protection from accidents, a desire to increase their wealth and wanting to pass an examination. While they might come with another member of their family or a friend, the healing ritual is mainly an independent event. The person speaks to the tang-ki, listens to the advice given, carries out the instructions of the assistants and then goes home without necessarily involving himself or herself in what other people are doing. They do not have to involve themselves in any congregational event nor believe in any particular teaching.
Corin’s (1998) view of the possession ritual of the Mongo in Zaire and Babb’s (1976) view of the Thaipusam ritual among the Hindu people of Singapore are that they give room for attention to the individual concerns of those who attend the rituals. The same can be said of people’s involvement with Chinese spirit medium cults in Singapore. They can be considered, in part, as places where personal goals and wishes are valued in a way where neither the person as ‘individual’ nor the person as ‘social’ is overlooked. While it may be that Chinese people are orientated more towards the social, there is still the presence of individuality in Chinese cultures. While this does not wholly equate to subjectivity, it shows that the Chinese person is not entirely the product of culture and that he or she has some desires and agency of his or her own.
Fate and Room for Manoeuvre
It was good fortune that brought me to Anna’s temple. I had been on my way with a friend to a particular optician when, on the spur of the moment, she changed her mind and took me to another optician. One of the proprietors of the shop, on learning of my interest in tang-kis, arranged for me to meet Anna. When I told people at the temple how I came to know about the temple, they said it was luck [yun, H. un] and also used a stronger term; they said it was fate [ming, H. mia].
Anna said she was fated [ming] to become a tang-ki. She also used the word pre-destined to describe the same thought. It was because she had made a mistake when leading a heavenly life that she had come down to this mortal earth to serve her sentence, Anna said. She had been advised by the god in a dream to become a tang-ki, which happened when Anna was nineteen. Yet, as we have seen from
Chapter Three
, Anna had put off fully committing herself to this venture until she was in her forties, despite what she saw as huge demands by the deities [usually shown in dreams]. She, or at least her parents, had negotiated with the gods so she could still be married. In one dream [
page 76
] she ran off when the god tried to take back the flag [symbol of the authority to be a tang-ki]. Finally, when she was in her early forties, Anna took up her duties more regularly after being frightened by another dream where two children were dying [
page 77
].
Some local people might see the fact that Anna finally became a tang-ki as showing how strong fate is, but it also reveals that there is some room to manoeuvre and negotiate; one is not entirely fated, and one can stand up to the gods at times. Anna did not allow the gods to take away her mandate to be a tang-ki, and she took up the position of a medium when she was more ready, albeit under some duress. While she was fated to be a tang-ki, there was also some freedom involved for her to exercise her own will and judgement.
Anna said one cannot change fate, but one can change one’s luck. She gave an example of someone being fated to become a butcher and said that they could not change this outcome, but they could decide whether they became the boss or not. She said a person’s character is partly determined by the hour, date, month and year a person is born. A person hands these details to the tang-ki’s assistant before a consultation with a tang-ki, as, to some extent, the tang-ki operates on these determining aspects of a person’s being. Some people consult fortune-tellers [suanming H. xiansheng], sometimes seen outside shops in shopping centres, to try to understand their fate. Anna said she was not a fortune-teller, although I did see her look at a few people’s palms. She said that knowing one’s fate did not change one’s life, whereas a tang-ki could help to change one’s life by changing one’s luck. Anna understood some aspects of her life, that her family had lost a lot of money in a recent recession, and that she herself had suffered a lot, in terms of the notion of fate.
Nezha’s agency and freedom to determine events can be seen as a central theme in the story about him in the
FENGSHEN YANYI
. Sangren’s view is that the story is about the inevitability of fate (Sangren 1997: 51) [See
Chapter Three
for an outline of the story]. Sangren agrees that the story of Fengshen Yanyi depicts Nezha as having desires of his own, which he acts out, although he thinks this portrayal of Nezha comes from a fantasy of omnipotent autonomy on Nezha’s part, and so, because of this, Nezha can be characterized as pure ‘egocentrism embodied’ (2004: 236). Sangren sees the whole story as one that misleads people [false consciousness] because he thinks religious thinking is a disguise, or type of alienated consciousness, that destroys a person’s sense of agency. I, however, see the story as being about Nezha having desires of his own and not as a fantasy of omnipotence. Sangren tries to have it both ways – in the story, Nezha does have agency, but Sangren says he does not really have it, for it is an omnipotent fantasy. Then he says that such stories conceal the fact that people do have agency and that these religious myths disguise this fact. Sangren seems to have forgotten Marx’s (1973: 146) maxim, ‘Men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted’, which is pretty much what Anna says in her notions of fate and luck. I see a person’s involvement in the shrines as increasing agency rather than destroying it. One of the assistants at the Redhill shrine told me that seventy per cent of fate is up to the person, and one cannot just ask a tang-ki for something and expect it to happen. Rather than seeing a spirit medium discourse as a completely deterministic system, one can see it as a system that helps give people some freedom within the wider cultural system that restrains some of a person’s individuality.
People go to spirit mediums for various purposes. Sometimes they go because of some ailment or distress or because something is not going right in their life. Often this can be subsumed under the category of wanting to change their luck. DeBernardi (2006) calls this ‘mending luck’. An example of this is Kim, forty years of age, who said that in the previous year he had lost his girlfriend, his job and was having trouble paying his mortgage. When I first saw him, he looked depressed, but he did not use this word. He said his luck had been low over the last two years and that this was his reason for seeing a tang-ki. It did not help that strange occurrences were happening in his home, which he described as the fridge door opening and closing by itself and another person living there hearing noises of people talking at night.
Another reason some people have for going to see a medium is to receive lucky lottery ticket numbers [Anna and Wei do not pass out lucky numbers]. This activity can also be subsumed under the same general category of seeking to change one’s luck. I am reminded here of a Lacanian psychoanalyst who said it was his aim in analysis to turn people into gamblers [Richard Klein – personal communication]. It seems this is what the tang-kis are doing, helping people take chances in life, despite the various vicissitudes of life that can overwhelm them. In
Chapter Three
, one has already seen how the myths of Miao-shan and Nezha have helped Anna and Wei manoeuvre within master signifiers that try to determine how women and men should be. Contrary to Sangen’s view, these stories and the rituals of mediums are not just fantasy productions in reactions to master signifiers nor are people who follow these myths completely powerless to overcome the dominant systems of meanings and values as DeBernardi suggests (1993: 162). They can be seen as actually helping people to find some way of living within dominant discourses.
Some people find that after going to see a tang-ki their luck changes and the various problems they went to the medium about in the first place have become lesser problems. Kim, mentioned earlier, who has had a number of losses in his life had improved. He had found a driving job and was getting up earlier and going to work. Tony [see
page 131
], after going to see a medium, did find employment. All these people came to the conclusion that their lives were not completely fated, as they had first thought. I am inclined, then, to characterize tang-ki healing as working in, what Kim (2003), in his work on Korean shamans, calls the field of misfortune or what one could call the field of luck or even the field of desire.
At the beginning of the Chinese New Year, Anna’s temple held a ritual [bai tai sui] for those people with birth signs not compatible with the sign of the New Year. This ritual is believed to change a person’s luck. Carrying out good deeds can also change a person’s luck. However, it was mostly an encounter with one of the gods tang-kis are involved with that is seen as able to change a person’s luck and help one work around what is fated for one, rather than become a prisoner of one’s fate.
Concepts of fate and luck can be considered as being part of a discourse used by Chinese people to understand their position in the world in relationship to other people and relative to the various vicissitudes of life that we all come across. It can also provide some motivation to continue striving in life, despite these vicissitudes. Tang-ki worship has these concepts embedded in their practices and acts on people’s desire, not allowing them to become just the puppets of fate. The concepts of fate and luck are also closely related to money and wealth, as noted in
Chapter 8
.
The Construction of Subjectivity
When people come to a shrine, the first thing they do is take the joss sticks and go around all the altars and bai [pray] to the deities. This praying to the gods was the first thing Anna taught anyone who came to the shrine. Sometimes people also made food offerings. Anna states that it was not until her father was dying that she kowtowed to him. At two weddings I attended, the bride and groom kowtowed to the ancestral altar and then also kowtowed to the parents and other elder relatives offering them some tea. In all these examples, we see a ritual submission, an acknowledgement and paying of respect to ‘the Other’ that is somewhat greater than the person, themselves. It is this acknowledgement of ‘the Other’ that can give a person some location within a symbolic field such as culture. While Western people often see the Chinese practice of kowtowing as a submission and as something that decreases a person’s freedom and sense of being a person, I would argue that such a ritual submission increases a person’s freedom and is at the heart of subjectivity in Chinese culture.
One can clearly see how this paying of respects and subjecting oneself to ‘the Other’ is connected to subjectivity in the Chinese film THE HERO
(Zhang 2004), which I watched with Chinese friends during my stay in Singapore. In this film, the protagonist called Nameless, sets out to kill the king of Qin, who is trying to unify divided China. Nameless, slowly, by various deeds, gains the trust of the king and eventually is allowed to stand in the king’s presence. The king senses his plan to kill him and gives him two options - to carry on and kill him or to walk away. If Nameless walks away, the king’s soldiers will kill him. If he kills the king, he will also be killed. Nameless chooses to walk away. This walking away can be seen as a type of kowtowing and recognition of the king and future emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi. One can see in this incident that Nameless recognizes here the symbolic role of the emperor in bringing the Chinese people together as a people. Nameless also acknowledges that the real good for his people is to join together, whereas if they do not they will only destroy themselves by being involved in petty quarrels and skirmishes between themselves.
To become a subject involves a sacrifice. In the above situation, one can say that firstly, Nameless will be killed and secondly, his people will no longer be able to do what they want. However, they will gain some freedom; the freedom of being subjects protected by law and the right to engage in the cultural system of the Chinese.
i
One could say that precisely at this point, near his death, Nameless gains a name as one who is the founder of his people. One can see the Lacanian principle of the Name-of-the-Father operating here. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the principle, or law of the Name-of-the-Father operates to lead a person out of a fantasmatic, rivalrous, imaginary world, made up of mirror-imaging identifications [which Lacan thinks the ego is] and a oneness with the mother, into the wider cultural world where people negotiate relationships by means of language and symbolic systems and come to a desire of their own. This is the beginning of subjectivity.
Before he attended Anna’s shrine, Kim had almost absolute freedom to do what he liked – sleeping until late in the morning, eating at any time, working when he wanted to, although he did complain of not having sufficient money. There was little involvement with friends, and he had lost his flatmate. Despite this apparent freedom, according to him, he had little desire to do anything. He told me that at one time he had been quite successful; he once had a good job in the IT industry, he was buying his flat and had friends. At the time of meeting him, he had some difficulty engaging in conversation with me and the other members of the shrine. From a psychological point of view, I thought that he was depressed, although there is no need to take up this psychiatric term here. Kim, though, occasionally used the word stress to describe his situation in life.
Kim seemed to be subject to no one or to no system, at least at this time in his life, although he did need to acquire money to pay his mortgage. An acquaintance of his had suggested he attend the shrine to see if this would help. When he did attend, Kim was first instructed by Anna how to bai to the deity and was asked to bring offerings. Kim did not go to the shrine regularly at first, but then, after awhile, he became a more frequent visitor and towards the end of my stay, he was quite actively involved in the shrine.
Kim contributed a lot of time to the shrine’s annual celebrations. He would often consult with the ‘deity’ and one time, because of strange happenings in his flat, a ritual was carried out to exorcise any bad spirits. Kim gradually became more involved with the shrine and demands started to be made on him to come to the shrine at certain times to assist. One can see that by becoming a shrine member Kim is gradually being subjected to the social system of the shrine and starting to take on some of the values of the people at the shrine. Kim seemed to become more confident, more conversational and more happy. He started to get up earlier and go to work more. He had more interest in life and a desire to engage with people and the world. Kim put the changes in his life down to attending the shrine and being helped by Guanyin.
The Discourse of the Tang-ki
One sees the tang-kis involved in various activities at the shrines. They organize rituals and instruct people what to do in the shrines. They also teach people about aspects of the rituals and the beliefs behind the rituals. Anna would sometimes sit down with me for two hours or more and explain various aspects of Taoist belief. She clearly saw herself as my teacher. Anna told me that she was entitled to be called shifu [master, teacher], although she did not bother with this title. Not much formal time was spent in teaching members of her shrine. One member complained that when he went out to exorcise spirits he did what he was told without altogether understanding what was going on. At another shrine, when I asked one long-standing member details about the deity, she said she had once asked the medium similar questions, but he had said it was better not to know these things. Wei also took the time to answer my questions. He seemed to like me to ask questions as if it gave him the opportunity to also explain about points of belief and practice to the other members of the shrine.
As the tang-kis engage in teaching and telling people what to do, they are involved in the discourse of the master and the discourse of the university. Yet that is not all they are involved in, and often, when involved in these activities, it seems to be a parody of teaching or a parody of being the master. In Chapters Three and Four, we have seen how another discourse can be seen to be operating in the shrines, the discourse of the hysteric. However, there is still another discourse that can be seen to be operating, the discourse of the tang-ki.
Lacan’s fourth discourse is the discourse of the analyst. This discourse is outlined here, as I believe one can find some help in this discourse to construct a discourse specific to the tang-ki. The analyst when working with a patient is meant to take up the fourth discourse by taking up a position of not knowing but being imputed by the analysand with having a knowledge that the person who comes to seek him or her wants to know. By this means, the analyst tries to activate the analysand’s own knowledge and desire.
The theory of the four discourses is not all there is to psychoanalysis. By the process of free association, the analysand slowly becomes aware of the master signifiers and the various values and ideals associated with these master signifiers that the analysand has taken on over the course of their life. These have been taken on as absolute and have served to construct a unified or ‘totalized’ sense of self for a person; in other words, they have helped to construct a strong ego. Over time, the aspects of a person’s self that do not fit this sense of self or tally with the master signifiers are ignored and repressed. These aspects of oneself are what Lacan collectively calls ‘object a’. He also calls them ‘the cause of desire’ in that they act as unconscious objects to promote the formation of fantasy material that causes certain behaviours. The separation of these from the ego serves to create a lack in being of a subject. This lack causes a person to want to overcome the lack and so desire comes into play.
A person can try to keep these aspects of himself or herself repressed by way of a discourse of the university or a discourse of the master, but if the person is unable to achieve a sense of oneness from this, an experience of anxiety, meaningless and depression can come about. It is this situation that can lead a person to go into analysis. If the individual is not already in a ‘lacking’ frame of mind, the first task of the analyst is to bring this about.
The analyst’s objective is not to give new master signifiers to fill in this lack or create some sense of wholeness [acting as either the master telling a person what to do or giving them knowledge about themselves]. The analyst is there to help make the person aware of the master signifiers used to create a false identity and of the fantasies put in place of the ‘lack’. This endeavour is helped by the process of interpretation, which Lacan sees not as providing statements about the hidden meaning of symptoms or utterances of the analysand but as statements meant to disrupt meaning (Lacan 1979: 212). They allow for people, themselves, to gain recognition of what is happening in their lives and to produce new master signifiers that allow for a better way of living in the world, with a more flexible identity or sense of self. A person can now assume their own desire much better and gain more enjoyment out of life.
Much work on mediums and the phenomenon of healing do not have a sophisticated approach to what happens in the healing. After a detailed descriptive account of Chinese notions of fate and luck, DeBernardi (2006: 80) talks of the peace of mind, the building up of confidence, the allaying of anxiety and the exonerating of the individual from a personal sense of guilt as factors involved in the cure of people who go to see tang-kis. No doubt all these factors are present in tang-ki healing, but I propose a more nuanced explanation, one tied to issues of subjectivity and master signifiers and the relationship between the two.
Tang-ki worship can be seen to offer people a support system, another sub-culture, maybe, where people can find some satisfaction away from the wider culture where they cannot find satisfaction. To some extent, it is true that tang-ki worship does create a community for some of the participants, much as do therapeutic systems in the West make a community for those involved in psychotherapeutic rituals. However, if that is all tang-ki worship offers, then it does not go beyond being another master discourse giving out master signifiers with which people can construct a life for themselves. It is proposed here that this is not entirely the situation in tang-ki worship, and that tang-ki worship goes further than just being a discourse of the master.
In Boddy’s (1989) writing, one sees an example of an analysis of a healing ritual where she has not reduced the therapeutic aspect to just providing participants with a new meaning system. She talks of the Northern Sudanese Zar rites as being ‘a parody of the quotidian life of people’. It does not directly subvert this everyday life in an explicit manner but does offer, often ambiguously, a type of meta-commentary or reflection on it, as a satirical allegory caricaturing everyday life (1989: 337-338). The rituals put everyday life into a different context that shows up the weaknesses of everyday reality. The rituals are suggestive rather than definitive and allow people in the rituals to come to their own conclusions about their life and to decide what they can or cannot do about it (1989: 338, 346, 353). Boddy talks about the over-determined nature of the self of the person who first comes to the rituals, over-determined by culture, and she describes how this self is partly deconstructed in the rituals (1989: 350-351). Much of her description would apply to tang-ki worship. The description seems to be a clear example of what Lacan would call a discourse of the analyst rather than a discourse of the master.
In the case of Kim, one sees some of the above comments being applicable. Kim’s identity was based on having a regular job; in his case involving computer science in the commercial field, which the Singaporean Government particularly values. He had studied and worked hard to achieve this position. Kim had received a good wage, had friends as well as a girlfriend and was buying his own flat. He told me he felt his life was very worthwhile during that time. His lifestyle was similar to many people’s lifestyle in Singapore. One could say he had identified with the master signifiers given to him by society.
Then, over time, things started to go wrong. Having these master signifiers – work and girlfriend taken away from him – made it seems as if he had no other subjective identity in place. He can be seen to have retreated into a depressed withdrawal from a life where nothing engaged him.
Kim found his way to the shrine through the help of a friend. In the shrine, one can see Kim encountering another logic he was not used to. Here events do not happen as they do in the everyday world because of empirical cause and effect. One has to take into account supernatural causes. Fate and luck, another version of cause and effect, are an alternative logic that gives some understanding of why certain things have happened. Here in the shrine, he can try to change his life not through working harder as he had tried before but through engagement in the rituals of the shrine.
To some extent, this alternative logic parodies the logic of everyday reality, as if saying everyday ‘cause and effect’ logic does not work. It parodies the scientific and instrumental discourse he had accepted. Kim encounters a new logic in the rituals of tang-ki worship. Here, he encounters gods who themselves do not obey the everyday logic of life. Toa A Pei gives out lottery numbers for one to become rich. Guanyin does not marry; in fact, gender identity for this god is not quite stable. Kim has gone from working with computers in a rational scientific instrumental way of life to a type of liminal world where anything can happen – fridge doors open by themselves, spirits attach themselves to people.
One can point to other people who have also entered this liminal world of tang-ki worship and come out of it somewhat differently from when they entered. Anna and Wei are both outstanding examples in this respect. Involvement in tang-ki worship has offered them a new system of meaning that has allowed them to change their life. I would argue that it has done this not by laying down rules of how to live or just building a new life for people in the shrine, but it has given them tools to help them live their lives not only in the tang-ki shrines but also in the wider world. The involvement with the shrine has not involved exact specifications of how Anna should see herself as a woman or how Wei should see himself as a man. It has, however, helped them question the everyday world that assumes how a woman or a man should be. By their involvement, Anna and Wei have been able to construct other ways as to how they live their lives, being neither completely subordinated to the everyday world nor living in a world of their own making, where their ‘illnesses’ were, at one time, leading them.
People come to the shrines and give their stories of their ‘illnesses’. They listen to the tang-ki stories. They see various stories enacted in the rituals and celebrations of the shrines. One can see a narrative process taking place in the tang-ki’s practices of curing, similar to the narrative processes that take place in psychoanalysis. In Freud’s book on hysteria, he speaks of Frau Emmy Von N telling him not to interrupt her, and he comes to the conclusion that he should allow patients to carry on with their ‘stories’ and ‘narrative’ (1893-1895: 61-62). It is in telling these stories that the symptom comes to be taken up into language and dealt with symbolically. The anthropologist Liu uses a quote from the British philosopher MacIntyre to talk about this narrative process:
Man is in his actions and practices, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story telling animal…The key question for men is not about their own authorship; I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part? We enter human society, that is, with one or more imputed characters-roles in which we have been drafted – and we have to learn what they are in order to be able to understand how others respond to us and how our responses to them are apt to be construed
.
MacIntyre 1984 (Quoted in Liu 2002: 182)
Tang-kis and followers are engaged in telling their past stories and in making new ones. Sangren has mistaken these stories or narratives as fantasies rather than mechanisms that precipitate the formation of subjectivity. The playfulness, the madness and the irrationality of some of the stories and practices tang-ki rituals are made up of all play a part in the process of subjectivization. Lacan’s idea of reality is the symbolized world, the mythological world. This is the world built up at the shrines.
It is difficult to be around tang-ki shrines and processions without becoming aware of the humour and fun often present for the participants in some of the rituals. In one shrine, one of the members could not help smiling every time the monkey god possessed the tang-ki. When asked why the tang-ki possessed by Nezha sometimes played with marbles, the person said that the god just wanted to play. At shrine celebrations, it is usual to have an opera theatre or puppet show set up and it does not seem to matter if anybody is watching them. They are primarily set up to entertain the gods. DeBernardi (2006) translates a word for trance [tiaotong H. thiautong] as deriving from the word ‘tong’ meaning shaman and ‘tiao’ meaning dance or leap. Two tang-kis I asked about this denied that the word meant to dance. Anna said it meant to jump, but she said it was not a good word, not a very sophisticated word to describe what was happening for a tang-ki in trance.
It is interesting that Hamayon (1995), in her paper on play and shamanic spirits, traces various words in Siberia, Mongolia and India associated with mediums and shamans to words that mean dance, jump and play and in one society, the Buryats, a Northern Mongol people, to a sexual connotation. Amongst these meanings, she highlights the notion of ‘play’ and its intimate connection to ritual practices. In her opinion, rituals that involve play are usually composed of spiritual beings on an equal footing with humans, and they thus deny ‘transcendence’ (1995: 26).
While the word for trance and medium in Chinese does not seem to contain the word play, such a consideration offers an interesting view of tang-ki rituals. This aspect of humour and play, like the concern with money and wealth discussed in
Chapter Eight
, seems very different from ideas about religion and healing rituals seen in many other religious traditions. It also makes tang-ki worship a place where a peculiar ‘jouissance’ [enjoyment] is experienced. The topic of ‘jouissance’ is discussed more in Chapter Eight.
Associates in the United Kingdom often asked if I ‘believe’ in the tang-ki healing practices. Many people in Singapore also asked the same question. However, it seems that the question is more complicated than what it appears to be. It would seem that people asking the question are asking about something that can be formulated into a proposition that presumes something is going on in a world independent of the observer that can be judged or believed to be true or correct [such a question is based on a correspondence theory of knowledge].
Needham, some time ago, questioned whether there was in the Chinese language, at least the classical language, the word ‘belief’, and he argued that the word ‘xin’ has more of the connotation of good faith and loyalty than of ‘truth’ or ‘belief’ (1972: 36-37). While ‘xin’ is a word in modern Chinese translated as ‘belief’ and ‘truth’, it may very well be the case that when talking about Taoist religion it is more the older sense of the word ‘xin’ that is being implied. Needham points to the Chinese radical of the word ‘xin’ as combining both the word man and speech, and he suggests that the word ‘xin’ is more about a notion of social communication and public status than being about a notion of dependence on a spiritual being or about an inner state of mind (1972: 36-37).
Hall and Aymes point out that Chinese religion is based more on ideas of appropriateness and fittingness [yi] than on propositions that one is meant to believe in (1998: 125). They say the Chinese thought form is based on a pragmatic theory of knowledge where relationships of things to other things and to context and dispositions to act are more important than the idea of a thing in itself. They see Chinese thought form as being ironic, metaphorical, rhetorical and as a deconstructed language [in the Derridean sense] rather than logical, metaphysical and logocentric (1998: 136, 140). One can add the category ‘playful’.
In this light then, Chinese people, at least when it comes to the Taoist religion, can be seen to not be so much interested in metaphysical and epistemological reasoning but rather to be interested in action and results. That certainly seems to be the case with the people I met in the tang-ki shrines. Investigators of such religious systems commit a category mistake when they analyze such systems with a positivist methodology that treats such religious systems as a body of dogma or teaching that is believed to be true. Sangren’s (1997) criticism of Chinese thought form, as seen in the myths of Nezha and Guanyin, can be shown to be of such an order and it would seem the seriousness of his analysis made him miss the joke and humour such myths contain, especially when acted out by tang-kis.
In trying to divine an answer to a personal question, people often resort to throwing two crescent shaped divining blocks [bu bei H. poah poe]. If the two blocks land with the flat side down, the answer to the question is no. If they land one up and one down the answer is yes, but if they land with the flat side up it means the gods are laughing [xiao bei H. chhio poe]. I get the feeling that Sangren did not see many blocks with the flat side up.
Obeyesekere notes the rejection by many psychoanalytically inclined scholars of such rituals as spirit medium rituals because they think personal issues of the participants are not completely resolved by those who take part in them. They believe they are not based on the type of rational self-reflection [insight] found in psychoanalysis (Obeyesekere 1990: 21-23). Obeyesekere disagrees with this as I do. In fact, one sees in Lacanian psychoanalysis that Lacan does not prioritize this type of conscious self-reflective insight or knowledge as the most important aspect of psychoanalysis but sees the motivational factor arising from discordant aspects of discourse being placed together and evoking some desire as the most important element. To that extent his understanding of how motivation works is close to one embedded in Chinese thought. That is why he uses interpretations that are elliptical in nature rather than direct. Nevertheless, one still sees in some Lacanians a rejection of religious thought as being able to offer no more than new master signifiers for the participants to attach themselves to (Bracher 1993: 70; Stavrakakis 1999). There is also implicit in Lacanian teaching a view that it is only in psychoanalysis that we find this fourth discourse, the discourse of the analyst – a very ethnocentric view.
In this chapter, it has been shown that within tang-ki worship there is a process going on whereby people can come to a new position in life, which is helpful to them. This state is not obtained by someone pouring out their soul to someone as in psychoanalysis nor by applying some body of ‘scientific’ knowledge to a problem area but is reached in a narrative and playful manner with stories of people’s discomfort put into conjunction with other stories of the gods. This new position is reached by an encounter with the real - the voice of the gods and the ‘play’ with the god, all of which promotes both subjectivity and the desire of the participant and helps to change personal conflicts or symptoms into symbolic content that then has the chance of being resolved. Of course, tang-ki worship is not psychoanalysis, but it works on the same issues psychoanalysis works on, that of subjectivity and desire. I propose to call this discourse – the discourse of the tang-ki.