part0017

I hope I have answered my colleague by showing that while tang-ki worship is of interest in itself, it also offers us a window for looking at Chinese life in Singapore and how such issues as subjectivity and identity are played out in relationship to wider concerns such as modernization, globalization and contemporary capitalism. Such a study gives us tools for thinking about issues of healing, of importance to all cultures and how they are related to wider issues than just biological processes that happen in the bodies and brains of individuals [an idea that is perhaps part of the dominant hegemonic biomedical discourse of both physical and mental health]. In a world where health, particularly mental health, is of growing concern to individuals and governments, anthropological research has a huge contribution to make.

Two other questions that my colleague asked me were whether tang-ki healing does in fact ‘cure’ people and if so in what way. Glasser (1998) sees the question of the efficacy of traditional healing as an important question that is often avoided by the anthropologist. He sees many anthropologists as often sympathizing with what he thinks are rather dubious ‘pseudo-scientific’ methods of healing while being prejudiced against more modern ‘scientific’ ways of healing (1998: 384). Glasser calls for anthropologists to be more concerned with conventional outcome measures and controlled studies in their investigations of healing in what is now often called evidence based medicine.

Kleinman is one anthropologist who has studied the outcome of tang-ki healing. The conclusion he comes to is that tang-ki involvement, in general, does not cure, at least as far as disease is concerned. He sees most of the people going to tang-kis for healing as for the most part suffering from ailments that would have in the course of time gone away or gone into remission (1980: 360). A point is made that there is a difference between disease and illness, and Kleinman sees tang-ki rituals as not curing the disease but curing the illness (1980: 360).

While Kleinman’s conclusion is interesting and one that gives a place for anthropological research, and while it is certainly an advance over Glasser’s conclusion, it assumes, however, in its distinction of disease and illness the positivist assumptions of biomedicine that sees biological processes as fundamental structures over which meaning is constructed as an epiphenomenon. i Littlewood (2002) deals with this topic in detail in the first chapter of his book PATHOLOGIES OF THE WEST: AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF MENTAL ILLNESS IN EUROPE AND AMERICA . Such a conclusion as Kleinman comes to, though, obviates just that which the anthropologist can add to positivist accounts of the phenomena. In my work, I have attempted to show that tang-ki healing is centrally concerned with challenging such a ‘rationalistic’ paradigm that splits illness from disease and suffering from religion in the first place.

Kleinman talks of two ways he sees illness being healed by involvement in tang-ki rituals. The first way is by a type of ‘anxiety management’ approach, where a person sits quietly meditating, talks calmly to others and obtains self-esteem from membership of a shrine (1980: 365-367). The second way is by offering a system of meaning to the person (1980: 372). Other analyses of healing utilize similar mechanisms as explanatory concepts as to how practitioners of traditional healing ‘cure’ people. DeBernardi, for example, talks of allaying anxiety, building confidence and the use of hypnosis in the creating of an optimistic outlook as the healing methods of tang-ki worship, although she does not develop this line of thought (2006: 80, 100- 101). Moerman (1979) points to the effects of developing healing symbols using metaphor as the curing mechanism. He rightly expands on a rather reductionist notion of ‘placebo effect’ used in analyzing an aspect of biomedical healing. While not denying that at some level tang-ki healing helps alleviate anxiety, gives reassurance and gives some meaning to illness, I would not see these mechanisms as being the main aspect of tang-ki healing. The anxiety management paradigm that Kleinman invokes, with its connotation of rational management of anxiety [often used in biopsychiatry as an adjunct to medication], is part of the ‘instrumental rationality’ of dominant discourses that I maintain tang-kis rail against. Anxiety, in the experience of people who frequent tang-ki shrines [in so far as they do not inhabit other discourses], is not the reduction from a phenomenological pre-reflective experience of something that is seen as more essential, the biological, but is intentional; it is an anxiety about something e.g. a presence of evil. Tang-ki worship is also more about the breakdown and challenging of meaning rather than the creation of it. It can be considered as the deconstruction of dominant discourses such as that of biomedicine and gender discourses that a person ‘ought’ to uphold.

In Sangren’s work, he sees the myths of Nezha and Guanyin [and by implication tang-ki rituals] as phantasy productions that serve to cover over the gaps or lack in the real world in which people have to live. His analysis has the implication that such phenomena are in some ways pathological. While Sangren does not mention the Lacanian term, the ‘imaginary’, it is implicit in his theorization.

To avoid similar conclusions in her study of gender rituals and gender discourses, Moore, (2007) in her use of psychoanalysis, utilizes a conception of the imaginary that is more than just about phantasy production in the negative sense, i.e. one that is stultifying of life and serves to avoid reality and thus avoid the desire to make a difference in the real world, as the Lacanian understanding of the imaginary implies. However, I believe that such a use of the term imaginary to investigate our data would impede our ability to distinguish psychosis from non-psychotic phenomena and would lead us in the direction of Deleuze and Guattari, and Szasz, in seeing psychotic phenomena as just ordinary phenomena or even in some cases as benign phenomena; psychosis being seen in Lacanian thought as in the realms of the real and the imaginary. No distinction would then need to be drawn between tang-ki phenomena and madness. I am, in contrast, putting tang-ki phenomena in the realms of the real and the symbolic.

While Kleinman eschews a psychoanalytical paradigm for anthropological analysis, his idea of tang-ki healing being about the modulation of anxiety is evocative of much early anthropological analyses of culture, which saw culture and particularly religious systems as being projective [defence mechanism] against anxiety. This can be seen in Spiro’s later (1987b) work, one essay of which is titled: ‘Religious Systems as Culturally Constituted Defence Mechanisms’.

In this book, I, for the most part, avoid such traditional psychoanalytical concepts as projection, repressions, unconscious, defence mechanisms and the traditional understanding of Oedipal dynamics for explaining tang-ki phenomena. This is done because I believe such concepts have served their usefulness in anthropological analysis and that within the psychoanalytical framework new paradigms must be developed in order to generate interesting understandings of cultural phenomena. I also believe that such conceptions have the implication of tang-ki phenomena operating in the world of the imaginary order, whereas I see it as operating in the realms of the real and the symbolic.

It is here that I disagree with the Lacanian maxim that ‘there is no other of the other’ in its implication that such phenomena as gods, spirits and religious productions are all productions just of the symbolic order, if not of the imaginary. It is precisely the various gods such as Guanyin, Nezha, the Monkey god, Jigong [the mad monk] and the hell spirits Toa Ji A Pei that create the disruption of meaning given by both the totalizing identifications of the imaginary order, particularly the notion of a whole undivided self, and also the more organized constructions of the symbolic order. These gods that do the healing via the tang-ki, while brought under the aegis of the symbolic order, can be seen as coming from the real.

This discourse of the tang-ki is a discourse not restrictive of jouissance as a defence mechanism might be but a discourse that promotes jouissance, a jouissance of a particularly Chinese order. It promotes jouissance without necessarily involving psychosis. I say necessarily here because tang-ki worship can go along with psychosis. We see this in the case of Bob in Chapter Seven , who had both a mental illness and also a religious experience.

Where then does this leave our central question, that of whether tang-ki worship is either madness or transcendence?

Hall and Aymes maintain that within the Chinese way of thinking, seen in moral, political, spiritual and epistemological endeavours, there is no importance given to any sense of transcendence, to principles outside of a given domain that exist independently and give some understanding of that domain (Hall and Aymes 1998: 189). In religion, the idea of ‘transcendence’ refers to the existence of some ‘entity’ independent from the created order. Chinese religion, then, can be seen as being ‘immanent’, being about worldly concerns, about harmony and the gods being more or less human beings who have reached a higher order of existence. Ching disagrees that Chinese religion can be characterized as purely immanent, and maintains that while Chinese religion is generally immanent there are also dimensions of transcendence within it (1993: 4).

It is not clear to me that tang-ki worship is just this worldly and ‘immanent’, concerned with daily aspects of life and not concerned with ‘transcendence’. One sees, for example, that people, when they first enter a shrine, pray to Yu Huang Dadi, the supreme deity. They do not often talk about this deity, and he is not often depicted visually, but, at shrine celebrations, this deity is prayed to first and has an altar dedicated to him. There is also a belief in the existence of another world, composed of heaven [tian tang H. tian ting] and hell [diyu H. tegek] [more of a purgatory than a hell in that people can eventually leave hell], which is the destination of humans after this life. However, there is also the belief in more worldly gods, as we have seen, who can affect the present lives of believers if worshipped in the right manner. These incarnate themselves in mediums and can give out advice and ‘cure’ illnesses. Tang-ki worship, then, can be seen as being both transcendent and immanent.

There is more to the question of transcendence, though, than just a metaphysics of divinity. Transcendence implies a getting over, outside of, or beyond, something. It is this understanding of transcendence that can be seen to be operating in tang-ki beliefs. In earlier chapters, it is shown that people come to the shrines with various problems to seek the help of a tang-ki. Usually, people are weighed down, worried and depressed by these problems, with reduced motivation and desire to go out and tackle these problems. Tang-ki worship provides a ‘liminal’ and ‘heterotopic’ space where people are helped to get over and on top of, to transcend these problems. The problems either go away or are taken up in the lives of people in such a way that the significance of the problems to those who have them is changed. This can be seen to be similar to how psychoanalysis operates. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, it is not that the fundamental structure of a human being such as obsessionality or hysteria is changed, but that a person’s position in regards to these structures is changed.

In tang-ki worship the problems of worshippers are caught up in the narratives, the myths and ritual play of the shrines, enabling people to get beyond and transcend their everyday concerns. This involvement helps people to transcend without doing away with what I have called the ‘madness of the market’ and the ‘casino capitalism’ of their daily lives. In a more theoretical way of thinking, tang-ki worship can be seen to help people transcend, again without doing away with, the symbolic and imaginary orders of their being which fix their position in society. These people are brought to a position where they are able to experience a jouissance of another order than that found in the everyday world; one derived from an encounter with a transcendent ‘Other’. However, this encounter does not do away with the everyday world, either. This would only lead a person to a position of psychosis. The tang-ki rituals lead to a new structure of jouissance and a new subjectivity that helps a person live in the ordinary everyday world without going mad.

Tang-ki worship, then, is not madness in the psychopathological sense but is the madness of the gods [coming from the real] that enables some people to both transcend and live in the ordinary mad world without going mad. This transcendence, however, does not necessarily entail the idea that madness, in the sense of illness or psychosis, is never present or is done away with. The case of Bob shows that tang-ki worship can go alongside psychosis and still make a difference. While Lacan postulates that Joyce’s writing served as a sinthome to keep psychosis at bay, nothing seemed to work for Joyce’s daughter, who ended up in a psychiatric hospital for the last part of her life. In the case of Bob, psychosis is present, yet tang-ki healing is able to make it liveable. Tang-ki worship then can be seen as helping a person to live in the ordinary world either by avoiding madness or helping the person to be able to live with it. It can be said to transcend the symptoms of madness and transform [redirect, sublimate] them into the person’s sinthome, their project in life. Perhaps a better conclusion, then, for our initial question is that while tang-ki worship is a transcendent phenomenon, it can also be at the same time madness.

I am not sure whether tang-ki worship and its healing rituals will survive in Singapore. There seems to be a diminishing interest. There is present in Singapore both a psychiatric and a therapeutic discourse where problems are seen to be either medical or psychological. There is also a modern ‘cosmopolitan’ identity discourse of Mandarin/English speakers that marginalizes dialect ‘heartlander’ speakers, which up to now has been the language of tang-ki worship. These modern cosmopolitan languages can be seen to be increasingly hegemonic in Singapore and as marginalizing the tang-ki discourse. Also, the Government is increasingly allowing far more freedom of speech and the growth of a civil society. Where people can speak more openly, there may be less need for rituals of protest.

However, modern capitalism in the form of what the Comaroffs call (2001b) ‘millennial capitalism’ or ‘casino capitalism’ with its promise of prosperity and abundance has not lost its hold on the people of Singapore. It is in such an environment that spirit medium sects can be seen to thrive as they have in Taiwan (Weller 2001). In a newspaper article in 1971 (The Nation Newspaper) on tang-ki rituals and practices in Singapore, where a photograph of Wei as a thirteen-year-old tang-ki is depicted, it was predicted that tang-ki practices would die out. However, that has yet to happen.