Popular religion inside out: Gender and ritual revival in a Hebei township

The temple fair

The Dragon Tablet was originally a rather flimsy, wooden tablet painted with the inscription ‘Seat of the Spirit of the Dragon, True Commander of the Ten Sections and the Three Regions of the Universe’ (天地三界十方真宰龙之神位). ¹¹ It was rotated among a score of households in Fanzhuang, and once a year, the deity was publicly celebrated and the tablet transferred to another household. The origins of this dragon cult and the temple fair are far from clear, but an 80-year-old informant recalled that the 1942 celebration was cancelled because irregular troops cooperating with the Japanese stole goods and money from the vendors. Some of the most popular stories about the efficacy (灵验) of the dragon deity stem from the Japanese occupation and they describe how the deity protected the village from Japanese troops and how it punished a communist activist who smashed the tablet. The communist administration banned public religious activities as wasteful expressions of feudal superstition with no place in the perfect modernity that peasants were about to leap into, and the Dragon Tablet was forced underground, quite literally in fact, as the tablet was buried in a secret place. When the time for the annual festivities arrived, members of the temple association unearthed the tablet for a small-scale celebration at night in a private home and then buried it again. Religious activities remained private until decollectivization, which took place in 1983, when a well-connected veteran known as Madman Liu applied for permission to erect a stage for a public theatrical performance and set up a marquee to celebrate the Dragon Tablet. The ploy worked, and the temple fair, thinly disguised as a theatrical performance, was permitted. In the following years, the annual celebration grew to an unprecedented scale, attracting as many as 100,000 visitors. Orchestras, dancers, and acrobats were fetched on lorries to perform in honour of the Dragon Tablet, and at least 100 temple associations from nearby villages brought gifts and added to the pandemonium with their drums, gongs, and cymbals.

In 1991, the ethnologist Liu Qiyin attended the festival and published an article describing the cult as a ‘living fossil’, an ancient totemic cult of an ancestral dragon that has continued to the present day. ¹² The dragon was originally a symbol of the imperial power that brought timely rain, but in the 20th century, the dragon also came to represent the Chinese nation and by associating the Dragon Tablet with the mythical origins of the Chinese nation as a whole, Liu Qiyin managed to add significant legitimacy to the temple fair. A steady stream of academics, journalists, and photographers started to descend upon the village for the annual celebration and the temple association graciously provided transportation, banquets, accommodation, and gifts to these visitors. The dragon deity was thus projected far beyond the village and it became the topic of a dozen academic papers in Chinese that have since been published as an edited volume on ‘dragon culture’. ¹³ Footage from the celebration was shown repeatedly on national television and the dragon gradually entered the circuit of global academia, first in the form of a brief description and a black-and-white photo on the cover of Stephen Feuchtwang’s book on popular religion, ¹⁴ then as the topic of a paper presented by Gao Bingzhong at the 2005 American Anthropological Association meeting, ¹⁵ and later as the subject of an article in China Information. ¹⁶ The support of academics was no doubt instrumental when the temple association applied for permission to construct a permanent home for the Dragon Tablet. Employing what Gao calls ‘the political art of double naming’, ¹⁷ they requested permission to build not a temple, but a museum for dragon culture. The bureaucrats were quite comfortable with that, and the temple association proceeded to build what everyone else calls a temple. In 2003, the Dragon Tablet was placed in the new temple/museum, and two years later, the temple fair was formally recognized by the provincial authorities as ‘immaterial cultural heritage’ (非物质文化遗产) worthy of preservation. Considering the organizers’ eagerness to provide the dragon deity with ever more imposing material form such as tablets and temple buildings, there is a certain irony in the approval of the temple fair as something non-material. The tablet itself has been replaced several times with larger versions, and the present one is a massive slab of wood with intricate carvings of coiled dragons. As the tablet gained gravity and fixity in space, the members of the temple association stopped moving the tablet from one household to another every year and started to take turns living as caretakers in a house built next the temple. However, the organizers still take the heavy tablet out for the annual parade to avoid accusations of tampering with an officially approved tradition.

Academic reports and the official recognition of the annual celebration tend to present the temple fair as a traditional cultural event that stimulates the local economy, but behind the folkloric, public exterior there is an element of religiosity, which academics and bureaucrats have either overlooked or hesitated to grapple with. In 2008, a researcher employed by the Party School in Shijiazhuang visited the temple fair in Fanzhuang as part of a research project intended to devise mechanisms for controlling associations behind temple fairs like the one in Fanzhuang. In particular, he was interested in finding the means to ensure financial transparency and preventing such associations from actively exacting rather than passively accepting donations. One of the former leaders of the temple association was toppled on charges of corruption and a few of the local shopkeepers grumbled that the donations were not entirely unlike protection money levied by gangsters, so these were actually very relevant questions. However, the researcher was also looking for more healthy forms of entertainment, and in particular, he felt that the incense divination carried out by old women at the back of the temple was an expression of bad taste and lack of cultural refinement that should be discouraged. The Party School researcher’s summary dismissal of the spirit mediums as a low form of entertainment seemed to represent an extreme version of a more general misrecognition of the gendered nature of the temple fair. What the mediums offer is not entertainment, but access to a world of deities who may prove to be responsive, and without the mediums working in the dark interior of the temple, the temple fair would become a folkloric event rather than a religious celebration.

Without detracting from the organizational acumen of the 19 men in the temple committee, it seems fair to note that their wives generally spend far more time on cultic activities. The male organizers take care of practical matters – the temple building, the spectacular annual fair, fireworks, and so on – but the work required to serve the deities in the course of the year is mainly carried out by women. The spirit mediums divining with incense at the back of the temple are locally known as ‘incense heads’ (xiangtou 香头), and the medium in charge of the ‘internal affairs’ of the Dragon Temple is a woman who also leads a group of middle-aged and elderly women on excursions to other temple fairs and participates actively in the structurally very similar celebrations that are carried out in the households of her followers. Those who take part in the ritual service of deities and accumulate merit in this way are known locally as xinghao (行好),which might be translated as ‘do-gooders’, and while there are quite a number of men among the xiangtou and a few among the xinghao, the rituals associated with the temple are clearly dominated by women. The affairs of the Dragon Temple thus seem to be gendered in the sense that there is a highly visible masculine exterior and a feminine interior. As the following sections show, this division of labour seems to parallel the way religious practices were organized within the households of three couples who were involved in the affairs of the Dragon Temple in different ways.

Guests from afar

For many years, Mr Wu was in charge of external affairs relating to the temple fair. He was not actually a member of the temple committee, but as a retired headmaster with a degree in biology and an influential member of the village branch of the Communist Party, he was exactly the sort of educated and diplomatic person who could be entrusted with the task of cultivating relations with the academics and journalists who came down to the countryside to witness the temple fair. Mr Wu kept a tab on these visiting dignitaries; he collected names, phone numbers, publications, and recordings and he arranged invitations, transportation, food, and accommodation free of charge on behalf of the temple committee. It was in this capacity, as a sort of minister of foreign affairs for the temple fair, that Professor Zhao Xudong and I met him during the height of the annual celebrations in 2002. When I returned in search of a field site three years later, Mr Wu had recently suffered a severe heart attack, but nevertheless he felt obliged to help out and I was installed in a vacant room upstairs, at first temporarily, and then gradually on a more permanent basis. Despite the amount of work that Mr Wu invested in the temple fair, he never expressed any belief in the existence of the dragon deity. He was perfectly willing to speak of its history and recount stories of its efficacy, but there was never any indication that he himself had experienced this mystical responsiveness and he generally explained his efforts to promote the temple fair as a question of preserving cultural heritage and contributing to social cohesion in the village. One could obviously question the relevance of belief in relation to Chinese popular religion and refer to James Watson’s emphasis on orthopraxy, ¹⁸ but it did seem rather odd that wholehearted activism to promote the temple fair could be combined with a careful agnosticism with regard to the existence of the dragon deity.

Mr Wu’s home exhibited no signs of religious belief. Whereas many elderly couples in Fanzhuang have an altar with a painted image of deities (shen’an 神案), facing south in a prominent position in the main room, the walls of the living room where Mr Wu received his many visitors were decorated with landscapes and photos. It turned out, however, that there was an altar in the household. In a storage room that was usually locked, Mrs Wu ¹⁹ had set up an altar with a statue of Guanyin and an image of Songzi Laomu and Guangong. She did not claim to know much about religion and explained that the simple altar with only two tiers was appropriate for a person who knew little about the world of deities but still believed in them and strove to do good and accumulate merit. Apart from serving the deities in the storage room with regular offerings of incense, fruit, water, and food, Mrs Wu was also a regular visitor to the Dragon Temple. She was finding it increasingly hard to walk the two kilometres to the temple, but she often managed to hitch a ride on someone’s three-wheeled bicycle when the temple was open for divination.

When Mr Wu suffered a heart attack in the summer of 2005, his three sons took care of the hospitalization, but Mrs Wu and their youngest daughter consulted two spirit mediums to learn whether Mr Wu’s illness was a natural disease or something caused by ghosts, gods, and ancestors. The first medium simply foresaw that Mr Wu would recuperate, while the second advised against the costly surgical procedure they were considering and suggested that the dragon deity would ensure a speedy recovery because Mr Wu had contributed so effectively to spreading its renown. In front of the second medium’s altar, Mrs Wu promised to return with gifts if her husband survived and lived till the day when the medium held the annual feast for her deities. Half a year after his heart attack, Mr Wu was doing quite well and he tended to explain his recovery as the result of expensive pharmaceuticals and rigorous self-discipline. However, he offered no objections when his wife prepared to make good on her promise to the medium’s deities and on the appointed day, Mrs Wu and her daughter set out on a three-wheeled bicycle packed with the promised offerings: a full meal comprising five different dishes, incense, paper money, and RMB 100 in cash.

Mr Wu and his wife were both engaged in activities related to the dragon deity, but in very different ways that suggested a tacit division of labour. While Mr Wu took charge of visiting dignitaries from the outside world, making sure that they were provided with food, alcohol, cigarettes, and cheerful conversation, Mrs Wu cultivated relations with deities with offerings of food, water, incense, and appropriate language. At first glance, this particular household seemed wholly secular, but while the rooms accessible to guests exhibited few signs of religiosity, a small complement of deities were nevertheless kept in store in the interior. This does not imply that Mr Wu privately believed in the existence of deities and that his agnosticism was merely a public facade, rather, the question of belief was never much of an issue to him because his wife could be trusted to deal with the other world. Mr Wu occasionally grumbled about the way his wife played cards with her friends and squandered money on pharmaceuticals, but he never complained about the time and money she spent on temples and mediums. And while he never participated in these ritual activities, he did occasionally help her prepare the necessary offerings. Mrs Wu was proud that her husband had played such an important role in the revival of the temple fair, but she did not expect him to take part in ritual activities and she seemed quite contented with the fact that the household deities were relegated to a storage room. The actions of this elderly couple are easily mapped on to a traditional distinction between nei and wai, interior and exterior, private and public, male and female, but it is interesting that relations with deities so clearly belong to the feminine domain and it seems to fit perfectly with a modern order of things where the state – here embodied by Mr Wu, the university-educated Party member – contrives to circumscribe and contain religion as a distinct field of activity from which it keeps aloof. This might sound as if Mr Wu had simply laid down the law on the proper role of religion in the household, but on other occasions Mrs Wu proved perfectly capable of holding her own, and it seemed to me that both parties were genuinely happy with the gendered division of labour. The two different ways of approaching religious activities thus seemed to complement each other perfectly, the secularism of Mr Wu facilitated by the religiosity of Mrs Wu and vice versa.

Calligraphy and unwritten scripture

Another couple involved in the temple was Mr and Mrs Guo. They were both in their early 50s and Mrs Guo had recently started to practise as a spirit medium, while her husband helped to organize the exhibition of calligraphy that provided an element of high culture at the temple fair. The trajectories of their lives were largely determined by their son, who had become mentally ill and extremely violent some 10 years earlier. They tried to have him committed to a mental hospital, but the hospital would not have him, and when he threatened to kill his father – according to village gossip actually chasing him with a knife – Mr Guo fled from his home. Having wandered in search of employment for a while, he set up an outdoor stall in a city some 70 km away and made a living as a calligrapher. In 10 years of exile, Mr Guo had to move more than 20 times, because his son came looking for him and caused trouble. Mrs Guo lived with relatives for some years, and the son stayed alone in their house, neglecting the fields and selling everything the family owned in order to eat. In the end, the son even tried to sell the house, but no one in the village would buy it. When I was there, the son had recovered to some extent; he still looked a bit like a madman with his long dishevelled hair, and he tended to keep to himself, but Mrs Guo had moved back in. Mr Guo saw his son’s illness as a trial that was sent for them to atone karmic debts, to accumulate merit, and to temper, or perfect, their selves. He believed he had wronged his son grievously in an earlier existence when he was employed as an official, and he even spoke of his son as a ‘demon’ (魔鬼) who had come through several incarnations to exact vengeance. Having been forced to write characters endlessly in all kinds of weather for 10 long years, he found that his calligraphy had improved a great deal, and when he won the first prize at a provincial competition, he saw it as more than just professional recognition – it was a sign of achieved self-cultivation and marked the atonement of a karmic debt.

While her son was ill, Mrs Guo herself suffered badly from insomnia and was intermittently possessed by spirits that made her move and talk in unfamiliar ways. She said that she did not lose consciousness when she was possessed, and if the spirits did not speak for too long, she was able to remember what they had said when they spoke through her – she was even able to resist when she did not want to give up control. In the beginning, however, she found it hard to say by whom she was possessed – one can be possessed by demons, the souls of deceased relatives, animal spirits, and a host of different gods, and some of them lie about their true identity. Mrs Guo had very little schooling and frequently had to ask her husband to explain the unusual words that came out of her own mouth. Amazed at the literate style of his wife’s ramblings, Mr Guo started taking notes in a journal that he entitled ‘Scripture without characters’ or ‘Oral sutras’ (无字经). At the end of a winter afternoon spent in conversation, Mr Guo asked his wife whether I could be allowed to take a look at the notebooks, and Mrs Guo decided to ask for permission. Having lit a stick of incense and posed the question, she closed her eyes briefly and then said, ‘Mr Bunkenborg’s character is benevolent, he may take a look.’ Mr Guo dug out the notebooks and said, ‘My wife says it’s OK’, but Mrs Guo corrected him, saying, ‘That wasn’t me talking, it was the Goddess of Mercy.’ Many of the remarks noted down in the early stage were short enigmatic statements, which Mr Guo interpreted as veiled injunctions to take up self-cultivation and serve the gods as a spirit medium – ‘A jade-studded girdle is not a common belt, snow cannot substitute flour’ the gods would say, ‘and sleeping in a bed is better than sleeping on the ground’. ‘Why isn’t the bird a phoenix?,’ the gods asked, and Mr Guo assumed that the bird was not a phoenix because it had not engaged in self-cultivation.

Presuming that she had been chosen to serve as a spirit medium, Mrs Guo approached an experienced female medium who agreed to act as her master and to arrange a ceremony called taofeng (讨封), which literally means ‘asking for a fief’. During this ceremony, Mrs Guo was presented with a religious image covered with red cloth, and kneeling in front of it, she visualized a decree and a seal of office by which she was instated as a vassal or a servant and ordered to practise in her home village. The complex altar painting suitable for a medium was designed for Mrs Guo by the spirit medium in charge of the ceremony, and it depicted a hierarchy of some 20 deities arranged in 12 levels with the Jade Emperor at the top. While Mrs Guo could rely on the assistance of these gods in her practice as a spirit medium, she was not actually possessed by them, but by Guanyin, whose presence was signalled by a porcelain statue next to the image. Mr Wu said that, in the beginning, his wife was like a radio receiving all frequencies at the same time, and that one never really knew who was talking, but after the taofeng ceremony she was, as her husband put it, permanently ‘tuned in’ to receive the words of Guanyin. As a former practitioner of various forms of qigong, Mrs Guo had some experience with meditation techniques, and Guanyin was kind enough to teach her more. But Guanyin could also be quite exacting, making her sick whenever she ate meat and threatening to nullify part of her accumulated merit if she ever started to smoke like some of the other female spirit mediums in the area. Mrs Guo did not seem entirely happy with the terms of her mandate, as she had been ordered to stay in the village. She once complained that the other mediums in Fanzhuang were too serious and explained how the followers of her master were far more relaxed at their meetings, allowing their respective deities to converse freely. Mr Guo was enthusiastic and curious about his wife’s new powers and sometimes he would access information through her almost as if he were surfing the Internet. He would ask about the size of the population of England or request help when he could not come up with the correct character for his calligraphy. He hardly expected straight answers and he was willing to interpret the reply, but he was genuinely amazed at the way Guanyin supplied the right answer through his illiterate wife.

Most mediums suffer some sort of initiation sickness that forces them to act as mouthpieces for a deity, but Mrs Guo’s suffering was caused by her son. Her husband shared this terrible burden with her, and no doubt that was part of the reason why he was so interested in every aspect of her transformation. They found moral significance in their trials together, explained them in terms of karmic debts, and saw self-cultivation as a meaningful response. This shared understanding, however, led them in different directions. Whereas Mr Guo moved out and found support in the predominantly male world of calligraphers, Mrs Guo turned inward and found unexpected allies through meditation. Mr Guo saw his wife’s mediumship as a project of self-cultivation that was quite comparable to his own pursuit of calligraphy and he described her work as a spirit medium as a process of ‘double cultivation’ (双修), a term that describes how animal spirits and their mediums both accumulate merit when the animal spirit seeks to attain a human form by performing good deeds through the medium. In Mrs Guo’s case, however, the fact that she was possessed by Guanyin, a proper deity rather than a capricious animal spirit, made it even more evident that mediumship was a morally appropriate pursuit. It is quite common for mediums to claim that they ‘don’t know characters’ (不识字) and ‘have no culture’ (没文化), and the example of Mr and Mrs Guo suggests that this contrast between formal training and mediumistic inspiration is gendered. While Mr Guo sought to master the written word, his wife strove to become a channel for the spoken word and her inspired orality provided content for his literacy. The unwritten scripture spoken by Mrs Guo initially seemed rambling and incoherent but once it was fixed in writing and interpreted by her husband, it offered both of them surprising insights. For this particular couple, Mrs Guo’s mediumship seemed a welcome gift that allowed them to exercise their complementary talents in a joint project with great moral significance.

The sorceress and the Party member

Mrs Xing was widely known for her abilities as a medium, and local people sometimes whispered that she was a regular ‘sorceress’ (巫婆). In her mid-50s and with little formal education, Mrs Xing seemed to have effectively pushed an older generation of mediums to the periphery and though she did not act as a diviner in the Dragon Temple all that often, she was effectively in charge of ritual activities and communication with deities. Mrs Xing’s career as a medium started when she was quite young. She suffered from bouts of mental illness even before she was wedded to Mr Xing at the age of 21, and after some years of marriage, the pain and confusion in her head became so overwhelming that she found it impossible to get out of bed for days on end. The spirit possessing her provided her with the name of a man in a neighbouring village, and this man’s wife turned out to be a spirit medium. Through this medium, Mrs Xing learnt that she was troubled by the deity that used to possess her paternal grandfather. The deity now wanted a new spokesperson and Mrs Xing accordingly started to practise as a medium. She also started smoking heavily, which was rather unusual for a woman her age, and on one occasion, she pointed out her grandfather’s spirit master portrayed in the shen’an and said that it was he who had made her smoke because he was so fond of cigarettes.

Mrs Xing’s relationship with her husband had no part in the explanation of her becoming a medium, but theirs was hardly the happiest of marriages, and this seemed to be a tacit part of the equation as well. The medium who took Mrs Xing on as a disciple was herself the victim of a very unhappy alliance: for many years, she lived with a mother-in-law who gave her hardly enough to eat and her husband chose to live with his mistress in a distant town. When he finally demanded a divorce, her family stepped in to prevent it, presumably to protect her, and she started climbing walls and acting crazy, until it was discovered that she was destined to become a medium. Mrs Xing’s husband was not nearly as bad as that, but they did seem to live rather separate lives. As a former soldier with some knowledge of life outside the village, Mr Xing was in a good position to explore the possibilities of the reformed economy in the 1980s and he made quite a bit of money travelling around the country with trainloads of pears. The Fanzhuang branch of the Communist Party was closed to new members, but Mr Xing managed to enrol in the Party branch in another village and then transferred his membership to Fanzhuang. In the 1990s, however, Mr Xing ran out of luck. He went bankrupt twice, and some people said that the losses were connected to a proclivity for drinking and gambling. Mr Xing’s two sons did not always give their parents the financial support they had promised, but as a member of the Party, Mr Xing managed to get by on a part-time job exacting fees from vendors on markets days and he benefited from some of the poverty relief funds distributed by the village committee.

Despite his membership of the Communist Party, Mr Xing never voiced any disapproval of his wife’s activities. There was always a good deal of smoking, drinking, and rough joking involved when he toured the local eateries, and he was not exactly a quiet person, but he seemed to accept that there was little room for him in a house that was often filled with the smoke of incense and crowded with Mrs Xing’s followers. Contrary to the situation in Mr Wu’s home where the deities were restricted to the domestic privacy of a locked storage room, the deities in Mr Xing’s home had effectively taken over the living room, occupying the public areas of the house and leaving little space for a secular sociality. The description of Mr and Mrs Xing is yet another example of the centrifugal trajectory of men and the centripetal orientation of women, but the balance of forces is very different in this case and the spatial boundary between nei and wai has seemingly shifted outwards to include most of the household. Spirit mediums are generally quite adamant that the money generated by their practice is all spent on incense and paraphernalia for the deities, but one of them said that the deities might extend a loan if the medium fell upon hard times. If Mrs Xing did something similar, the loans would have been small, but not entirely insignificant to a hard-pressed household economy. In Mrs Xing’s case, the introverted cultivation of relations with deities went hand in hand with an extroverted social life involving a handful of loyal followers and a score of more occasional participants, frequent visits to ritual events in other households and villages, and a steady flow of visitors offering gifts for her services as a medium. Mrs Xing’s talent for organizing things, cultivating personal relations, and interacting with strangers seems fairly similar to what one would expect of a businessman or a Party organizer, but oddly, her work was consistently represented as belonging to a different, internal sphere.

Internal affairs

Descriptions of the celebration of the dragon deity tend to foreground the men involved in the temple committee and the practical organization of the temple fair, but the question is whether this spectacular annual event would be possible without the more discreet contributions of a loose congregation of predominantly female xinghao who deal with ritual obligations in the course of the year. While the male organizers took turns living as caretakers next to the temple, it was always their wives who made sure that the Dragon Temple was filled with the smoke of incense and open to the public on the 1st and the 15th of the lunar calendar. On these days, the xinghao brought offerings of food and incense and they honoured the deity by ‘chanting scripture’ (念经). The women also attended religious celebrations in each other’s homes, and they often toured the countryside to visit temple fairs in other villages. When the temple committee received a formal invitation to a temple fair, the caretaker at the Dragon Temple would organize a tractor, but it was the women who piled onto the trailer with their gongs and cymbals, presenting gifts of incense and cash to the deities of other villages and ensuring that the temple fair for the dragon deity was visited in turn. At the heart of the activities of the xinghao, there is the mystery of divination, and as the most respected spirit medium, Mrs Xing had a leading role among the xinghao. Though she had no formal position in the committee of the Dragon Temple, she was said to be in charge of the ‘internal affairs’ (里边的事) of the temple, implying relations with deities. The position of a xiangtou is described in the ethnographic literature on Hebei, but they are seldom portrayed as being integrated in more general religious practices. This image of the spirit mediums as individuals doing their own thing does not appear to hold true in Fanzhuang, where Mrs Xing and other mediums were clearly involved in the general ritual life of the township and where the exceptional status of the medium was called into doubt by a number of women who were not quite mediums but had mediumistic experiences.

Much of the recent literature on Chinese spirit mediums and shamans ²⁰ tends to present them as individual performers and little is said about the social organizations – ‘the spirit-medium cults’ ²¹ – that support their practice or about the way these organizations and associated religious practices at home are gendered. The xiangtou are described in a few studies carried out in the Republican era in the vicinity of Beijing. Li Wei-tsu thus presents a remarkably detailed sociological description of the xiangtou as magicians, ‘We may say that a magician has a powerful position in his family, even if she is a female, as in fact most of them are. In ordinary rural families the wife is subordinated to her husband. A female magician however is superior to her husband.’ ²² Based on fieldwork in a village some 25 km southwest of Beijing in 1933, Körner uses the term Weihrauchguckerin (incense observer) to describe women who are capable of healing sick and possessed persons, dispelling ghosts, and foreseeing the future by going into a trance and communicating with their gods. Their profession is forbidden by the government, Körner notes, but they practise secretly everywhere, and in the countryside, people ask them for help whenever they experience strange events and disease. ²³ At the time when these studies were conducted, religious practices were already being marginalized by the modern state and it would be a mistake to see the ethnographies as being indicative of the way religious practices were traditionally gendered. The vocation as xiangtou was seemingly associated with women, but the ethnographies do not really provide sufficient information on public and private religious practices to give a broader picture of the way religion was gendered in Hebei before the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

In a recent study of popular religion in an area quite close to Fanzhuang, DuBois states, ‘The Xiangtou themselves act as individuals. They have no formal affiliation with a teacher, are not members of networks, and are not identified with the village community in the way that temples or sectarians often are.’ ²⁴ This description of xiangtou as isolated individuals contrasts rather interestingly with a study from southern Hebei, where Fan Lizhu describes an elderly lady who suffered from debilitating pains in her legs until she accepted to become a medium for a deity called the Silkworm Mother. ²⁵ This article illustrates quite powerfully how mediums are not necessarily lone individuals but invest their abilities in forging social relations and channelling resources to promote the cult of their spiritual master. In comparison to the situation in Fanzhuang, however, the cult of the Silkworm Mother seems like a unique and discrete revival of religious customs rather than something embedded in a working system of religious practices. The existence of such a system is convincingly demonstrated in Yue Yongyi’s doctoral dissertation ²⁶ which describes how the annual fair in Fanzhuang is embedded in a system of structurally very similar celebrations on different scales, involving multiple villages, single villages, or individual households, a system in which most of the work seems to be carried out by women. Contrary to the image of mediums as isolated individuals, Mrs Xing cultivated relations with a master and several students and her followers did not seem to think of her as someone fundamentally different from themselves, but as someone who had achieved more insight into the world of ghosts, gods, and ancestors. There is a vast literature on mediumship as a cross-cultural phenomenon and Lewis’s description ²⁷ of possession, mediumship, and shamanism as different, sociologically determined, and gendered expressions of a single phenomenon is obviously relevant to the xiangtou described here. Generally speaking, however, focusing on mediums tends to set them apart as a distinct category of persons, and what the material from Fanzhuang suggests is, on the one hand, that the work of mediums should be understood as part of ritual practices in general, and on the other hand, that mediumistic experiences are not necessarily restricted to mediums.

‘We have all been crazy,’ an old lady explained one day when I started to ask systematic questions about the specific events that had led each of the women present to become a xinghao. This was no doubt an overstatement, but a rather surprising number did have experiences of headaches and possession, and becoming a xinghao did not seem entirely different from becoming a medium. The spirit mediums start with an initiation sickness from which they recover after having established permanent relations with the medium who saw the true cause of their affliction and recognized the deity who caused the trouble as their spirit master. When spirit mediums treat the illness of others, they sometimes employ the very same method and even if the patient is not destined to become a medium, the healing process may well involve permanent relations with a spiritual agent of disease and the medium. As evident in Margery Wolf’s description of a woman who did not become a shaman, ²⁸ it is not all that easy to determine whether people are mediums or not, and there seems to be degrees of recognition and competence among a fairly large group of not-quite mediums. One interesting example of a low-level mediumship was provided by a woman in her 60s who was suddenly inspired to compose a song in praise of the dragon deity. She recalled that she did not dare to sing the song in front of an audience at the temple on the morning it had come to her, and she returned home with a sensation that something was pent up inside her. That night, however, the dragon deity emerged in her dreams, and ordered her to sing the song he had entrusted to her. When she did, the unpleasant pressure on her chest disappeared immediately. This experience was understood and related in mediumistic terms, but the woman was not, and did not become, a medium in the strict sense. The recognized mediums appear exceptional and singular on first acquaintance, but in Fanzhuang they were clearly embedded in webs of relations with people with similar experiences.

Conclusion

With the annual temple fair in honour of the Dragon Tablet as a point of departure, this article has argued that the highly visible work performed by the male organizers of the temple fair once a year is complemented by the rather more discreet efforts of a group of women who uphold the ritual obligations of the temple throughout the year. This gendered division of labour is locally explained as being analogous to the situation in households where men handle external matters and women take charge of internal affairs. As evident in the ethnographic descriptions of three couples involved in the Dragon Temple, there really does seem to be a gendered division of labour in relation to religion where men take care of the more spectacular and public aspects of religious activities while women undertake the more discreet and ongoing task of maintaining relations with deities. However, the boundary between inside and outside tends to shift from one household to another, and while the ritual activities of the domestic sphere are confined to a storage room in one household, they expand in another household and leave little space for secular sociality. There seems to be some truth in the idea that temples and households have a masculine exterior and a feminine interior, but the boundaries between inside and outside tend to shift and the idea of an inside encompasses much more than a mundane domestic sphere of cooking and cleaning. The inside actually seems to be a doorway that opens up to a rather wild spiritual world peopled by demons and deities. The spirit mediums in Fanzhuang referred to the words of deities as things that were said inside, and they seem to conceptualize the world of ghosts, gods, and ancestors as being interior to the world of men. As women were already on the inside, the mediums found it quite natural that women took charge of rituals and communication with the deities, and as paradoxical as it may seem, it seems to be the inside position of women that opens up a spiritual world and makes it appropriate for some of them to leave their home to visit temple fairs while others fill the home with visitors and the smoke of incense.

Gender has not played a particularly prominent role in descriptions of the religious resurgence in the post-Mao era, but there is an article by Nancy Chen which describes how qigong masters are expected to be masculine even when their followers are mostly women. The arrest of a female qigong master named Zhang Xiangyu was, Chen suggests, not only prompted by her heterodox teachings, but also by the fact that she was a woman. As stated by one of Zhang’s followers, ‘The reason they locked her up was because she was a woman and she did not have enough powerful clients to back her up when she started to make a lot of money.’ ²⁹ Religious organizations headed by male leaders stand a better chance of negotiating with the predominantly male representatives of the Chinese state, and some religious organizations seem to consciously adapt to these circumstances. In a temple some 20 km from Fanzhuang, a group of women were behind the establishment of a large temple and explained that the nominal leader did not know much about what was going on, but as a man, it was easier for him to represent the temple in matters involving the local authorities. Mrs Xing responded in a similar vein when I asked her why she was not recognized as a member of the temple committee of the Dragon Temple. The committee might be all male, Mrs Xing explained, but there was no conflict of interest as the menfolk on the committee would obviously represent their wives. The all-male temple committee was thus presented as a convenient formality that masked the participation of women without preventing them from exerting considerable influence. Chen states that religious leaders are expected to be men, but perhaps it would be more precise to say that formal leadership is associated with masculinity. If one looks behind the masculine exterior of religious organizations, the ethnography from Fanzhuang suggests, women may well be in charge of religious matters even when the organization is formally represented by men.

The official permission to erect a permanent building for the Dragon Tablet and the provincial recognition of the temple fair in Fanzhuang are reminiscent of the ‘superscription’ of symbols that occurred when the imperial state incorporated local deities in the officially recognized pantheon. ³⁰ One major difference, however, is the resolutely secular character of the modern state, which is reflected in the permission to build a museum for dragon culture rather than a temple for the dragon deity and the recognition of the annual fair as immaterial cultural heritage rather than a religious celebration. The revival of rituals that has swept across the PRC in recent decades has involved official approval of some of the more folkloric expressions of popular religion, but deities cannot be publicly recognized as contemporary social agents. The ethnographic material from Fanzhuang suggests that this selective recognition of popular religion has gendered effects in the sense that men enter the limelight as practical organizers of folkloric events that seem fairly secular while the religious work of serving the deities is hidden away in the interior of households and temples to be carried out by women. Women are not particularly visible as organizers and participants, but Fanzhuang is hardly the only place where they play a central role in the recycling of rituals. The gendered division of labour, which seems so evident in the ethnographic material, raises a more historical question, namely whether the violent secularism of the 20th century that drove popular religion away from the public scene and into the interior of households has inadvertently come to push religion into a conceptually feminine position and thus contributed to giving women very central roles in the new forms of religion that are now emerging – inside out – in the PRC.