Outwith: Jonathan Adams | Shamans keep city dwellers in touch with spirit world

Published on Saturday 13 December 2008 18:48

AFTER 10 minutes of drum-beating and incense-burning by her assistants, Chang Yin donned a black spotted robe and a pointed hat. She picked up a fan with her right hand and a silver flask of sorghum liquor with her left.

Then she sat in a chair before an altar piled with joss sticks, cans of beer, fruit, other snacks and images of deities. The session began. She appeared to slip into a trance.

Chang is a jitong, a shaman who dispenses advice while said to be possessed by a spirit. Inside a modern office building next to Taipei's bustling main train station, she is carrying on a folk tradition that goes back hundreds of years in Taiwan and on the Chinese mainland.

In the past, such shamans played a central role in rural village life. Based in temples, they would resolve community disputes and pick auspicious dates for important occasions, and were believed to help heal the sick by channelling spirits.

Now, as Taiwan's economy has developed and its population urbanised, some jitong, like Chang, are changing with the times. With the tradition on the decline, Chang is one of a small number of people who are maintaining the shamanistic practice but adapting it to the needs of modern city-dwellers.

"People moved into cities, but they still have this kind of religious need," said Ting Jen-chieh, a specialist in Taiwanese religion at the Institute of Ethnology at the Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan's capital.

Forty years ago, shamanistic ceremonies were still a frequent feature of village temples, with jitong playing an important public role.

Now, Ting said, few young Taiwanese are interested in becoming jitong. Many older people who carry on the shaman tradition have switched to 'private practice', often in cities, operating out of homes, storefronts or offices rather than temples.

The problems they are called upon to solve have changed too: there are fewer village-level quarrels, more questions on marital disharmony or workplace setbacks.

In the southern Taiwanese village that Ting has been studying, there were eight jitong in the 1960s. Now there are none.

"Before, jitong were seen as performing a public service," Ting said. "But now, as people have become more educated, they've come to think the practice isn't scientific, that it's uncivilised."

But if jitong are less visible, the underlying beliefs that prevailed when Taiwan was a predominantly poor, rural society are surprisingly resilient.

Many Taiwanese pragmatically switch among Taoist, Buddhist, folk and other beliefs and practices, depending on the situation, Ting said. And at least 70% of Taiwanese still adhere to some traditional ways, he said.

Another example is the divination blocks that many Taiwanese still use in temples for spiritual guidance. Each crescent-shaped block has a flat and a rounded side. How a pair of the blocks falls is believed to determine the answer to a (typically yes or no) question one might ask.

"Taiwan has become more middle-class oriented, but we still keep our folk practices," Ting said.

Consulting a jitong is a case in point. The practice has not been totally abandoned, just updated. Chang, for example, regularly sends out text messages to about 300 clients. That virtual network has replaced the tightly knit village setting of old.

One Sunday a month she invites those contacts to her office for an open spirit medium session.

On one day, as she answered petitioners' questions, several elderly men lounged nearby on pillows and chairs, watching the proceedings. Children ran in and out of the room. Chang's assistants bustled around in the office and an attached kitchen, lighting joss sticks, washing dishes, tending to accounts.

Her office door remained open, with about 15 waiting visitors and passers-by chatting and eating in the hallway. As clients knelt on pillows before her and aired their troubles, Chang was by turns marriage counsellor, family therapist and psychotherapist.