"Collecting Catholicity : The Materialization of Faith within the Taiwanese Domestic Sphere" / Chambon, Michel

Published in the International Journal of Asian Christianity: Vol. 8 (2025): Iss. 2 :
Special Issue: Asian Catholic Materials and Space

Abstract:
This article explores how contemporary Taiwanese Catholics materialize their faith within their homes. Based on ethnographic material collected from Catholic households in Northern Taiwan, it presents the diversity of religious items found in the homes of churchgoers, the organizational patterns of these artifacts, and the invisible relationships behind them. Moving beyond discussions of inculturation as a process of integration and of material religion as a question of semiotic ideologies, this article argues that Catholic items found in the privacy of Taiwanese homes allow their owners to deploy an array of multidimensional relationships, a form of Catholicity that cannot easily be reduced to a single issue. From the intimacy of home, Catholic items enable churchgoers to position themselves at the heart of a rich, personalized, and evolving network of glocal Catholicism, a material and domestic form of Catholicity which complements the institutional Church.

God, Jesus, and the Ancestors : an ethnography of the Ancestors’ Rites in the Taiwanese Catholic Church / Marco Lazzarotti.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 121-127)
Cover device: Zuxian 祖先

Local access dig.pdf. [Lazzorotti-Ancestors.pdf]

In this book the author describes the Ancestors Ceremonies as practiced in the Taiwanese Catholic Church. The author’s point is to demonstrate how the Chinese symbolic universe made a deep translation of the “new” symbolic system represented by the Catholic doctrine. At the same time the effort of the Catholic Church in order to adapt the Gospel message to the local situation built up a particular phenomenon that the author defined as cultural dialogue. It is this dialogic relationship the process that the author defines as Culture.--back cover.

1 Introduction 1
1.1 On Occidentalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Otherness and Daily Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.3 On Ancestors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.4 Contact of Cultures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.4.1 Historical Contacts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1.5 Jian 間: Where History and Culture meet . . . . . . . . . . . 9
1.6 God, Jesus, and the Ancestors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2 Anthropologists and Ancestors 15
2.1 A Brief Literature Review . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
2.2 The Ancestors’ Rites and the other imported Religions . . . . 21
2.3 A Case of Cultural Encounter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
2.4 Person as a jian 間: The Space where Cultures Meet . . . . . 31
3 Catholicism in Taiwan, History and Anthropology 33
3.1 The Chinese Rites Controversy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
3.1.1 Anthropological Considerations of the Chinese Rites
Controversy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
3.2 Catholicism in Taiwan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
3.2.1 The First Evangelization (1626-1642) . . . . . . . . . . 42
3.2.2 The Second Evangelization (1859-1895) . . . . . . . . 44
3.2.3 The Third Period (1895-1945) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
3.2.4 The Fourth Period . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
3.3 Some Anthropological Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

4 Fieldwork 55
4.1 Fieldwork Place . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
4.1.1 Who are the Faithful? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
4.1.2 Experiences of Conversion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
4.2 The Taiwanese Catholic Ancestors’ Rites . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
5 Cultural Interpretations 69
5.1 The same service to the dead as to the living 事死如事生. . 70
5.2 The Concept of Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
5.2.1 Lunar Calendar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
5.2.2 Gregorian Solar Calendar and Liturgical Time . . . . 73
5.3 The Concept of Ling 靈. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
5.3.1 Chinese Ling and Christian Miracles . . . . . . . . . . 78
6 Gods, Ghosts, and the Ancestors 81
6.1 Gods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
6.1.1 The Blessed Virgin Mary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
6.2 Ancestors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
6.2.1 Ancestors and the Catholic Church . . . . . . . . . . . 96
6.2.2 Funerals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
6.3 Ghosts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
7 Conclusions 115
7.1 A Dialogue of Cultures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
7.2 The Place of the Dialogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
7.3 The Textile of Dialogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119