'Ritual is Theatre, Theatre is Ritual: Tang-ki: Spirit Medium Worship' by Margaret Chan

As a young Peranakan, I am interested in the Taoist traditions practiced by my forefathers.

Tang-ki worship or spirit mediumship has its roots in pre-Chinese animism of more than 5000 years ago, but its practice is alive and evolving within the Hokkien communities of Taiwan and Southeast Asia. This engaging study is one of the very few about tangki-worship in Singapore. This phenomenon has received scant scholarly attention largely because it is seen by the educated as a mere superstitious practice. There are no sacred texts, nor canons, nor dogmas in tang-ki worship. The author reveals aspects of this practice that have never been recorded before. These include the drama and history of tang-ki worship; the costumes, make-up and props used; the religious significance of the rituals; the notion of tang-ki training; and the performance scripts used by the mediums. The author also discusses the social dynamics of tang-ki worship as a communal theatre and provides a provocative hypothesis on the religious nature of traditional Chinese theatre forms. It is held that the very act of taking on an image by an actor in theatre is a transmogrifying ritual where a mortal transforms into a god.

Here's a review from NLB's  Timothy Pwee

If you are monolingual English-ed like me, Singapore's Chinese folk religion is largely a closed, unreadable book. You may assemble small disjointed paragraphs, but you cannot get any real sense of the culture. What you get is a fragmented, distorted view that is more informed by prejudices than by reality.

I'm not claiming that Margaret Chan's new book, Ritual is Theatre, Theatre is Ritual: Tang-ki: Spirit Medium Worship, is comprehensive or authoritative (in folk religion, change and individualism are the only constants which means that nobody can ever hope to define practices or beliefs), it's just a very useful resource that discusses tangkis or spirit mediums. Coupled with discussions on the Taoism-Singapore list, I am now begining to understand the meanings behind the practices.

If you want to get an idea of tangkis, crossing peace bridges, and the various gods, this is about the only contemporary book on the subject in English. Published by the Wee Kim Wee Centre, I got my copy from Select Books at Tanglin Shopping Centre.

Interestingly, I found that her PhD (Ritual is Theatre, Theatre is Ritual: Tang-ki: Spirit Medium Worship. Royal Holloway, University of London, 2001) on which the book is based on has an accompanying video (Ritual is Theatre, Theatre is Ritual: Tang-Ki Spirit Medium Worship, 2001). A copy of the video is kept at the Centre for Performance Research Resource Centre in Aberystwyth, Wales.

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Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.