英文摘要 |
Taiwanese shamans, known as dang-gi 童乩, may refer to persons of either sex who serve as intermediaries between humans and spirits. When possessed, they pray for blessings and remove misfortune for their clients. In Taiwanese society, they play the role of healers, but are also depicted as patients. This paper intends, therefore, to investigate the shamans' engagement in medical affairs in Taiwan, analyze their conceptions of disease and healing methods, and explain the reasons why they are regarded as patients. This research relies heavily on both historical documents and materials gathered from fieldwork. According to the description of Taiwanese customs written by authors of local gazetteers and other scholars of the Ch'ing Dynasty (1644-1911), from the middle of the sixteenth century to the late nineteenth century, the common people in Taiwan, when sick, would generally ask shamans to heal them by means of such methods as exorcism, prayer, and prescriptions. During the period of Japanese rule (1895-1945), we know from official documents of the colonial government and studies of Japanese scholars in Taiwan, that shamans continued to play the role of healers. After 1945, despite the fact that Taiwan broke away from Japanese rule, the roles of shamans in Taiwanese society barely changed. According to the research of anthropologists, folklorists, medical doctors, researchers in medical science, and Protestant pastors, shamans continued to treat people for diseases from the forties on. Most Taiwanese shamans impute the cause of disease to spiritual beings or supernatural forces. Their diagnoses for a particular illness might include: punishment by spiritual beings (particularly gods of pestilence), being haunted by the souls of deceased persons (particularly the so-called malicious ghosts) , offending demons or breaking taboos, bewitchment, and the soul being frightened. However, they do not deny that people's moral defects and mistakes in conduct may also provoke karmic retribution or demonic punishment in the form of disease. In addition, they accept several theories of traditional Chinese medicine and modern Western medicine that explain the causes of disease at physiological and psychological levels. For treatment, they basically all rely upon the power of deities or rituals which may be called ''ritual healing,'' including exorcism, prayer, conversion, medicinal prescriptions offered by deities, divine massage, and turning the patient over to medical authorities on the advice of a deity. Though the major function of shamans in Taiwanese society is healing, a few traditional literati, modern officials, psychologists, psychiatrists, Protestant pastors, anthropologists and folklorists have regarded them as a kind of patient. They believe that the strange deportment of shamans during their religious practices including the way they bring down the spirits, speak in tongues while possessed, mutilate themselves and so on, is the effect of a kind of hypnosis, or a state of hysterical dissociation. At the same time, they also believe that numerous shamans, before their initiation, have congenital mental abnormalities, paranoid personalities, or that they suffer from other mental disorders. According to data derived from the latest fieldwork, illness undoubtedly plays a very important role in shamanistic initiation in Taiwan, but by no means has every shaman experienced fallen sick, and furthermore, only a small part of the diseases that they have suffered from relate to psychiatric problems. Nevertheless, shamans are very easily categorized as sick or abnormal in social or cultural terms. They are often regarded as offenders of public decency, illegal troublemakers, deceivers of the people, and harmful undesirables; as detrimental individuals, the cause of social corruption; and as obstacles on Taiwan's road towards modernity. Furthermore, most shamans indeed endure many hardships in life. Before their initiation, apart from the torments of illness, they usually have numerous traumatic experiences. They are frequently weary in body and mind, and live in poverty. After their initiation, apart from gaining some improvement in health, most shamans are economically far from being wealthy, and have to accept the help and support of family members, relatives and friends . In addition, most of them are poorly educated. Consequently, they may be called an underprivileged group in Taiwanese society. Nevertheless, just like other shamans in other parts of the world, the experience of failure, trauma, or suffering, is inevitable in the initiation process of Taiwanese shamans. But during the process of self-healing (or receiving divine healing), they also gradually acquire the capacity of healing others. This is the reason why some people call them the ''wounded healers.'' |