Weeping in a Taiwanese Buddhist charismatic movement

Emotion can be a locus of interpretation and a motor for religious commitment. This is illustrated with the thick description of uncontrolled weeping that recurred with the followers of a Buddhist charismatic movement in modern Taiwan. Ethnography of the ubiquity of weeping in this group suggests that emotion in religion expressed in tears is not limited to rituals or uncanny phenomena; and the devotees' and the leader's interpretation of weeping reveals the multivocality and the individual agency of the symbolic emotion. This emotion, expressed in weeping, is not a dialogue of culture but a construct of identity evoked by religious charisma. (Weeping, emotion, religion, charisma, Taiwan) ********** This article attempts a symbolic analysis of uncontrolled crying and its implication in the broader cultural context of a Taiwanese religious charismatic group whose devotees sometimes describe themselves as people who love to cry (Minnan, aikhau; Mandarin, aikuae). Sometimes they weep together, and many members trace their conversion to an inexplicable flood of tears. Uncontrolled crying is especially common among the female followers, who often sob, yet never wail. They remember having cried, and never try to stop any tearful fellow participant from crying, even during the most tranquil ceremonies. Such expressiveness contrasts with the image of Chinese people as rarely showing emotion. At the same time, the pervasiveness of their tears transgressed the conventional domain of adult public crying in Chinese culture. Wailing is not unusual at rituals such as funerals and weddings (Ahern 1986 [1973]; Blake 1979). The common perception of crying tends to be limited to wailing during these two events, characterized by performative expressions of loss and departure. Whether Chinese people shed tears outside these special rites and to what extent their tears represent multiple meanings beyond the sentiments of loss are themes that have not received much attention. A more important problem with the characterization is that it hinges the interpretation of crying on the metaphorical representation and/or reversal of the social relation enjoined by public discourse of patrilineality and patrilocality; i.e., ancestor worship elaborated in the funeral, and the severing of ties between a daughter and her family upon marriage. Although family (being both patrilineal and patrilocal) has been a primary source of emotion and of the construction of self in Chinese culture (Wolf 1968), a conflation of interpretation of emotional expression and metaphor runs the risk of restricting the multivocality of symbolism pertaining to the expression (Turner 1995 [1969]:41-43; Weller 1994) to an assumed mind/body dichotomy (Strathern 1993). A prescribed meaning structure of crying in relation to cultural ideology limits grasping other discourses involved and the importance of individual agency in interpreting emotion. The pervasive crying described here calls for an approach that synthesizes the two anthropological fields of emotion and religion. Religion seems to have been sidelined in the sociocentric anthropology of emotion (Abu-Lughod 1985; Lutz 1988; Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990; Rosaldo 1992 [1984]). At the same time, anthropologists of religion describe emotion as a part of the phenomenological experience in particular ritual settings such as healing and spirit possession (e.g., Boddy 1989; Csordas 1990:18-23; Lewis 1978 [1971]) and seem not to have attempted emotion as an analytical category. This essay looks at religion through weeping, a nonverbal expression of emotion that recurs in multiple contexts including but not confined to ritual or uncanny experience (Mitchell 1997). Through exploring the interpretations of crying in its multiple contexts, this article seeks to show that 1) emotion, as embodied in nonverbal uncontrolled crying, constitutes a commitment to religious charisma; and 2) that the charismatic religious discourse of crying does not subscribe to Taiwan cultural ideology, yet it still taps into the power of crying within the broader cultural context. …