3. ANCESTOR WORSHIP AND THE PSYCHOLOGICAL STABILITY OF FAMILY MEMBERS IN TAIWAN Yih-Yuan Li, Ph.D. Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica and College Humanities and Social Sciences National Tsing-hua University Taipei ABSTRACT: For most of the Chinese in Taiwan the matter of carrying on the family line is still of paramount concern. While ancestor worship is a ritual means to symbolize the continuity of the descent line, to erect a tablet and to have descendants to worship one is metaphorically to have the line carry on. Therefore, in present day taiwan, to have their ancestor tablet being properly worshiped is one of the important elements of the psychological stability of family members. In the paper we illustrate how the people relate their illnesses and mischief to the improper treating of different ancestral lines, and how they try to cure the illnesses through the arrangement of the ancestor cult. INTRODUCTION Ancestor worship is an essential part of the chinese religious culture which is deeply rooted in the social structure and psychological domain of the people. Ancestor worship in China can be delineated as having the following aspects (4, 7): donestic worship Tablet worship ancestral hall worship in China 1 Ancestor worship { | worship at ching- \ ming festival cs worship Feng-Shiu or geonancy On the manifest level, tablet worship is a ritual within the house, while tomb worship is a ritual outside the living quarters. lowever, on the latent level, the former is a ritual toward harmony in Social relations, while the latter is for harmony with nature. Both of these two levels of harmony are part of folk concepts in regard to the State of optimum health (7, 8). Among the Chinese folk people, in order to obtain a true state of _yeoptinum health, one has to maintein three levels of harmony. The first gevel is that of harmony within the individual organism for which yecping the balance of hot and cold food is most essential. While taining an individual organism's harmony is the primary step toward jealth, it is not enough, at least not for a permanent state, because there are two further levels of harmony to be pursued, i.e. the harmony of hugan relations and also with nature. While maintaining harmony qith the people one has to deal with in everyday life is quite clearly 2 mechanism to ensure the health of an individual, the web of human felations extends to both the living and dead, because they are part and parcel of the Chinese kinship system. It is in this context that ancestor worship is related to the psychological state of the family embers. The third level of harmony is to deal with the environment, or more exactly, nature. It is good for a living individual or a society to live in a right place, right habitat, and for a deal person to be buried at a right site. To locate a right site for burying an ancestor is to ensure the peace and prosperity of the descendants, that fs what Chinese call feng-shui or geomancy (9). In this paper I shall not be able to discuss the problea of feng- shui or harmony with nature, My focus will be on the subject of harmonizing human relations through the ritual of tablet worship. ANCESTOR WORSHIP AND DESCENT LINES The worship of ancestral tablet in traditional China was that every tablet represented an agnatic ascendant or an ancestral couple, i.e. an ancestor and his spouse. The individual tablet is a wooden plaque ranging in height from about fifteen to thirty centimeters and a few centimeters wide on which the name of the deceased was carved or written (6). However, in present day Taiwan, the individual tablet has been replaced mostly by what may be called a collective tablet on which are installed all of the recent ancestors in one commemorative tablet. The collective tablet used in Taiwan is now represented by two forms; one is in the form of a Japanese shrine with many wooden slips, each dedicated to one ancestor, in the back; the other is in the form of a wooden panel case with a rack in the back which is, again, meant to contain those sacred slips representing ancestors being worshiped (2). In spite of the different individual or collective forms, the tablets are worshiped, in the ordinary situation, in the family altar which is located in the central hall or cheng-tling of the house. The family altar is usually divided into two zones; one of these, the area on the right, is devoted to the worship of gods or deities, and the area on the left, which is the place reserved for ancestor worship, is the zone where the tablets stand. The worshiping of ancestral tablets on the family altar varies in different situations. Those more recently dead are commemorated and offered foods and incense on the birthday and deathday. Remote ancestors are mostly commemorated twice a year collectively or are worshiped on annual festivals together with as. The offerings for worship of the ancestors are prepared by the women of the house, but men are expected to participate in the ceremony and, on some important occasions such as the first birthday of the deceased, all of the descendants are supposed to join the ritual. The worship of these beings is tied up notions of memorializing the dead and providing for their continued comfort after death. But in 18chine, especially in present day Taiwan, the ancestral cult has jnevitably become involved in a variety of ways with relations between ana anong family members, segments of an original family and even the cent lines (6, 13). In a strictly patrilineal society like China, ancestral worship is a key ritual device to serve the purpose of continuation of the male gescent line. The son or the male descendants are obliged to worship their father or patrilineal ascendants, and they in turn expect their agnatic descendants to worship them in the proper way. It is through this worshiping behavior, the offering of incense and and cooked food, thet the patrilineal descent will be carried on forever. So to have a nale heir is very important both to the descent line and to ancestor worship. To speak of the continuation of a family line or a descent jine is usually expressed as the continuation of incense and fire; this pakes quite clear the mutual metaphoric meaning for worshiping the ancestors and carrying on the line. Therefore every family tries hard to worship all of their own agnatic ascendants, and in normal situations, the tablets they install for the ancestors are ancestors with the same surname as the family concerned. Ancestor worship is also closely related to property inheritance ina family. One owes the most direct obligation to worship someone from whom one inherits property. This relationship between property inheritance and ancestor worship is sometimes extended to lateral kin or non-patrilineage kin, hence creating the phenomena of worshiping the ancestors other than those in the agnatic line. We are going to discuss in detail in the next section this category of ancestors other than own's line (14). des ANCESTOR PROPER AND PERIPHERAL As we have discussed in the section above, in normal situations the Chinese worship only their lineal agnatic ascendants as ancestors; this is the ideal principle for a patrilineal social system like China. However, in some special circumstances, particularly like that of pioneer immigrant society among the earlier Chinese who moved to Taiwen, Due to certain necessary adjustments to the frontier Situation, they sometimes could not adhere strictly to the patrilineal Principle but created a sort of non-patrilineal ancestor; this category of ancestors may be called peripheral ancestor (11, 12), in order to distinguish them from proper patrilineal ancestors. The emergence of peripheral ancestors was mostly due to two sets °f social adjustments. One occurred because of an anomalous form of Rerriege; the other occurred due to irregular manipulation of property otharitence. Sometines the two may also mingle and re-enforce each pe The most frequently seen special form of marriage is uxorilocal Tiage or, in Chinese, chao~chui-hun. When a family has no sons who tovive to marry, it ordinarily must arrange a marriege for a daughter cult in" a husband into her house. Occasionally, a man can be ay id who is willing to resign from his place in his own line and allow his future children to take their descent from his father-in-law. theyZeet Ben who marry in such a uxorilocal way insist on retaining T own surname and the right to name some of their sons to their own trang One arrangement is to name the first born son to his maternal father's line and all other children to their father's line; a ~19—conaon alternative is to alternate the children's descent without regard to sex. When a man marries into his wife's family, he contributes labor and children to their line, while they provide him and his children with a home and the use of land. The result is a strong sense of mutual obligation that often endures for several generations. If the marriage produces enough children to carry on both lines, these obligations are usually not expressed in ancestor worship peyond the first generation. But if one of the two lines should lack descendants, the other is required to care for their dead. The inevitable result is that many ancestral altars contain tablets devoted to the remote peripheral dead of several lines as well as tablets representing the worshiper's parents and the senior members of their own descent line (14). In regards to the situation due to the transfer of property that initiates the worship of ancestors from other lines, the line or ancestors concerned are mostly affinal kin. In China, although married women who remain identified with their husband's line have a right to a place on his altar, this right does not extend to members of the wonan's natal family. If a woman should bring her own parents! tablets with her at marriage or be forced by a brother's death to assume responsibility for them later in life, these quests in her husband's home are relegated to an altar in a back room of the house or at best to a subsidiary altar. The tablets are granted a place on her husband's altar only if the wife's responsibility entitles her to inherit a share of her father's estate. In such a case, the husband usually treats his wife's parents with respect and sometimes assigns one of his children to act as their heir and descendant. In all of these cases, the house will have ancestor tablets with more than one surname. The tablet with the same surname as that of the household head is their proper ancestor; tablets with different surnames are in nature peripheral ancestors and are usually also referred to as "yi- b among Chinese anthropologists (3). THE STRUGGLEE OF PERIPHERAL ANCESTOR To become ancestors with different surname or peripheral ancestor with a regular position on someone's house altar is really not easy; sometimes they have to fight a long way in order to be recognized. Sung-hsing Wang and hsieng-hsui Chen, both my colleagues in the Institute of Ethnology, have reported some vivid stories concerning the struggles of peripheral ancestors as follows: This example concerns a woman called Yeh who had no children and adopted a daughter who is now Mrs. Hsue When Mrs. Hsu's marriage was being arranged, Yeh insisted that this adopted daughter should marry a "called-in husband; i.e. a man who was willing to look after the Yeh family, including the living (Yeh herself) and the dead (Yeh's ancestors), At first the Yeh tablet was placed in a room in the wing building of the Hsu family. Later, the wing collapsed. The family then erected a small bamboo hut in the same place and worshiped the Yeh ancestors there for about twenty years. Recently, however, members of the Hsu family have experienced bad luck: their children and the housewife have been ill. They asked the deities the cause of the Sickness. The answer was that the Yeh ancestors were haunting them, because they were displeased about being placed in the small bamboo hut and wanted to enter the cheng-ting or the hall of Hsu's house. At —20—first Hsu's ancestors refused to let them enter their cheng-ting; finally, after negotiations through the shaman, it was decided to place then accordingly, and the Yeh tablet was placed on the left of the fsu's and in an inferior position on a lower table of the altar. However, the bad luck was not over, because the Yeh ancestors still tried to take over the place of Hsu's ancestors in the family. The yousewife threatened the Yeh ancestors and said: "You should be gatisfied with being in this position, If you continue to haunt us, qovody will take care of you." After this there was a short period of peace. But when the wife had her third son and suffered from a serious Tiiness, the deities conferred that the Yeh ancestors were begging for an heir and wanted the new born baby to be theirs. The housewife did not recover, eventhough the third son was surnamed Yeh. They asked the feities again. The answer was that the Hsu ancestor had become angry spout this decision. Through the negotiation of the shaman on both sides, the Hsu and Yeh ancestors agreed that the third son should adopt a double surname. Incidentally, the Yeh family owns 0.2 hectares of paddy field which will be inherited by the third son (3, 12)+ 4 second example is like this: Lo Yang's family has two sets of ancestor tablets. One is surnamed Lo, the proper ancestor of this family, and the other is surnamed Huang, brought in by Lo's mother. When his mother married into the Lo family, she was accompanied by her foster grandmother and a piece of land because the Huang family had no descendant. At first, the Huang tablet was placed in the kitchen when Lo Yang was living with his brothers in the same dwelling unit. Later, Lo Yang built his new house and now has his own cheng-ting. The Huang table then was moved to the cheng-ting is now placed on the left of the Lo tablet. Huang's ancestors had been haunting his family until they decided to let Lo Yeng's two sons succeed to two family lines and adopt double surnames (Lo Huang) (3). The third example is this way: A woman in Lun-ya Hua-t'an told me that her son went mad. They asked the deities why. The deities told them through the shaman that Sone spirit had haunted him. The spirit was her husband's uncle who dno descendent. She promised to offer him some food and paper money on the first and fifteen of each lunar month. She worshiped him Outside the courtyard of the dwelling. Her son did not recover because the Spirit insisted that he should have his own tablet, which should be Placed inside the door. She promised she would do this only if her son hed Teally recovered (3, 12). tipnetO® these cases we see how different descent lines in the family Bht for their proper position through the ritual of ancestor worship. W,i8 only after the tablet is placed in a proper position that a cent line can be assured of being recognized; then the relations of chetily members will be harmonized, and optimum health will be 1 *ved, In the next section I shall use my own filed data to further Ustrate the point. THE CASE OF KAN-TING Sera oF the last three years I have been conducting fieldwork in a ‘ten village called Kan-ting which is located in Hsin-chu county in —21—Northern Taiwan. Kan-ting is a small village with only 130 households. Among these 130 households of Hokkien residents, all of then are still practicing ancestor worship. However, this is not to say that every household in the village has its own ancestral altar. Since siblings or even cousins may worship their common ancestors on the same altar, there are about 113 out of 130 households with ancestral altars in different places within their house. A striking phenomenon we have found among the ancestral worship of Kan-ting villagers is that more than half of their shrines retain two or more sets of ancestral tablets with different surnames. The following shows the figures (10). Tablet Household 1 set 56 2 sets at 3 sets 10 4 sets 6 Total 113 These are figures that have never been reported by our colleagues. The highest figures from other parts of Taiwan concerning worshiping peripheral ancestors are about 10-20 percent; therefore the figures show that our Kan-ting data are very special indeed. Among those households with two or more sets of tablets, we have found several of them which place their ancestral tablets from other lines or peripheral ancestors in rooms other than the cheng-ting or central-hall, or in the kitchen; some are even in the back roon storage. These placements indicate various stages of struggle between different lines of members with regard to the final recognition as a full-fledged ancestor to be worshiped on the main hall's shrine. Many stories have been told about the process of negotiation between members of the family representing different rights and duties; most of then follow the pattern as described above by sung-hsing Wang. That is, they ascribe illnesses and other mischief to the anger and dissatisfaction of their peripheral ancestors, and so the focus is always upon how to deal with and settle the problems brought by them. Through the intervention of gods and shamans, the problems are settled step by step and so the relationship between the living and the dead on one hand, and among the living on the other can be harmonized gradually, It is only under this order of harmony that the optiaum health of the family will be achieved. However, during the process of Negotiation we can see that the members of the family are usually under Severe stress and hence psychological instability; some of them even suffer from mental illness. In our data we have found three cases of Mental disorder which are involved somehow with the business of Worshiping ancestors. The first case is that of a young lady surnamed Tseng who fell into "neurasthenia” shortly after she gave birth to a daughter. This Young lady's family geneology is as follows: ows sa Kua Tzeng? 0a 0 ° —2—Tseng's parents have four daughters but no son. She is the eldest, So she had to "call in" a husband surnamed Kuo to carry on the jine. Kuo agreed at the marriage to give up the right to name any children under his own surname. However, after Tseng fell sick they found out that Kuo had been adopted out as a ritual heir to his yaternal uncle when he was a child, so the shaman interpreted that her fiiness was because the paternal uncle asked to have @ proper ritual position and to be worshiped in the house. Eventually the family had to erect a tablet for him. The second case is that of a man named Chen who was very bright jn his youth but suddenly become insane at age 19. His family's geneology is a& follows: chend <> dTreng Bi Chen's grandmother Wang was first married to a man surnamed Chen. After her first husband died, she married again to a man named Tseng and afterward she named all her descendants Tseng. When her third grandson fell sick, on the advice of a shaman, she erected a tablet for her first husband and all his forebears and changed her third grandson's name to Chen. Furthermore, since Chen is badly sick and alnost impossible to get marry anymore, she also arranged for one of her great grandsons to be Chen's heir in order to carry on Chen's line. A third case is that of a woman named Tseng who married wrrilocally to a man Yang. According to the marriage contract, Tseng naned all the children under her family's surname. After some years, the husband left home because of a several quarrel with his in-laws and eventually died in another town. After that Tseng gradually became insane, The family members then discussed several times whether they Should erect a tablet for Yang, but somehow they feel reluctant to do that. Until recently, we still have not seen that any action has been taken yet. From these cases we see again how the Chinese in Taiwan relate their ilinesses to the ritual of ancestor worship, and how they try to Cure illnesses through the arrangement of the ancestor cult. CONCLUSION Until very recently, for most of the Chinese in Taiwan the matter 8f carrying on the descent line, or in a negative way, the fear of ‘ing broken off from the family line is still of paramount concern. $ complex of anxiety can be seen in various expressions such as ‘uan-le-hsing-huo" (breaking the incense and fire), "Tao-fang" (to conn the home), or in @ famous Chinese saying "Among three matters meritered as unfilial, to be without posterity is the most serious While ancestor worship is a ritual means to symbolize the Wntinuity of the descent line, to erect a tablet and to have ~23—descendants to worship one, is metaphorically to have the line carry on. Therefore the focus of anxiety concerning the absence of posterity has been shifted somehow to the concern of whether one's ancestor tablets have been praperly treated or not. In the chinese family in most of rural Taiwan, to have their ancestor tablet being properly worshiped is one of the important elements of the psychological stability of family members. To treat the ancestors properly and to release anxiety about descent is one way to hermonize the family and also the whole kin group. If there are some lines of ancestors who have not been properly treated, anxieties arouse immediately among some family members, and all kind of illness and struggle will happen until the relevant problem has been solved. From our data we have seen dozens of cases of hard efforts to allow a differently surnamed tablet to be erected on one's altar in order to harmonize the family members. Furthermore, if there is no obvious problem related to ancestor worship eventhough continuous mischief or chronic illnesses happen to members of the family, someone may try even harder to find out if there is a remote ancestor coming back to initiate the trouble. In other words, it is a convenient way to refer those misfortunes to some remote or even unknown ancestor. In these ways, we may say that the Chinese are not only under the ancestor's shadow, as Francis Hsu has so nicely told us (5), but rather we are nostly under a psychological state which we may call the "ancestor complex." REFERENCES 1. Ahern, Emily M.: The Cult of the Dead in a Chinese Village, Stanford: University of Stanford Press, 1973. 2. Chen, Chung-min: Ancestor Worship and Clan Organization in a Rural Village of Taiwan, Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, No. 23. Taipei, 1967. i 3. Ghen Hsiang-shui: The Ancestor Tablet: Inheritance and Wealth in the Determination of Ancestor Position, Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, No. 36, Taipei, 1973. 4. Freedman, Maurice: Ancestor Worship: Two Facets of the Chinese Case, in Social Organizatior Essays Presented to Raymond Firth. Edited by M. Freedman. London: Frank Cass, 1967. 5. Hsu, Frencis LK. Under the Ancestor's Shadow: Kinship, Personality and Social Mobility in Village China, 2nd ed., Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1967. 6. Jordan, David K.: Gods, Ghosts and Ancestors: Folk Religion in a Taiwanese Village, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. 7, Li, Yih-yuan: Chinese Geomancy and Ancestor Worship: A Further Discussion, in Ancestor, Edited by W. Newell. The Hague: Mouton, 1976. 8. Li, Yih-yuan: Shamanism in Taiwan: An Anthropological Inquiry, in Culture-bound Syndromes, Ethnopsychiatry and Alternate Therapies, Edited by W. Lebra Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1976. 9. Li, Yih-yuan: Belief and Culture (in Chinese), Taipei: 10 Chiu-liu Press, 1978. - Li, Yih-yuan: Traditional and Modern Adaptation of the Chinese Family in Taiwan, Paper Presented to the Symposium on Modernization and Chinese Culture, Chinese University of Hong 4We 8 the Kong, Hong Kong, 1985. Wang, Shun-hsing: A Comparative Study of Ancestor Worship of the Chinese and Japanese, Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnology. Academia Sinica, No. 31. Taipei, i971. Wang, Shun-hsing: Ancestor Proper and Peripheral, in Ancestor, Edited by W. Newell. The Hague: Mounton, 1976. Wolf, Arthur: Gods, Ghost, and Ancestors, in Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society, Edited by A. Wolf. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974. Wolf, Arthur: Aspects of Ancestor Worship in Northern Taiwan, in Ancestor, Edited by W. Newell. The Hague: Mouton, 1976. —25—