Daoist Studies 道教研究

As anthropologists of other societies have done, anthropologists of Chinese society have inquired into Chinese religion to discover a social or cultural essence. Searching for an elusive social totality and its essence through collective representations led two major anthropologists of China, Maurice Freedman and Barbara Ward, to refer to political authority. More recently, Emily Martin Ahern hsa brought precision to parallels between religious and political rituals. Whatever else religion may be, it involves representation and it conveys authority. This article examines the religious conveyance of authority and its relation to political authority. The relation emphasised here is that of dissimilarity. A case study is presented of a spirit-medium who is also a minor Daoist adept and devotee of the cult of a god called the Sage King, in Taiwan. The local cult which developed around him, and the stories of the foundation of the cult, illustrate the argument that a religious authority is presented as an archaic 'before', unlike actual political authority, and is amenable to recruitment by many different and even opposing loyalties and legitimisations of political authority.