The Maoist Shaman and the Madman

An essay extract on failed rituals and communist-religious syncretism

This is a fascinating extract from an obscure paper I found online called The Maoist Shaman and the Madman: Ritual Bricolage, Failed Ritual, and Failed Ritual Theory written by Emily Chao, and published in Cultural Anthropology in 1999. It deals with something that rarely gets discussed in anthropology and archaeology, the phenomenon of the ‘failed ritual’. In this instance a shaman from a Chinese ethnic minority tried to heal a young man by incorporating Maoist era symbols into her ritual practice. The results are comic and almost pitiful.

Both the failure of the ritual and the use of atheistic and politically ideological symbols are interesting. We typically think of communist regimes as being so violently secular that they stand in opposition to everything superstitious and religious, which is true, but the syncretism of local and small-scale beliefs with the new superstructure produced something absurd like ‘Maoist shamanism’.

Everything below is taken from this essay.

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On a cool summer afternoon, a shaman arrived at a dusty mud-brick Naxi village to cure a resident who had gone mad. During the ritual that followed, the shaman called on Chairman Mao, Zhou Enlai, and Deng Xiaoping to assist her in driving out demons while she instructed the madman to brace up, learn from Lei Feng, and work for the greater good of his country.

The shaman chanted, "The madman is one of the wretched masses. Arise if you don't want to be enslaved! Let our flesh and blood build the next Great Wall."

The shaman incorporated political slogans and phrases from the Chinese national anthem into her ritual incantations. She wore a shoulder bag affixed with a Red Guard armband and marched around the madman's courtyard as if she were going into battle. The shaman bowed to the gods and burned incense, but she also invoked the "gods" and the experiences of the Chinese revolution-all in an attempt to save the madman. This extraordinary ritual was held at East Wind, a village populated by the Naxi ethnic minority in southwest China. The shaman grafted national discourse onto local ritual structure in a context where there had formerly been a clear division between the state and the shamanic. The shaman's performance reveals both the penetration of state power and the agency of the shaman in creating a syncretic form of ritual practice that momentarily blurred national and local epistemologies. During the ritual, the shaman's conjurings created a site for the reinscription of ritual meaning and the opening of new contingencies and ambivalences. But the village audience immediately debated the merits of the ritual and ultimately assessed it to be a failure

As the shaman entered the madman's courtyard, a rapt crowd of villagers gathered to watch her begin arranging offerings for the ritual. The villagers had high expectations of the shaman. Someone in an adjacent Naxi village had recommended her after she had held a ritual that "cured" a local woman formerly unable to bear children. A woman in her early forties, the shaman wore a Heqing Bai minority head-dress, a Red Guard shoulder bag slung over a common blue cotton shirt, apron-covered trousers, and the ubiquitous army green tennis shoes on her feet.

The shaman was not Naxi but of the Bai nationality. This was immediately apparent from the headdress, which identified her as from Heqing, 90 kilometers from Lijiang town; it is standard for rural Bai women to wear the headdress of their area. She conducted the ritual in Yunnanese, which is the lingua franca of the Lijiang basin area as well as of Heqing. What villagers found peculiar about her appearance was the Red Guard shoulder bag, which is a Cultural Revolution relic rarely seen in the post-Mao era Lijiang countryside. Villagers claimed that the shaman was originally a poor peasant who had once been a Red Guard and Communist Party official with a high enough rank to have attended political conferences as far away as Kunming, the provincial capital.

The shaman first burned incense and prepared colored flags, which she positioned according to compass points associated with fire, water, metal, and wood. She placed an assortment of offerings in cups and bowls in the center of the courtyard next to a live chicken. The shaman's actions - the burning of incense and bowing to the gods of the East, West, North, South, and Center - constitute chu ba zei, the standard procedure for beginning rituals, including shamanic ones, in Lijiang Prefecture. Chu ba zei is also performed by some Naxi families on the first and 15th of each month and for manyueke, a baby's first month celebration, to which they invite the gods.

The shaman then began to sing: "I came to save the madman because I pity him! The madman is one of the wretched masses! We invite Mao Zhuxi [Chair- man Mao], Zhou Enlai, and Deng Xiaoping to come and save the madman!"

In doing this, she symbolically replaced a local ritual structure comprising the gods of heaven, mountain, and earth with a nationalized ritual structure presided over by this deified postrevolutionary trinity. The shaman raised some wine cups toward the sky and poured water as if offering it to an invisible entity, and then she scattered rice in four directions as offerings to the gods.

Addressing herself to the madman, she began singing from the Chinese national anthem: "Arise if you don't want to be enslaved! Let our flesh and blood be used to build the next Great Wall!"

Before the anthem was finished, she began singing verses from an anti-Japanese war hymn, during which she dramatized a mock decapitation: "We'll wield our knife toward the demons and cut off a demon's head! One-two, one-two-three, one-two-three- four!"

She marched as if in battle, singing this strange medley interspersed with extracts from Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Mao 1969), sung to the tune "Do-Re-Mi" (from The Sound of Music), and exhortations to emulate Lei Feng.

Some of the audience giggled sporadically. Her words were all too familiar; these songs once performed in schools and during political meetings evoked memories from the not-so-distant past and aroused vague feelings of patriotism and a determination to carry out political campaigns or tasks of heavy labor. During the Cultural Revolution, loudspeakers roused the villagers every morning with the inevitable revolutionary songs or the exercise count "one-two- three-four" (yi-er-san-si), which echoed through the village. Quotations from Chairman Mao, recited like daily mantras, spoke of what many villagers, who had been true believers, once considered the very meaning of life.

"Xue Xi Lei Feng!" [Learn from Lei Feng !]-a campaign repeated every decade or so-exhorted the masses to emulate the personal sacrifices of that paragon of Communist righteousness. First in the 1960s and then numerous times thereafter, the state pro- moted Lei Feng, a People's Liberation Army (PLA) soldier and tireless worker, as a model of socialist sacrifice. Lei Feng had rescued a bus filled with children by propping up a falling telephone pole, which eventually crushed and killed him. His diaries, often miraculously discovered in different places at the same time during "Learn from Lei Feng" campaigns, are narratives of sacrifice and tireless enthusiasm to serve the people. Versions of these diaries were the main- stay of political study sessions for years (Farquhar 1996). Lei Feng was both an embodiment of the Communist spirit (Spence 1990:727) and a virtuous exemplar narrativized in the fashion of imperial and pre-1949 worthies (Ebrey 1981:382).

The shaman's songs and gestures prompted some whispering and nervous laughter; the strange juxtaposition of shamanic activity and revolutionary text made many of the young people giddy. Shamanism belonged to the realm of pre- revolutionary local practices that remained situated outside state control, and it was antithetical to the political slogans that articulated the voice of the state. Despite this apparent incoherence, many of the older people watched attentively; the performance even transfixed some of them. The shaman appeared to use song and slogan as mnemonic devices to conjure strong attitudes and emotions from specific historical memories. In doing this, she sought to mobilize the mad- man and the audience by appropriating the fierce determination of the past for battle in a new context of demon quelling. The ritual wound down after the shaman threw the increasingly dazed chicken in various directions, telling the madman to fetch it each time. A cool breeze was blowing, but the shaman's clothes were wet with perspiration as she alternately sang and trembled.

Over one hour after the ritual began, the shaman fed the chicken some rice and said, "Now they've eaten their fill and drank until they are no longer thirsty, and so we ask that the demons go away and allow the madman to recover."

Then the shaman instructed the madman to bow in the direction of the village graveyard. The ritual closed with a group consisting of the host, some relatives, the madman, and the shaman walking to the graveyard to send off the demons. Once there, the group killed the chicken and feasted on it. Sometime later, the relatives of the madman graciously thanked the shaman and sent her on her way with ten duck eggs. Relatives of the madman described the duck eggs as a gift or a token of the hosting family's gratitude. Within moments of her departure, the village was abuzz with criticism of the ritual and the shaman. Before the arrival of the shaman, the villagers had generally felt that one or more demons were afflicting the madman. However, after the ritual, and in spite of the shaman's demon-quelling efforts, the madman did not appear either substantially improved or particularly mad but, rather, quiet and withdrawn. Most villagers felt that the shaman had not cured the mad- man, although some were hopeful that he might improve with time.

By the next day, public opinion had moved toward a negative evaluation of the ritual itself. Some villagers called the shaman a pianzi (cheat), who had only come seeking material gain.

An older man complained, "She said Mao, Zhou, and Deng sent her to save the madman; she didn't know the names of the gods and didn't know how to sing shaman songs [he imitated the high melodic tune used by shamans]."

Many of the older villagers rejected the shaman's performance because her words, songs, and appearance were simply inconsistent with their cultural categories and shared memories of shamans and shamanic rituals. Prior to 1949, shamans in the Lijiang basin were men who wore cloth turbans, wielded drums or swords, and sang secret shamanic songs in a high melodic whisper. This shaman, many villagers pointed out, was a woman-wearing a minority headdress and toting a Red Guard bag-who sang revolutionary songs and spouted political slogans. Most of the villagers under 40 had never seen a shaman perform, and their knowledge of shamanism was based on older villagers' memories of the performances of the shaman who had lived in the village before 1949. Their rejection of the shaman was based not so much on a critique of her authenticity as on a rejection of what they saw as her promotion of the Maoist era. For many of the young people, the shaman's Red Guard shoulder bag and strident rhetoric suggested a reinvocation of values they had once subscribed to and had since rejected.

But did the rejection of the trinity of Mao, Zhou, and Deng also suggest a perception of state powerlessness in comparison with local gods and folk cosmology? If so, can this be contextualized in terms of the declining role of the state since decollectivization in the Lijiang countryside? Given that villagers in the 1990s have been going through yet another "Learn from Lei Feng" cam- paign, what does their rejection of the recent reincarnation of Lei Feng as demon queller imply?

One young man protested, "How can studying Lei Feng help? That has nothing to do with it."

His response, which was echoed by other villagers, flatly rejected the shaman's implication that the madman's illness could be attributed to his ideological shortcomings. Perhaps this is why most villagers were sarcastic about the shaman's use of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse- tung and the model of Lei Feng. Neither the initial village support for the ritual nor the occasionally recognizable ritual actions performed by the shaman could override what the villagers perceived as anachronistic.