Religion, State and Cultural Entrepreneurship in post-Cold War Taiwan: The Case of Chio-Tian Folk Drums & Arts Troupe

• In Event: Breaking Open the Religious Realm: 21st Century Religious Developments in Taiwan

Abstract

This paper examines the incorporated development of Chio-Tian Folk Drums & Arts Troupe, based in Taichung, Taiwan, from an obscured temple procession group to an established entrepreneurship renowned for its refined martial troupe performance ostensibly claiming elements from Taiwanese popular religion. At the outset, the troupe’s struggling path from a turf-based organization fixated upon territorial cults to a translocal “cultural” corporation profiting primarily on commercial performance and folksy commodity echoes what many have claimed as evidence of how culture differences are innovated in the “neoliberal” age, in which private corporations, in place of what the modern states have previously held, play a more defining role in creating new identities and cultures.
Nevertheless, a more nuanced observation reveals that the Taiwan government and its capricious cultural policies, far from exhibiting signs of dysfunction, has continually redefined “culture” for implicit political motives or economic calculations during the post-Cold War era, as exemplified in the boost of native consciousness in the 1990s, and the subsidiary-based promotion of multiculturalism and “cultural and creative industries” in the 2000s. These shifting policies, in turn, impacted largely on how local religious groups brand themselves catering to the ever-changing definitions of “culture,” while molding their own often conflicting views on how “culture” should be represented, innovated, and revived. In this process, “culture” and its definition become entangled within the wrestles between various state agents, entrepreneurs and religious performers, which must be contextualized in the specifically troubling state-building project and economic transformation of Taiwan during the post-Cold War era.

Author

• Dayi Hsu, National Taiwan University