Paying homage to the "Heavenly Mother": intimate geopolitics of the Mazu Pilgrimage in the midst of rapprochement between China and Taiwan

Abstract

The cultural proximity of people from Fujian province in China and those in Taiwan means that religion is a common social denominator. Their belief in Mazu or Tien-shang Sheng-mu (the Heavenly Mother) is a case in point. Since the establishment of informal contacts in 1987, Taiwanese pilgrims travelling to discover their religious roots in China became the most visible and largest groups of visitors. This paper conceptualises the Mazu pilgrimage as a platform to further our understanding of everyday geopolitics and how religion plays a part in the rapprochement between China and Taiwan. In particular, it discusses the cultural-geo-politics of the Mazu Pilgrimage from a variety of different scales, ranging from the state, to temple organisations and the personal. Empirical evidence reveals that these scales do not operate independently but are highly intertwined. Furthermore, as Holloway (2006:182) argues, the geography of religion has hitherto focused mainly on the “construction and effects of religious-spiritual space” rather than on the production of such spaces. In other words, it is often assumed that spiritual spaces were there before the pilgrimage rather than spiritual spaces being performed through the pilgrimage. As such, the Mazu pilgrimage tour is conceptualised not as a tourism product, but as something that produces platforms for devotees with different political allegiance to interact with each other. In doing so, the pilgrimage tour is both a social activity and a socialising one, representing a potential force in creating new forms of geopolitical imaginaries and possibilities between the Chinese and Taiwanese.