E LEMENTOS DE UNA FILOSOFÍA DE LAS RELIGIONES

The first sign of the secularisation of the Atayal culture lies in Christianity being the ‘fantasmatic supplement’ of the Atayals’ social dilemma. Although the traditional

Atayal culture believed in the utux controlling the wellbeing of the tayan, the adversity of the people was also considered to be punishment from utux. Instead, turning to Christianity was a ‘rational’ decision. This means that this change of gaga did not pass through the traditional religious process, but resulted from a consensus opinion. This conversion thus showed the very secular reference in the Atayal people’s acknowledgement of their tradition’s ‘superstitions’ and the false belief in the utux. We might even say that this secular reference not only was based on the ideology of an ideal ego, but also served as a ‘fetish’ construction of the Atayals’ belief in Christianity. The fetishism here is not a bodily and sexually triggered trauma as in Sigmund Freud’s (2001)[1913] terms, which ‘the mother lacks a penis and the ensuing fear of castration that pathologically leads to the substitution of a sexual object with an Other.’ (Böhm, 2010: 350) Rather, we should understand this drive in terms of the fetishistic relation between the subject’s cause of desire and the object of desire in a Lacanian way, which is ‘not the real family father and his penis… but the Name-of-the-Father and the phallus, both of which are symbolic, mythical signifiers that mark the formation of society.’ (Böhm, 2010: 352) The Name-of-the-Father, according to Lacan (1977, 1978), signifies the lack and repression resulting from the gaze of the Other. It is because the phallus, as Lacan puts it, ‘is in the place of the Other that the subject has access to it. But since this signifier is only veiled… it is this desire of the Other as such that the subject must recognise.’ (Lacan, 1977: 288) The phallus, in other words, represents what is lacked by, as well as what is desired of the subject for the society. In the Atayals’ case, we found out how the need for better material life resulted from the ‘gaze’ of the Other, while such need became not only the ‘trauma’ of the Atayals for being in the marginalised social status, but also the ‘desire’ for the Other, the modern society. Yet it was also, because the Other can never be fully obtained, that fetishism in this case operated as the substitution for the desire of the Other by transforming the desire/lack to the obsession with a certain object. (Lacan, 1977) I thus argue that the Atayals’ secular reference in their conversion to Christianity reveals the transformation of the trauma/desire from the Other to the ‘obsession’ with the ‘better life’ (that could possibly be) provided by Christianity.

When Christianity is recognised as the fetishistic image of the Atayals, this imagination of a better life represented by Christianity also became its symbolic capital that further shaped the modern world of the Atayals. In Bourdieu’s (2007)

theory of capital, symbolic capital is usually obtained through people’s economic capital, social status and reputation, making a ‘person’ as the bearer for symbolic capital. Yet in practical life, symbolic capital is not necessarily attached to human bodies, but can first be endowed to objects, and then circulate back to the body through the connection between the two physical ends. The Church, as representing the material abundance that is compatible with mainstream Han society, thus provided such symbolic capital to the Atayal converts, so that their believing in Christianity became symbolic of the promise of the material future. This promise, as we have seen in chapter eight, was what helped Christianity gain the position of orthodox gaga while sharing the Atayal ethical values. By legitimising Christianity itself as the modern orthodox way of life, the subsequent symbolic struggle against the premodern Atayal traditions further influenced the modern Atayals’ understanding of the world. To the Atayals, such understanding of the world is never merely a ‘religious’ interpretation of the way the world is. Being a society founded on religious principles, this Christianised understanding of their history – the ‘now time’ of the conversion and the ‘past’ of the ‘culture’ – and rituals changed not only the perception of the symbolic meaning of these customs, but further reshaped the episteme (Foucault, 2005), or the schemes of analogy and classification (Durkheim and Mauss, 1970) of the Atayal society. In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault (2005) had argued that how we ‘know’ and perceive the surroundings is related to the construction of social classification, and this episteme served as the reference for people to imagine the way that the world operates and the ‘order’ of everything within it. This is why, with the transformation of the content and practice of gaga to the Bible and Christian rituals, we witnessed in this study how the power structure, along with the subsequent cultural and social capitals, were redistributed in the process of the Atayals’ conversion to Christianity, thus further changing the villager’s idea of community. What this new episteme of the world also brought to the Atayals, however, is the unsymmetrical relation between the knowledge and the faith of the religious subject. As I have discussed in chapters three through five, the pre-Christian Atayal people’s life was constituted by a series of sacred practices that involved both knowing and doing. Such actions also embodied the faith in utux. Yet as we have seen with the Bienjing villagers, the incomplete translation and transformation between the Christian and traditional customs, as well as the rather fixed doctrines, detached the practices of life from the belief itself. Meanwhile, the lack of reading ability among

the older generations, the pervasive Christian value of ‘piety’ in worshipping among the younger generations, and the church’s demand of biblical authority, also caused the disinterest of the villagers in pursuing theological knowledge. These factors, as I discussed in chapters seven and eight, not only were the result of the symbolic struggle between the Christian and traditional Atayal belief systems, as well as of the power struggle between different families, but also became the new doxa that dominated the attitude of the villagers towards Christianity, where the Atayal people are not even aware of such rupture between the faith and its knowledge.

The danger of this asymmetrical relation between faith and knowledge is that it further reproduces the fetishistic ideology of Christianity, and in a way that is different from that of the Atayals’ conversion. In earlier discussions, I presented how the Atayals believe Christianity provides them a ‘better life’ while ignoring the evidence that the most ‘successful’ figures in the village are not ‘good’ Christians – or even Christians at all. However, we should not understand such phenomenon as the evidence of the Atayals’ dematerialisation of Christianity. What we have to notice is how the Bienjing villagers failed to see that becoming less socio-economically vulnerable was not the direct result of believing in Christianity, but the consequence of the facilities and policies bridged through the Church. This logic of ‘faith’ in Christianity, as Slavoj Žižek (1997: 137) stated about the logic of religious fetishism in The Plague of Fantasies, is where the Atayal people ‘first believed in God and then, on the grounds of their [my] belief, become susceptible to the proof of their [my] belief.’ Unlike the rather empiricist tradition in the old gaga, which saw every action and consequence as the reflection of the belief of the utux (and vice versa), the modern Christian Atayals no longer connect the adversity to the anger of the god, but only see the ‘successful’ cases – such as the priests – as the reward for the faith in God. Fetishism thus works not as the belief in the direct promise of a better material life (the reason the Atayal people converted to Christianity in the first place), but as the distant, delayed driving power that makes them believe it would eventually lead to a better life, which, again, reproduced the secular reference in the belief of Christianity.