Paul Katz, Tireless Explorer of Folk Religion

Back in 1988, a foreigner rode his motorcycle through the streets and alleyways of Pingtung’s Donggang. Curi­ous and fluent in Taiwanese, he would stop at temples and ask questions. Often, he would ride to Linbian to eat seafood and knock back a few glasses with the locals. That young foreigner was Paul Katz, an American historian.

A pioneering researcher of Wangye in Taiwan, the American historian Paul Katz has acquired a fitting nickname: “Wangye.” (photo by Kent Chuang)

Martin Luther meets the White Lotus Sect

“My father was a cardiologist, and my mother a scholar of classical Greek and Latin,” Katz explains. Neither of his parents was particularly religious, but their liberal-­minded attitudes encouraged him to broadly gather knowledge from a young age. He went to a church-­affiliated high school, which spurred an inter­est in religion. At Yale his initial focus was on Euro­pean reli­gious history.

But he changed tracks after encountering the British-­American historian Jonathan Spence, a famous Sino­logist at the university. As Katz heard Spence discuss the White Lotus Sect, the Boxer Rebellion, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and other topics related to religion in China, Katz found his academic horizons broadening: “To me it was all so fresh and interesting, so I changed my major to Chinese religious history,” Katz explains.

In 1988 Katz went to Donggang in Pingtung to check out how the local community mobilized to welcome Wangye. He captured many precious images of the Wangye ceremonies there.

Another side of Taiwan

In order to study Chinese history, Katz began studying Chinese at Yale. The poet Cheng Chou-yu was one of his teachers, and he thought up Katz’s Chinese name, Kang Bao. (Kang is a Chinese family name that means “healthy” or “peaceful,” while the given name Bao means “leopard.”)

In the 1980s China had not yet fully recovered from the Cultural Revolution. Taiwan‡US relations, on the other hand, were friendly, and Taiwanese society comparatively free. With its strong academic and instructional resources, the island was the top choice for many foreigners wanting to study Chinese. Katz first arrived in Taiwan in the summer of 1983. Back then a can of cola cost NT$25, whereas a can of Taiwan Beer was only NT$21. Mineral water was hard to find. “Naturally, I drank more Taiwan Beer with meals,” says a smiling Katz, recalling his early days here. 

After entering the doctoral program in East Asian Studies at Princeton the following year, Katz once again came to Taiwan, enrolling for a year of advanced Chinese language classes at the Stanford Center at National Taiwan University. Katz made some Taiwanese friends with whom he visited historical sites in Wanhua and Lukang. “That’s when I discovered that Taiwan had this other culture where people spoke Taiwanese and worshipped Wangye and Mazu,” says Katz. “It was fascinating.”

At the Stanford Center, Katz met David K. Jordan, an anthropologist at the University of California, San Diego who was one of the West’s pioneering scholars of Han Chinese culture. Fluent in Taiwanese, Jordan took Katz to his first triennial Wangye Worshipping Festival in Xigang, which aims to ward off diseases. “It was the first time I watched a Wangye boat burn, and there were many jitong spirit mediums beating or piercing themselves with weapons. It was all quite shocking.” That eye-opening experience prompted Katz to shift his focus from Chinese history and instead explore the historical origins of the Wangye boat burning ceremony in his doctoral dissertation.

In 1988 Paul Katz visited Donggang and Xiaoliuqiu in Pingtung County and captured many precious images of the Wangye welcoming ceremonies there. Shown here is a Wangye welcoming ceremony on Xiaoliuqiu.

Nearly a Taoist priest

In 1988 Katz found a Taiwanese language teacher in Taipei for one-on-one instruction, and then he rented a studio apartment for half a year in Pingtung’s Donggang, where he conducted in-depth research into Wangye worship. The residents of that simple and un­preten­tious community embraced Katz, happily showing him around and helping him any way they could. Having never seen a hirsute foreigner before, the local children would curiously tug at the hairs on his arms. 

In his time in Donggang, Katz watched the preparation and planning that went into the Wangye Welcoming Ceremony and the construction of the ceremonial boat. He saw how the entire community mobilized. Men and women of every age played their roles. Elders were responsible for what went on inside the temple, whereas younger people performed in the parade troupes. Deep-sea fishing boats made special trips home. Katz marveled at the social cohesion, and he still finds it unforgettable today. A Taoist priest even offered to take Katz on as a student, hoping to pass along to him knowledge of how to cast spells and climb ladders of knives. If he didn’t become a student, he wouldn’t learn these secrets, Katz realized, but if he did learn them, then he wouldn’t be able to publish information about them anyway. As an academic, he was obligated to take the more careful and measured approach.

Katz gathered evidence both firsthand and from written documents as he traced the history of Wangye devotion in Taiwan and explored the impacts that Taoism and local beliefs have had on each other. He later went on to put what he learned into English and Chinese books, bringing Taiwan’s Wangye worship into the realm of Western scholarship.

Katz’s life has been deeply influenced by Eastern culture. On display in his office is a note from a teacher at Princeton, encouraging him to adopt the way of the Confucian gentleman as his guiding ethos. (photo by Kent Chuang)

Faith is life

Katz returned to the United States, where he completed his doctoral dissertation and got married. In 1991, with National Chung Cheng University interested in hiring a foreign history instructor and with Katz’s wife able to return to a job at the Academica Sinica, the couple decided to come back to Taiwan.

Living in Taiwan for more than 30 years, Katz has continually been researching folk religion here, but rather than focusing on better-known deities such as Mazu and the Earth God, he has always preferred to explore less-trafficked fields. When you look carefully at Katz’s work, you discover that he not only has the systematic approach of a historian but also the cultural concerns of an anthropologist. As he examines the history of local religious beliefs, he pays close attention to how religion intersects with ethnicity and demography. For instance, Katz researched the Tapani Incident (a.k.a. the Xilai An Incident). Apart from researching the Xilai Temple, whose main deities are the five Wangye, who have dominion over infectious diseases, he also looked at household registration records, personal documents, and transcripts of the oral recollections of survivors to further explore the impact that the conflict had on the local popu­lation structure.

In recent years Katz has been researching the rituals of “divine justice.” Conducting fieldwork at Xinzhuang’s Dizang Temple, he has been observing the role that “indictment rites” play in Taiwanese society. Even in a democracy like Taiwan with a well-­functioning legal system, there are still matters needing redress that fall beyond the purview of the courts, including disputes involving marital strife or financial debts that lack leg­ally binding documents. For such matters, many people choose instead to make an “indictment” at a temple. Katz explains that these petitioners typically come to the temple in a heightened emotional state, but they must settle themselves before making their accusation to the transcriber, who turns their complaint into a written affidavit that a Taoist priest then delivers to the gods as an indictment. Over the course of these procedures, the plaintiff usually calms down quite a bit. “These indict­ment rites thus serve the function of lowering the emotional temperature,” says Katz.

Despite studying folk religious practices for several decades, Katz has not become a devotee of any particular religion himself. When asked if he believes in God, he says, “I believe in God, but God isn’t necessarily a white man with a beard or an Asian man sitting on a lotus. Rather, God reveals himself in different forms in different cultures.” Katz and his wife occasionally worship Buddha and make tea offerings or go vegetarian for a day as an act of devotion. Sometimes they pray for peace at an Earth God temple. When asked about his research at the Lianzuo Mountain Guanyin Temple in Taoyuan’s Daxi, Katz’s eyes sparkle as he describes the religious history of the Hakka in Daxi. The flexibility and openness of popular religion in Taiwan both provide Katz with inexhaustible subject matter and keep him full of passion for his work.

Katz has spent his working life researching folk religion in Taiwan. He has published a rich collection of papers in English and Chinese, which have raised understanding of the island’s religious practices both in Taiwan and overseas. (photo by Kent Chuang)