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)