power and transcendence in the Ma Tsu pilgrimages of Taiwan

By prescribing travel outside pilgrims' native communities, the Ma Tsu pilgrimages of Taiwan define the sources of socially productive power as transcendent to both the individual and the community. In this article, pilgrimage ritual and rhetoric are shown to constitute a multifaceted set of mutually authenticating representations of the self‐productive power of various institutions and culturally constructed selves. The most encompassing horizons of social and cultural production in pilgrimage exceed overt or conscious representation in pilgrimage itself, a fact crucial to the article's attempt to link the spatially hierarchical social organization of pilgrimages to ideological qualities inherent in pilgrimages' representations of transcendent power. From an objective or “totalizing” analytical perspective, pilgrimages are logically transcendent or encompassing levels of social production, but they entail representations of transcendence that misrecognize the sociogenic nature of this transcendence. [ pilgrimage, alienation, ideology, social production ]