Spiritual Experience of Taiwanese Civil Society: A Research on Technologies of Self of Taiwan Post-war Cult

• Main Authors: WU NING SIN, 吳寧馨
• Other Authors: C.S.STONE SHIH
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/45889555695867584432

碩士 === 東吳大學 === 社會學系 === 97 === This research is inspired from the modernity of religious sociology, and aims to explore the connotation and technologies of spiritual practice about postwar Taiwanese cult that has been temporal and special mismatched for thirty years or so in Taiwan. While questions referring to : “Does soul exist? Who am I? What is the ultimate meaning of life?” are also proposed in western society, my research intends to find out what physical or mental “technologies of self” under Foucault’s idea of “ limit experience” are suggested in non-western intuition-based civil cult .And also the research investigates how do the unique Taoism experience and technologies situate a subject who are already submerged in a modern society and therefore make possible the transformation of the subject? This research has spent two whole years in field investigation with methodologies such as participative ethnography, auto ethnography, and in-depth life history interviews. In another words, this study is a bodily practiced and literally discoursed track interlaced by the significance of postwar cult and the religious belief / secular life of a variety of people from an in-depth participator’s angle-- “my” point of view. In addition to the ambiguous identity of postwar Taiwanese cult movement, the gap of theories between traditional religions (or civil belief ) and Western religions is another issue in studying religious phenomenon. Besides, the research is based on Foucault’s subjectivity discourse and develops his studies on spirituality ,through which the subject shapes his or her exploration, practice and experience to reach the truth, to the observation on the doubt, practice and acknowledgement of members of a cult. In the observation, the research tries to comb through “the technologies of self” of the cult : what the members of the cult, including me, do with their own bodies, minds, thoughts, behaviors and ways of living to transform themselves, and whether they accomplish some sort of happiness. purity, wisdom, beauty, or immortality. The unique language and value under the definition of traditional religious practice shall be hence clarified.