| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中山大學 === 社會學系碩士班 === 107 === Most people in Taiwan are familiar with going to the temple to pray for fortune and blessings, engaging in religious activities as a believer or prayer. This thesis focuses on the female dancers who are hired to offer performance in religious festivals. Besides observing festivals and interviewing 17 dancers, I also tried to be one of them and experienced the whole labor process. This research underlines the significance of the body and proposes the concept of “interactive performative work.” The research findings are as follows.
Firstly, these dancers cover the K-pop MV as performance, which is totally different from the traditional Din Tao and the Electronic-Flower-Cart. I suggest that this new type of performance is constructed to create market segmentation. Besides, I construe the labor process through the ethnographic fieldwork.
Secondly, these dancers lie between the sacred and the secular. On the one hand, this type of dance performance stemmed from the festivalization of religious activities, bringing work opportunities to these dancers. On the other hand, these dancers are spillovers from the “girls’ economy” in which young girls are used to promote products. It seems that the religious field and the business field are contradictory, but they are the same in the sense of using female body to attract people.
The other meaning of the distinction between the sacred and the secular is high art and popular entertainment. There are different ways to evaluate the bodily capital in each field. Some dancers shape body habitats in a specific field, but some dancers’ bodies can flow between the sacred and the secular. In the religious field, which is popular entertainment, not only are diverse appearance and higher tolerance of the dance performance accepted, but “interactivity” and “interestness” are stressed. These characteristics allow the autonomy of the religious field to be maintained.
Finally, these dancers have had dancing experience in religious festivals since they were students, but the experience of earning “fast money” made it difficult for them to adapt themselves to ordinary jobs after their graduation. Moreover, their cultural capital and bodily capital cannot be converted effectively to the form which can be used in the labor market, leading them to a disadvantaged position in the labor market. Therefore, the dancers tend to turn dancing in the religious festivals into an easy and funny job, both mentally and practically. They earn money as much as they can until they are eliminated by the market.
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