In July 2000, the pilgrimage of 2,000 worshippers of the goddess Mazu from Taiwan to her birthplace in Fujian, Mainland China was more than a historic crossing between two hostile political entities. It was also the first large-scale, live, on-site, direct satellite television transmission across the Taiwan Straits. There is a historical irony that in Mainland China and Taiwan, both secular states who have been perpetually preparing for war with each other, the military-controlled Mainland satellite uplinking service was used to deliver live images of religious rituals. For the new Taiwan government trying to build up an independent Taiwanese national culture, there is another irony that a central Taiwan cultural and religious icon, the goddess Mazu, is now crossing the Straits to "return to Her mother's home." For the Mainland state, the very strategy of promoting religious linkages for state re-unification with Taiwan, ironically disseminates non-state religious and regional identities in China. The only two institutional forces in this media-event displaying no ironies are the Mazu cult and the transnational capitalist media. Their structural logics resist containment within the boundaries of the nation-state: the Mazu cult is based on a pre-nationalist matrifocal kinship logic of women crossing between male kin groups, and the capitalist media is propelled by an increasingly post-nationalist profit motive.

Mayfair Yang received her Ph.D. in Anthropology at U.C. Berkeley. She is the author of Gifts, Favors and Banquets: the Art of Social Relationships in China, which won an American Ethnological Society book prize in 1997, and editor of Spaces of Their Own: Women's Public Sphere in Transnational China. She has written many articles on China: gift economy in socialist China, ritual politics and the state in ancient China, modernity and popular religion, mass media and transnational subjectivity, and state feminism. She is the director and producer of two documentary videos, Through Chinese Women's Eyes, comparing the situation of urban women in Maoist and post-Mao China, and Public and Private Realms in Rural Wenzhou, China, on non-state organizations and popular religion in rural southeast China. She has held fellowships at University of Michigan, University of Chicago, and Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

This event is cosponsored by the UCSB Department of Religious Studies and Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.

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