Presentation Information
[SY-6-02]Attuning to Divine Prescriptions: Affective Technologies of Spirit-Possessed Healing in Taiwan
*Chia-Hui Lu (I-Shou University(Taiwan))
Keywords:
spirit possession,affective technologies,sensory healing,dynamic feeling process,Taiwanese vernacular medicine
This paper examines spirit-possessed healing in Taiwanese vernacular medicine as an affective and sensory process. Focusing on ritual contexts where jitong (spirit mediums) prescribe herbal and ritual remedies while possessed by deities, I conceptualize these divine prescriptions as affective technologies: embodied and ecological practices that generate new ways of sensing illness and well-being. Drawing on ethnographic research at a healing temple, I analyze how patients experience divine presence through tactile, olfactory, and affective engagements—such as feeling a deity’s “cooling touch” during ritual diagnosis, sensing the vitality of herbs, or experiencing bodily lightness after consuming deity-prescribed remedies. These practices are not merely biomedical alternatives but situated processes that reshape patients’ perceptual and emotional worlds, fostering trust and transforming distressing bodily sensations into signs of healing. By highlighting this dynamic process of feeling, I argue that spirit-possessed healing offers a phenomenological understanding of how bodies, deities, and ritual environments correspond in contingent and socially meaningful ways.