The Japanese Government-General’s 1930s Taiwan Studies of Spirit Mediums

Record summary

Japanese colonial researchers in Taiwan documented tang-ki, or spirit mediums, together with temple rituals, illness diagnosis, exorcistic procedures, and deity possession. These records are relevant because bodily comportment, trance, and healing were interpreted through overlapping religious, folkloric, medical, and administrative frameworks. They can help compare possession as a socially authorized ritual role with possession portrayed as demonic affliction. The existence of the ethnographic corpus is secure, but individual reports vary in quality and may use Japanese spellings that obscure Taiwanese or Hokkien terms.