Creating Familiar Futures: Aging, Lived Religion, and Digitized Tradition in Postwar Kinmen

Abstract

Kinmen, a Taiwanese island territory merely two miles from China’s coast, was Taiwan’s battlefront against China from 1949 to the 1980s, but has since become the most-used border-crossing between these polities before the COVID-19 pandemic. Tensions have risen again since the 2010s, with Kinmen now caught between the Taiwanese who push for the global recognition of Taiwan’s statehood, and a China that forcefully insists that Taiwan belongs to itself. Through ethnographic research conducted between 2021 and 2024, this dissertation examines the ways by which Kinmen people who came of age during demilitarization in the 1980s envision, articulate, and create political futures through religious rituals and other ritualized practices when met with rising political tensions as they approach later life. I foreground older adults’ ritualized activities, grounded in everyday life, in an attempt to sidestep the ideologies that suffuse an already-volatile Taiwan Strait. I develop “projects for later life” as a concept concerned with the ways by which people cultivate and actualize visions for the future through the material and subjective spaces that ritualized practices and designs afford, and with aging experiences and mortality in view. I also use “familiar futures” to express how futures are created in ways that reflect people’s earlier lived experiences, through cultural resources that they possess. “Familiar futures” describe how “transitional” thought objects cushion against abrupt changes and facilitate the articulation of political possibilities. This dissertation zooms into how curated religious sensations interact with lived experiences to engender familiarity (Chapter 1), how ritual improvisations enable inter-generational continuity (Chapter 2), how the ritualized documentation of “vanishing” traditions through digital media create particular temporal subjectivities (Chapter 3), and the remodeling of Taiwan Strait’s political futures through museums, temple-building, pilgrimages and protests (Chapter 4). These elaborations of how my interlocutors’ “projects for later life” create “familiar futures” at Kinmen and the Taiwan Strait illustrate the usefulness of (1) placing research on aging and vernacular politics in dialogue, (2) tracing how subjectivities develop in the interstices of ritual and design, and (3) understanding how and why familiarity and transitional spaces facilitate future-making, especially amid political instability and uncertainty.