The Dynamic of Spirit Possession in the Boxer Uprising
By Tom Wheat
For his. 150-b
Submitted to professor Gail Hershatter
11/28/01

UCSC

The following essay is about Paul Cohen's book:

History In Three Keys, The Boxers as Event, Experience, & Myth

The experiences of the people who were part of the boxer movement as well as those around them including missionaries according to Cohen, where often biased in the form of "artful reconstructions", the "struggle between good and evil" or recantations eulogizing the superstisous nature of the peasantry as a whole. For Cohen the Boxer movement was constrained by geography, the event only occurred in Northern China, and sociologically, northern china differed from other parts of china in terms of cultural belief practices. Hence recantations of the experience according to Cohen were, broadly constituted under historians piecing together a historically reconstructed past, and by the actual people who were there that the latter created a mythologized past based on moral, political and overall, ideological beliefs. My essay will be an analysis of Chapter 3, Spirit possession.

The Boxer Uprising has been a contentious topic of study in the last 100 years. Cohen's analysis of the movement is an attempt by him to recreate through objective study, the Boxer voices of the past and the factors that led them to view possession and armed conflict as culturally necessary. Cohen argues that historical narration, can be a historical in that it leaves out experience related factors, and can represent a superficially stale history. The experience of possession took many forms, and for the majority of those who experienced it and witnessed it the experience and vibe of the collective cultural preservation was more important in many ways than life itself. In terms of mythmaking, the boxer movement was recast to suit the ideological underpinnings of the evolving Chinese response to the modern age, especially in the age of propaganda. I find it interesting that Cohen views that Chinese scholarship due to governmental constraints has almost no objective history about the boxers, at least up until 1989. Objective history then can be inherently controversial.

The northern Chinese peasant's cultural world was permeated by beliefs in popular gods from the Taoist pantheon as well as those gods in Chinese operas. In encountering the phenomenon of spirit possession in the Boxer movement it was believed that certain boxers performing rituals, could cause gods to possess their physical bodies. The boxer would first face the southeast, recite a charm, then perform the ritual koutou-in this case ritual flagellation, and then burn incense. He then would appear to be possessed, and would seem to exhibit supernatural strength. Rituals were conducted in public for maximum effect for the onlookers. The boxers also relied on traditional martial arts practices such as preying mantis kungfu and qigong.

In terms of the experiential factor the stated nature of the Boxer movement was one in which patriotic boxers were going to rid china of foreigners. It was believed that the current drought in china and the preceding flood had been brought on by the polluting presence of the foreigners in china especially the Christians. The Chinese response to this foreign threat was to deify their popular culture, i.e., the gods from local village operas. Cohen argues that at this point, the crisis anxiety level of the Chinese peasants pending fears of death by starvation, from the drought caused them to retreat into the supernatural. He argues that there was little distinction between the realms of secular and sacred life. The Heroes of popular culture were almost secular in that the people believed them to imbibe temporal existence while still being divine. "The Boxers counted on these beliefs and practices for protection in an environment fraught with danger; they also used them as their main cognitive apparatus for understanding and explaining-to themselves and to others-what transpired in this environment."(98)

The Boxers also were relying on the historically accepted notion of spirit mediumship. Traditionally these mediums would act as functionaries between the divine and while in a trance like state would communicate the will of the gods to the living. These mediums also operated as healers in the community, exorcised demons, and acted as fortunetellers. One of the main functions of the boxers according to Cohen was for them to use these mediums to heal the sick. However, as environmental factors such as flood of 1898 and the drought of 1899 or interventions from the state or foreigners increased, these rituals were later replaced by invulnerability drills, i.e., spells and charms that would make loyal followers invincible to bullets. According to Cohen this was brought on by the need for self, and national preservation. "Also even after this date, as the purpose of boxer possession shifted increasingly to invulnerability (as a consequence of the rising levels of violence between boxers and Christians), possession trance continued to be seen as serving a protective function with regard to the community." Cohen goes on to say that the possession rituals began to depart from established cultural practices of spirit mediumship due to the crisis.

Spirit possession was empowering to the everyday ordinary peasant. It brought a sense of relief from the anxiety brought on by the protracted drought, and the foreign impure presence. It also afforded the person tremendous power and prestige for now he was a guardian of the community. However, most of the Boxer rituals were based on Chinese village operas. The main gods involved in possession according to Cohen were, "The Gods by whom boxers were most frequently possessed-Guandi, Monkey (Sun Wukong), Zhang fei, Zhao Yun, Zhu Bajie, and the like-were heroes of such works of popular fiction…"(106) The boxers derived their rituals from, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, and Enfeoffment of the Gods. According to Cohen there was a long tradition of itinerant storytelling in northern china, and as such people of all walks of life were familiar with these plays. This served to unite the community in resolve as well as belief.

Now the question comes to whether or not there was genuine spirit possession or cognitive disassociation occurring. According to Cohen, 8 out of 10 Chinese, (also included officials who were present at these rituals), believed spirit possession was actually taking place. Cohen himself believed that there were few cases of true possession, and few cases of out right charlantry, and that on the broad order of the spectrum most of those people were more or less affected by the adrenaline and anxiety brought on by the impending crisis, i.e., drought, fear of Christian devils, etc., One of the more unusual factors was that those who were possessed were able to master martial arts skills with relative ease.

The Boxers themselves were a heterogeneous movement comprised of peasants, Taoist priests, Buddhist monks and nuns, soldiers and various fringe martial arts organizations. (111) Membership wasn't entirely selfless. Poor people joined so that they could be fed, since boxers operated granaries. The wealthy joined in order to safeguard their property. Often the wealthy would be required to make contributions as a demonstration of good faith and loyalty. Young people did it often for the excitement. Some people joined the movement to carry on local feuds. Cohen points out that in this last instance there were a number of cases where certain homes would be marked with an offending mark connoting foreign or devil influence, whereupon those people often innocent of any foreign involvement where summarily lynched and beheaded at the instructions of supposedly divine god possessed people. Also there were individual cases of boxer feuds with one other each disproving of the other's claim to be actually possessed. (112)

However, by far the most common reason why people joined was out of loyalty to the dynasty as well belief in the notion that the boxers could bring back the rain. "These personal motives, however, did not necessarily displace or compromise the motives of a more public and widely shared nature, such as loyalty to the dynasty or anti-foreignism or the related conviction that the Boxers had it in their power, by stamping out foreign influence, to bring an end to the drought plaguing much of North china at the turn of the century."(112)
Cohen also uses the term operaticized to describe how ritual and Chinese culture, i.e., Chinese theatre had become fused with ordinary everyday life and this contributed to the belief systems of the people and made them more willing to accept the boxers direct claims of access to the supernatural. He relies on the work of David Johnson, whose analysis of opera and ritual in imperial china were fundamental to correct performance, in the Chinese mind, and that this created a separate aesthetic reality that operated as "lifelike", if the rituals were performed properly. In effect opera and the ritual of performance had become inseparable from each other, in china. In this case as Cohen states, "As opera became more dominant, religion, and the rest of Chinese life, began to be operaticized."(113)

Another key point is the fact that there was not an established tradition of spirit mediumship in Northern China as there was in the south. According to Cohen this contributed in the rapid rise in boxer popularity in local consciousness. The methods were simplistic and even the most illiterate of people could master these rituals, and eventually become identified with gods. However, the most common subjects were young males. There was a belief that it was easier for them to be possessed, and boxers would scour towns seizing all of the young boys they could find to perpetuate their possession rituals. Families had no choice but to give up their children. Cohen alludes to the psychological effects of persuasion in that it is easier for children to become programmed, or change identities due to their young age but ultimately he concludes it is an issue best left to the psychologist. (117)

His last main point involves the psychological effects of hunger brought on drought as counting for the rapid rise in spirit possession, and overall increase in boxer numbers. Relying on some theories in psychobiology, he describes the nature of hunger as causing altered states of consciousness or a state of disassociation. Thus a starving peasant underwent a form of self-therapy when he became possessed. "There is moreover the further possibility, clearly relevant to the latter group, that possession, that possession through release of the bodies natural pain killers, the beta endorphins, may reduce the pain of hunger, thus serving as a kind of self therapy."(118)

On this last point Cohen makes a number of cross-cultural parallels involving spirit possession in Taiwan and in the West Indies. In his conclusion on these parallels he notes that there is a thematic link to periods of great crisis, and that they form the basis of memory for an event, recasting it not in terms of historical narration rather recast as experience, and that the experience of possession itself, not a historical event rather a psychological event, takes preeminence over the actual transpiring of events and forms the basis for the recantation of memory and its remembered experience. More of this will be discussed in later sections of the paper.

Cohen concludes the chapter noting that anxiety was the biggest factor that led to the peoples' propensity to be possessed. God possession was the people's only response, essentially calling on the supernatural forces to assist them in events that were unfolding in china that they could not fully comprehend, only that notion that foreign religion and foreign things had led them to a state of crisis. Also one final point is that the Boxers had no formal hierarchy and as far as those possessed, anyone could essentially become possessed. According to Cohen this was the uniqueness of the movement, and it was the main factor in recruiting popular support for the movement.

I can see that Cohen is really trying to be objective in his approach towards retelling the history in three parts. As far as the familiarization factor, he often relies on historical nuances at some point and then concludes in a relativist fashion that if you don't include the biased sources, i.e., missionaries and elite Chinese, since largely the boxers were illiterate, then you will miss the history. He must be a very complex man, and a lot of it is over my head. However, his parallels are informative in that at least they demonstrate some sort of cultural synchronicity to the phenomenon of spirit possession.
In terms of familiarity, the boxers are recast based on local record, and Cohen's analysis of boxer historiography, as well as his use of cross-cultural parallels. Does he succeed? With me I think he has. The Boxers symbolized the final evolution and decay of the Chinese imperial system. Unfortunately, many innocent people were killed and lynched, by both boxers and foreign military forces. Cohen demonstrated the effect modernity had on china when both urban and rural people came into conflict with its stated values, the perceived mastery of the west and western rational science. Chinese culture became operaticized and more people became possessed, because of the psychic effect of having to protect rather than disprove thousands of years of traditional Chinese beliefs, in the face of western science, that was the supposition which was considered irrational by most Chinese.

In the event section Cohen describes the spirit possession in terms of a linear evolutionary cause and effect sense of analysis. He describes spirit possession as being dynamic in that it undercut and cross cut all forms of authority, including those at the bottom of the social scale. These people could become gods, and in effect they did. It was anxiety and uncertainty brought on by the flood of 1898 and the ensuing drought of 1899 that increased the number of cases of spirit possession.
Furthermore, the majority of those possessed were youths made idle by these floods. The population was also affected by fears of hunger, and that fear contributed to more numbers of people likely to become possessed. The final most important point was the outgrowth of that anxiety to view that it was the foreigners were the cause of the all of the problems. Hence as more incursions occurred, the boxers moved from healing rituals to invulnerability rituals. As the conflict worsened, more and more boxers seemed to be undergoing possession.

Cohen's treatment of this issue here is different then in the experience section, in that he doesn't go into the accounts of those foreigners were present or the elite Chinese testimony or actual boxer proclamations like he does in part two of his book. The first part I guess functions as history as story, and the second as an attempt to recreate the historical experience objectively. The third part, historical myth, would undoubtedly be disproving the biases of ideological politicized history.
In the event section Cohen is only concerned with historical narration, i.e., recasting all of the experiences into a linear story, with a beginning and an end. He is not concerned with the experiential part in this section other than for the sake of speedy narration. Myths also do not concern him here as well. Rather the nature of transition from one event to the next is of primary importance to him. First he describes the history of the boxer rebellion, how it formed out of the early Qing secret societies, though the link here he says is a disputed one, i.e., and Chinese communist theories about boxer ritual links to the White Lotus millenarian society. Then he describes the resulting agitations, that resulted in the Boxers becoming more militant, and then their actual uprising and then effects of that uprising. It is essentially a cause and effect scenario, regardless of whether ideology is present or not.

However, he acknowledges, that this narrative style to history, creates a discontinuity with real history, in that the peoples experiences are never voiced so one is left with an incomplete picture. He argues that history should be as much experiential as well as eventful. If this does not occur then it results in a biased retelling of history. Overall, he is looking for a three tiered approach to history, in that some truth can be found in the narrative story section, albeit it's a historical nature is problematic if one relies on it solely, however, eventually a story must be told in some narrative form. The real truth then is to sort everything out of the naturally occurring process of group think, a psychological process intractable to large scale and even small scale social organization.

In Cohen's words in his preface he describes the event and myth dynamic as operating in tandem. "The Boxers as event represent a particular reading of the past, while the boxers as myth represent an impressing of the past into the service of a particular reading of the present. Either way a dynamic interaction is set up between present and past, in which the past is continually being reshaped, either consciously or unconsciously, in accordance with the diverse and shifting preoccupations of people in the present."(xii) In terms of myth, he is referring to how people and government reinterpret the past to suit their own ideology or political party line structure.

In part three of his book, Cohen describes the history of the boxers as it was reinterpreted by later generations of Chinese. In terms of the spirit possession dynamic the members of the early republican movement caught up in their ideas about the mastery of imperialism, decried the entire boxer movement as superstitious and indicative of everything that was wrong with china.

Overall these reformers believed that if empirical methodologies were not adopted quickly, then another boxer uprising would occur. As Cohen states: "The boxers in this context, were a convenient peg on which to hang all that the participants in the New Culture movement found most objectionable and threatening about the old culture. Paramount here, especially for people wedded to the values of science and reason, were the superstitions and irrationalism they perceived as endemic in Chinese society."(226) Cohen also points out how boxer is recast as Boxerism, and that term, illustrates how myth is reformulated as value and becomes a blanket term for old Chinese culture.
In the next chapter Cohen describes the differing attitudes become dual, i.e., the boxers are superstitious and ignorant and yet they are patriots. The belief in spirit possession stemmed from their agrarian roots. (244) However, it is easy to suppose that the boxers and all Chinese perceived that their culture and way of life was under attack during the period of drought and foreign encroachments. For urban elite Chinese in the 1920's it was an uncomfortable formulation to rationalize the phenomenon of spirit possession to their own views based on the empirical scientific method, yet strangely when it came to the boxers, was more idealized, then empirical.

The next chapter described the total mythologization of the Boxer myth in popular consciousness in terms suited toward politicized governmental propaganda. Unfortunately for my topic, spirit possession, the cultural revolution propagandists wouldn't even comment on the topic of spirit possession, because it was to controversial for their stated political aims-to recreate in the Red Guards the loyalist spirit of the Boxer Movement. Instead of talking about spirit possession they chose to focus on the courage aspect of the boxers and through this sought to recast the boxers to suit the political propaganda of the Cultural Revolution. "Spirit possession, invulnerability rituals, and magic, despite their importance in the religious cultural repertoire of the boxers and Red Lanterns, did not fit into the sanitized picture Chinese mythologizers were intent upon constructing during the Cultural Revolution. Therefore they were deliberately omitted."(283)

Overall, Cohen argues that all three functions of history, event, experience, and myth are necessary. That as a historian he must mediate between the past and present, imposing narrative over experience objectively, and extracting historical fact from myth. While undergoing historiographical research the problem of periodisation, compounds the problem of mythmaking, in attempt to get actual pristine primary sources. He argues that unconsciously people leave their subjective biases on history, and as historians must write history they must first undertake three things. 1. All history is narration, and that narration to a degree must explain historical events, while in his words being spatially dislocated from the event since the outcome is already known. 2.) In terms of writing history as experience, historians have to take in context that the people of the day do not know the outcome of an event, and their emotions and "cultural constructions" influence their responses. (291) 3.) In terms of myth construction to history Cohen defines it as a story told to suit a political aim. (293) The past is reinvented and identified to suit a particular cultural aim, then simplified, sensationalized into a drama. At that point it is no longer an event rather historical drama. It is interesting to note that it is the Taiping that survives longer in myth and popular consciousness then the Boxers. Later 80's historiography compared Mao Tse Tung to Hong Xiaouchen. (292)

I do agree it is possible in some quantifiable form to reproduce live voices from the past. This has been Cohen's stated aim and why he has divided the book into three sections. However, it was difficult to find sources on spirit possession, dealing exclusively with the boxer movement. I was able to find sources on female pollution in the case of the Red Lanterns, however, this was an ongoing cultural practice associated with women, and didn't suit my topic which was the dynamic of spirit possession, as experience, during the Boxer Uprising. Also Cohen himself said the red lanterns played a very small part in the overall boxer movement. To give them grand status in the spirit possession topic would have been mythologizing their importance, despite the ideal of some feminine equality, it did not exist in that age, in China.

Cohen's book was very informative in how it showed how cultural constructions of myth and rumor influenced the degree to which it was culturally necessary to be possessed, due to the psychic shock of having to reconcile traditional Chinese values with western values about progress and modernity, and the view that the old ways were under attack helped to reinforce the possession ritual. I should have probably written about female pollution. However, the dynamic of group possession, and mob mentality has always interested me and was why I chose the said topic.

Army Handbook: History of China