TAILIEUCHUNG - Distributing Lộc: flows of gifts and fortune in Vietnamese four palace mediumship
Whenever Vietnamese religious believers visit a shrine, temple or Buddhist pagoda in order to worship and make wishes, they present offerings offering to the deity (or deities) enshrined there. A basic set of offerings consists of some fruit, flowers, incense, and votive paper money. These items are carefully arranged on a little plate borrowed from the temple and then placed on the altar. | Vietnam Social Sciences, No. 6(164) - 2014 DISTRIBUTING LỘC: FLOWS OF GIFTS AND FORTUNE IN VIETNAMESE FOUR PALACE MEDIUMSHIP KIRSTEN W. ENDRES * Whenever Vietnamese religious believers visit a shrine, temple or Buddhist pagoda in order to worship and make wishes, they present offerings offering to the deity (or deities) enshrined there. A basic set of offerings consists of some fruit, flowers, incense, and votive paper money. These items are carefully arranged on a little plate borrowed from the temple and then placed on the altar. When the worshipping ritual is completed, the devotees linger around for a while and then reclaim the edible items, now transformed into lộc - “divine gifts” from the deities. These gifts are sometimes consumed on the spot, shared among the group (for example during a pilgrimage) or taken back home for consumption and distribution among friends and family. During a hầu đồng ritual, this practice of making, reclaiming and distributing offerings takes on a different dimension. Each time I participated in a ritual performance in honor of the Mother Goddesses and the Four Palace deities during my research on urban spirit mediumship in Hanoi (between 2001 and 2006), I carried home with me a huge plastic bag of lộc, containing cans of beer, soft drinks, biscuits, bags of candy, instant noodle soup, bags of Ajino Moto (MSG), sugar, cigarettes, green tea, mangos, oranges, 26 and some areca nuts. I usually kept the beer and some fruit for myself and distributed the rest among neighbors and friends (Endres 2011).(1) In this essay, I focus on the religious gift economy in contemporary urban Four Palace mediumship. In his landmark essay on the gift, first published in 1924, Marcel Mauss viewed the gift as a ‘total social phenomenon’ that gives expression to the religious, legal, moral and economic institutions in society. He identified three distinct obligations in the process of gift exchange: the obligation to give, the obligation to receive, .
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