**1. Introduction**

This article explores various expressions of religiosity through material culture in the worship of Mazu, one of the most popular goddesses in China. In particular, I will show the modern transformations the cult has experienced, highlighting the actors and media involved. We shall see that material expressions of the veneration of Mazu play a central role in constructing a modern version of worship. To undertake this task, I will rely on textual sources to illustrate how material objects were foundational in the rise of the Mazu cult and contributed to its orthodoxy throughout the centuries. I will also illustrate modern transformations of the materiality of the devotion to the goddess through ethnographic work I have conducted. This work includes participant observations and interviews with visitors at Mazu's ancestral temple during important religious festivals, such as the day of "Mazu's ascending to Heaven," and the 24th "Meizhou's Mazu Cultural Tourist Festival".<sup>1</sup> In order to obtain a wide variety of opinions, I interviewed tourists who are not Mazu believers, as well as Mazu devotees on pilgrimage. In addition, to gain a view from "the top," that is, from institutional religious actors, I sustained extensive personal communications with members of the temple association, including some in leadership positions. This juxtaposition of sources—textual and ethnographic—will enable me to place the current dynamics in their longue durée context.

**Citation:** Zhang, Yanchao, Chenjingyue Wu, and Xiangbo Liu. 2023. The Development and Modern Transformation of Material Culture in the Worship of Mazu. *Religions* 14: 826. https://doi.org/10.3390/ rel14070826

Academic Editors: Fátima Matos Silva, Isabel Borges and Helena Albuquerque

Received: 20 May 2023 Revised: 20 June 2023 Accepted: 21 June 2023 Published: 23 June 2023

**Copyright:** © 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

While the study of religion and materiality has gained significant prominence in Religious Studies in the last couple of decades, its rise can be traced back to Daniel Miller and Christopher Tilley's studies in the 1960s.2 Rejecting philosophical idealism, Miller argued that the material world is not a superstructure separate from the social world: it both precedes and makes possible the existence and communication of human concepts. In other words, materiality is not just the expression of social identity and cultural concepts, as both of these are constructed and reconstructed in the historical and emplaced interactions of humans and material objects. Moreover, borrowing from Marx's notion of praxis, Miller pointed to the fact that individual and collective identities are crafted as we produce and handle material objects. In this sense, the study of the material world is indispensable to our understanding of culture, society, and religion (Miller 1987, 2007).

The 1980s witnessed the development of a variety of interdisciplinary approaches to materiality, including social anthropology (Tilley 1990, 1991), social psychological analysis (Dittmar 1992), and religious studies.3 In religious studies, new perspectives have emerged, focusing on the "material economy of the sacred", following the "life of the religious object" from production to consumption (passing through circulation), and analyzing conversions back-and-forth from sacred objects like relics to commodities, including souvenirs (See Morgan 2010, p. xiii; see also Morgan 2019). Likewise, Manuel Vásquez characterizes the task of the materialist approach in religious studies as exploring the material (in the sense of being enacted by historical and embodied individuals) "practices of materialization and dematerialization", as well as the material infrastructure, that make it possible for an object, place, event, and/or performance to be experienced as religiously efficacious; that is, as a potent, meaningful, affective, and transformative reality, a reality that is often felt by the religious practitioner as transcending its material, immanent moorings (Vásquez 2020, pp. 11–12).

Throughout the Chinese religious landscape, traditions have been marked by a variety of material objects and cultures, such as temples, images, rituals, and texts. Traditionally, research in the field of Chinese religions has primarily focused on literary sources, prioritizing canonical texts in classical languages (Fleming and Mann 2018). This focus on literary evidence has been particularly dominant among Chinese scholars, and it still holds sway over the field. However, the study of materiality in Chinese religions has gathered some momentum. For example, Benjamin Fleming and Richard Mann have integrated material evidence in their explorations of a variety of cultures in South, Southeast, Central, and East Asia.4

The reciprocal constitution of individuals, community, and religious objects has attracted some attention in Chinese religious studies. For example, Scott Habkirk and Hsun Chang have explored how incense in traditional Chinese religion serves as a material medium to construct and maintain religious identity in local communities. Through incense and other related objects, individuals of a Chinese temple community generate shared religious emotions and memories, not only intensifying personal experiences of the divine, but also affirming communal religious identity (Habkirk and Chang 2017). Another case study of the construction of a temple in Ox Horn (niujiao) village of Mazu Island, conducted by Wei-Ping Lin, demonstrated the important role of religious materialization in transforming and reestablishing social relations. Specifically, in the process of working together to build a community temple, people from different generations negotiated conflicting ideas and interests and redefined their original social relationships, thereby establishing new shared values and a sense of community (Lin 2017). While these studies bring to the fore the social role of religious materiality, they do not examine the new developments in religious material culture and the latter's increasing interaction with religious tourism.

Every year, thousands of pilgrims and visitors travel across China to a myriad of religious sites, generating a sizable economy that involves not only relics/souvenirs but also a hospitality industry (Zhang 2021). According to the statistics of the Ministry of Tourism, there are over 3000 religious tourist sites throughout China. Over 40% of the total in the list of national tourist sites are connected with religious or cultural tourism.5 In the case of Mazu worship, there is a vast material religious infrastructure that enables the flow of pilgrims and visitors, bringing believers and nonbelievers into contact and thus transforming the way in which the devotion is experienced. More importantly, religious tourism also has a significant impact on the social and economic viability of the communities that have key Mazu sites. However, scholars in Chinese religious studies have not paid enough attention to these topics. Neither the literature on religious tourism nor that on religious materiality has dealt with the interlinkage between religious tourism, material culture, and social and economic profitability, especially in the Chinese religious context. I intend to address this gap with a focus on the role of tourism in the worship of Mazu.

The modern transformation of religious materiality in Mazu worship is part and parcel of significant changes in the Chinese religious landscape due to changes in the socio-economic context, a new religious policy by the central government, and the dramatic growth of religious tourism. In response to these new changes, Mazu worship has been increasingly commodified, becoming the locus of cultural attraction, as religious sites associated with the devotion seek to appeal to larger numbers of visitors. This is certainly the case for the ancestral temple at Meizhou, which is commonly known as the original place of Mazu worship. This temple provides a good window into the development of religious materiality in China, allowing us to see the characteristics of this phenomenon and highlighting different agencies and mechanisms involved in the modern transformation.

This article builds upon but goes beyond previous studies to explore transformations and expressions of material culture in the worship of Mazu in contemporary China.<sup>6</sup> More specifically, I will focus on tourism and the development of a cultural and creative industry at the ancestral temple of Mazu in Meizhou Island. The key questions I will pursue are: Have the material expressions of Mazu worship changed in modern times? If so, what are the factors that have contributed to these changes? What can we learn about the current dynamics of the religious field in China from the Mazu case study?

To answer these questions, I will first sketch a brief history of the devotion to Mazu, highlighting its expression though traditional material media and culture. Secondly, I will move on to the discussion of modern transformations of material culture in Mazu worship, identifying agents and social forces behind the process of transformation. The third part of the article will focus on the ways in which the new forms of material culture in Mazu worship interact with local economic and tourist systems through an interdisciplinary analysis. In this section, I also offer a model to explore this interaction. Finally, the conclusion argues for the need to develop a dynamic and interdisciplinary perspective on material religious culture in the modern Chinese religious context, one that studies the complex relations among religion, tourism, and economic development.
