Abstract
Community is a cultural construction; it can refer to a social entity bounded to a territory; it can also refer to any kind of de-territorialized or re-territorialized human affiliations. Olwig (2002) has proposed to approach community by examining different social fields of the human affiliation that can provide people with a sense of shared belonging. Studying the pilgrim’s group from Baishatun, located on the northwestern coast of Taiwan, I regard the goddess Mazu as a religious symbol that has the force to congregate all believers to participate in the religious journey. Because of the common voyaging experience and religious sentiments, pilgrims from different origins assert a sense of belonging to this Mazu cult and also claim a sort of identity. However, this identity has been constructed in diverse situations, in which some distinctions can be made between ＂we-group＂ and ＂theygroup＂. Thus, four kinds of communities can be discerned. (1) The territory-bound community refers to the cult area where the goddess’s temple is centered. (2) The homeland community associates the emigrants with the residents under a notion of homeland based on the relationships of kinship, property, and religious activity. (3) The religious community includes all Mazu believers who share the common experience and the religious sentiment of the pilgrimage journey. (4) The imagined community can be formed by way of films of the pilgrimage and the communication via internet discussion boards, in which the common sentiment and experience of the pilgrimage journey is always asserted. A religious symbol held in common does not necessarily contain the same connotation for everyone, because ＂communality＂ does not mean uniformity in essence, but the similarity of the symbolic form. Identifying with the goddess Mazu in Baishatun, people with diverse religious concepts and ritual practices claim a sense of belonging and construct different kinds of communities focused on common residence, homeland, pilgrimage and belief in Mazu. Overlapping affiliations to different communities are possible. This phenomenon can be explained by the concept of family resemblance, whose logic of analogy allows people without many similarities to connect to the community base under certain circumstances. In this way, there exists a large space for the agent’s active selection. Owing to the multiple possibilities for human affiliation to form a community, the boundary of these communities is always shifting from one situation to another.