ABSTRACT
I n the course of more than a year of ethnographic fieldwork in Taiwan, I was once obliged to interview a shady kind of fellow whose real job was
"Gangster," but who was thinking of taking on a second job as a spiritmedium. This fellow operated a gambling den, and some people who were on close terms with him - people whose job description was "doing a little of this and a little of that" - disappeared for longish periods, and then re-surfaced after a while looking very thin and nervous. I had to go to this man's home and interview him because as a child he had known the spiritmedium at the shrine where I was doing my fieldwork, and probably this early childhood experience influenced some of his later occupational choices. Eventually, he would go on officially to open his own shrine and in effect go into competition with the shrine of his childhood mentor. When I went to interview him, it turned out that he had already placed statues of the possessing gods on his household altar; this stated that the gods were ready to take control of him, whenever any of the neighbours wanted to come by and have him take care of any problems or business they had. For some reason, at that time very few of the neighbours had availed themselves of the opportunity.
