Assembling a haunted place: festival tourism and ghostly heritage in Taiwan

Abstract

This study examines the Fenglin Ghost Festival in an aging rural Taiwanese community, analyzing how the festival transforms deep-seated cultural taboos and landscapes of fear into a successful tourist attraction. Addressing a gap in the placemaking literature regarding the more-than-human agency of ghosts in East Asian festivals, the study employs assemblage theory (AT) and postmodern tourism to conceptualize the event as a dynamic configuration of materiality, meaning, and practice. Drawing on 7 years (2013–2019) of long-term participant observation and in-depth interviews, the research analyzes the socio-spatial assemblage in Hakka Village, Beilin. The findings indicate that by strategically incorporating global horror tropes and grounding them in local colonial history, the festival transgresses the traditional temporal taboos of Ghost Month. This process involves the reterritorialization of materiality, transforming neglected Japanese colonial-era heritage into a novel ‘haunted place.’ The collective performance of staged inauthenticity (the ‘ghostly carnival’) converts the ‘useless’ (abandoned sites and public fear) into a distinct ‘ghostly cultural heritage.’ This practice simultaneously revitalizes the aging village, strengthens local identity, and achieves community-wide disenchantment from superstitions, while maintaining private ritual reverence. The study extends the AT framework to demonstrate the transformative capacity of performative placemaking in achieving significant local socio-spatial reconstruction.