Animal Spirits and Narrative Techne: Vernacular Knowledge Production in Contemporary Pilgrimage in Northern China

This paper examines how contemporary incense associations at Mount Tai vernacularize religious knowledge through narrative techniques amid contestations over orthodoxy. Based on fieldwork conducted between 2023 and 2025, it argues that incense association’s leaders increasingly emphasis storytelling over formal ritual to transmit beliefs surrounding Bixia Yuanjun and the “Four Great Spirit Animals” (fox, weasel, snake, hedgehog). In a context where certain ritual practices are labeled as superstition, storytelling becomes a practical technique through which mediums reinterpret beliefs, and align them with contemporary ethical norms, and further embed them in specific mountain sites. By retelling myths at temples, caves, and scenic markers, they transform sacred spaces into the “lieux de mémoire” and produce embodied, shareable religious knowledge. In this way, pilgrimage is not only a ritual journey but also a process of producing collective memory and vernacular religious knowledge in contemporary China.