土地公廟是台灣最普遍供奉的廟宇，因此常被用來探討與人群聚落相關的議題，土地公廟座落之處一般涉及人的生活與生計，乃至人群規模與組織，反映人們對所處地方的思考與回應。學者依據土地公廟現象所提出最為人熟知的觀點有二，一是土地公廟為聚落的指標，另一是土地公廟標示了台灣社會的發展階段。不過在對比草屯、竹山、美濃，以及台中……等處的土地公廟現象後，各地區個別的歷史文化脈絡挑戰了觀點的適切性，同時，現代化影響下的社會發展也使土地公現象更顯複雜，因而土地公廟所隱含的「地方」概念需要重新思考。 The temple of the Earth God (Tudi Gong) is the most popular one in Taiwan and it always arises related discussions on settlements. The Earth God’s temple location reflects people’s daily life, means of livelihood, the scale of the groups and their organizations, showing how people think about their environment and how to react. There are two well-known perspectives for explaining the Earth God temple phenomena, one of which is the temple stands for where the settlement is, and the other is that the temple marks out the development stage of Taiwanese society. However, after comparing with various cases, the historical reasons for the temple formation challenge the relevancy of these perspectives, and the modernization also adds the situation more complicated. Therefore, these thoughts need to be re-considered and clarified.The holistic image of the Earth God has to be explored in the context of the Small Temple as well as that of the Large Temple in Puli. The former context shows the settlement meaning of the Earth God varies according to the center as well as the surroundings of the basin. The latter shows the Earth God is the best example proving ‘benevolence making people turn into gods,’ a thought valued and practiced at the flying phoenix hall everywhere in Puli. The changes of the community relate to the activities of the residents. The rebuilt/reconstruction of the Earth God temple expresses the subjectivity of the people, describing how the locals produce, represent and reproduce social activities. It also embodies the process of locality as a result of the cultivation of life experience and group interactions. This process reflects how people connect their identity to a fixed location and thus generate a sense of place. The rituals held by the flying phoenix hall perform the locality, and the participants not only embody it but also create new opportunities that might become part of the traditional context or potential for the new context. The dimension and the context of the locality is not always the same; the image of the Earth God is the symbol of the locality.
