Death rituals in a Chinese village: An old tradition in contemporary social context.

摘要

Death rituals have played an important role in Chinese society for over two thousand years. Death rituals that followed the elaborated Confucian ritual canons were promoted by officials and elites in imperial China. However, after 1949, the traditional death rituals were branded as superstitious and relics of feudalistic society, and were officially banned. In the early 1980s, as China started its economic reform, the traditional death rituals were quickly revived in rural China. What has contributed to this revival? What do today's death rituals look like in rural China? What economic, political, and sociocultural changes that rural China has experienced in the last two decades are reflected in the ritual practice? This dissertation will address these questions.;The ethnographic data were collected in a village in Chongqing in southwestern China. The history of the village was investigated, and so was its contemporary way of life in terms of settlement patterns, demographics, kinship system, economic life, political activities, and religious rituals. After presenting the ethnographic setting, we center our attention on death rituals. The sequence of pre-burial, funeral, and post-burial rituals usually performed by the villagers is reconstructed. These rituals are discussed from a cultural perspective that looks into the symbolic and normative dimensions of Chinese death ritual. The symbolic dimension illustrates the worldview of practitioners, and reveals the meanings of rituals. The normative dimension focuses on social implications of rituals, social relationship of ritual participants, and current socio-cultural structure in the village.;It is shown that the basic pattern of traditional Chinese death rituals is well kept in this village, though the performance of many rituals is simplified. The practices of these rituals perpetuate the traditional Chinese cosmology of heaven, earth, otherworld, gods, ghosts, and ancestors, though many younger villagers seem no longer to believe in the existence of heaven and otherworld. This dissertation argues that the contemporary death rituals in the village can be understood as a modified version of the traditional pattern. Such a modification came about in order for the traditional beliefs and practices associated with death rituals to be continued in a changing sociocultural context.