Ritual Reciprocity and Village Ritual Alliances: A Case Study of Two Temple Festivals in North China

This dissertation focuses on the local community rituals in rural North China since modern times taking the praying-for-rain rituals and temple festivals of the villages as examples. There were many forms of ritual cooperation among the villages in rural North China. In this research, we would examine a mode of ritual interaction among selected villages by examining two cases in Central Hebei, China.;The first case is the Heilongguan Temple festival in Hetaogou area of Fangshan district around Peking. In Hetaogou, a large amount of villages performed the praying-for-rain rituals and temple festivals together. In these community rituals, the local organizations called Liushan Association had played a crucial role. The ethnographic data of Chapter Two aim to show that the construction of multi-village alliance builds on the interaction of Flower fairs from different villages. In the forms of visiting each other during a temple festival parade known as Zouhui and xianhui, villages built up the network of their alliance. The exchange of performance of Flower fairs is regarded as a mode of ritual exchange. The second case concerns the Medicine King Temple Festival in Anguo County which is the main topic of Chapter Three. Using the methodology of historical anthropology to analyze the Anguo local society helps us to place the Medicine King Temple Festival in a network of temple festivals from different villages. In Anguo, this interaction is called 'treating each other with courtesy' or Jiangli.;Finally we would like to argue that visiting each other in a temple festival parade (Zouhui, Xianhui) and treating each other with courtesy Jiangli, were the main strategies of the villagers to construct their multi-village alliance. Their logics were not different from 'returning the favor' and 'face saving' which were common in rural society.;Keywords: multi-village ritual alliance, community ritual, Flower fairs&...