From Blind To Emcee:The Historical Transformation Of The Unlocking Rite Host’s Identity

This article takes the Unlocking Rite in Qixian County,Shanxi Province as a case study to reveal the process of the succession of ceremony hosts from the perspective of social transformation,and further examines the changes in rural ritual life it displays.Through field investigation methods,it is found that each transformation of the ritual host is accompanied by dramatic social changes.Social transformations bring about improvements in people’s living conditions,which in turn affect people’s attitudes and expectations towards their young sons at home,leading to changes in the Unlocking Rite.According to the changes in the identity of the hosts,the ceremony can be roughly divided into four stages,presided over by blind people,female elders,"supervisors," and emcees,respectively.They appear alternately in different periods and make varying degrees of adjustments to the ceremony according to people’s needs.Behind the ritual changes lies the transformation of rural ritual life,which mainly focuses on three aspects: the core of the ceremony,folk beliefs,and interpersonal relationships.The evolutionary path ultimately presented in the article is simply for the sake of research needs;in reality,the changes in the ceremony,the identity of the hosts,and the ritual society are not uniformly consistent throughout.Up to the present,female elders and "managers" may still serve as hosts in the ceremony,which indicates that even within the same period,people’s expectations for their children are diverse and varied.