Food Offerings Of Bai People Living Around Erhai Lake In Dali

Food is essential for humans since prehistory. Ethnic groups have the wisdom of recognizing and applying food specialties in special environments. Functions and meanings of food are abundant with complicated advancement of civilizations. Food symbolism has been one of the most popular topics for anthropologists. The saying "Foods initiate all rituals", are deep in people’s minds. Thus using food and offerings to god as a pair of lens for social order and identity of some groups are important issues when anthropologists do their fieldwork.Dali Bai people, with diversity of gods and abundant sacrifices, maintain different rituals. This case study investigates how these people divided their universe by food. Their patron god (ben zhu) is well known. Bai society worships ancestors, and the Three Religions (Buddhism, Taoism and Confucism), all important matters in academic research. People can hardly find a book on food offerings and their culture.It practice, ritual symbolism theories, such as those of Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner, Edmund Leach and Mary Douglas, take food offerings and foodways and try to figure out symbolic meanings of food, and their sacrifice logic. Meanwhile, it does cross-cultural comparative studies within the three categories of gods, ghosts and ancestors in Taiwan Han society by Arthur Wolf. It catalogs offerings and gives analysis from common foodstuffs to offerings, basic ways of serving food, and popular psychologies of sacrifice. All foods on the altar have symbolic markings. Some food has its own symbolic meaning, some has to be settled positions which imply meanings, and some has to be presented in a group which gives symbolic meaning. The complexity and ambiguity of food offerings need to be explained at three levels of annotated, operational, and positional.This study shows that Mainland China has different categories of object beliefs, not like Taiwan. Mainland China has been through cultural devastated in 1950s-1960s, and cultural renaissance since 2005 with the Socialist New Countryside program. That is to collect pieces of memories and reconstruct their tradition culture. In Bai societies, patron gods have very high level personalities and functions. The general term Gui, is divided into three:our ancestors, their ancestors, and haunted ghosts. These imply three kinds of people in their lives; kin, acquaintances and strangers. Haunted ghost normally referred as ghost. Villagers mention Xian as deities, as cultural remains of a Bureaucratic System in the era of empire, and a metaphor of keeping distance from the authorities of ideology. Patron gods, ghosts and deities, all are served with different food offerings, rituals and taboos. In a ritual process, vegetarian offerings symbolize purity and their impact confirming holy spaces. In celebrations, people eat vegetarian food to clean their bodies, to go inside holy spiritual spaces, where they can have exchanges with patron gods for good fortune. When finished the ritual, there is another feast of flesh and blood, to pull the body back from polluted death to regular status. The food symbol system has built Bai’s world view, and reflections of their connections. One typical example is their feast after a ceremony which not only enhances family feelings, but also shows boundaries of different groups of people. In addition, it does synchronicity research, at the same time, compared with Hsu’s Under the Ancestors’Shadow and Fitzgerald’s The Tower of Five Glories the change in modernization and globalization. This research attempts for the first time, to locate Bai people’s food offerings around Dali’s Erhai Lake. Hopefully, more researchers will discuss their food, societies, religion, and environment.