Boundaries In The Rural Society

Boundaries are omnipresent in human life,serving as the basic dimensions for understanding human life and culture.But ordinary people are often unaware of human boundaries,and to date in-depth investigations are still inadequate in the academic circle.In the rural society,rituals are often used to set or enhance boundaries,involving community traditions,group psychologies and individual identities.At Dongyong'an village in the central region of Shandong province,China,the rituals of "Shaodaniu(Burning the Big Cattle)"and "Shaodama"(Burning the Big Horse)are held during the annual Spring Festival.Throughout the process,with the aid of the organization mechanism of the rituals,their parading routes,presupposed functions of disaster elimination as well as their cultural interpretation,these rituals manifested multiboundaries among various families,villages,rural areas and urban areas,and created diverse traits of the related families,villages and rural areas.In essence,the rituals of burning offerings regularly held during the annual festivals offer a platform for public life in the local communities,enhance the local ethic codes of "competition with limits",and establish a rural communal tradition that is based on families boundaries and orientated to rapport among the families and villages.Hence these rituals reflect traditional wisdom via which the local people actively adjust social relations and consolidate community life.Since boundaries possess a certain nature of culture construction,they are naturally relative,dynamic and diverse,instead of being invariable.As a popular social phenomenon in the northern area of Weifang,the custom of burning offerings demonstrates the strong impact of specific ecological environment upon local traditions.Northern Wefifang features a mixture of small hills and shallow lakes as well as wide spreading Saline-alkali soil,prompting the local residents to develop traditional livelihoods combining agriculture and weaving.With the passage of time,great changes took place and the weaving industry gradually declined.But the related trussing tradition got preserved and inherited by means of the sacred rituals,hence enjoy cultural significance with boundaries as its carrier.This is a geographical reason for the popularity of making sacred burning offerings in northern Weifang area.from the perspective of population,suffering from waterlog due to the widespreading lakes and depressions,people in this area highly value the hilly land resources,and as"indigenous people",increasingly enhance their boundary consciousness,especially when facing the intensifying contradiction between population growth and plowland limitedness.In this connection,cultural politics manifested by temple building,ritual practice and oral tradition,could indicate boundary consciousness and presuppose flexible space for cross-boundary communication,hence still serving a role in avoid unhealthy competition between different groups in the local society up to now.In view of the ritual of burning offerings in northern Weifang,the concept of boundary are frequently utilized among individual villagers,among families within a village,and among neighboring villages,as reflected by coalition among families with different surnames,cooperation among diverse branches of the families with a common surname,and synergy among neighboring villages.Clearly,the prevalent competition among groups or individuals leads not only to wide recognition of certain logic of belief and widespread existence of ritual practice,but also to minute differences in the forms and details of the rituals.This is how the villages construct rituals according to boundaries,and enhance society cohesion via these rituals.The boundaries here are embodied not only by entities,but also by cultural narrative of the people.Thanks to this flexibility,which represents a widely inclusive status of cultural co-existence and sharing,these ritual symbols do not interfere with the local ethic codes of ""competition with limits",but instead could help to develop community shared values."Shaodaniu" and "Shaodama" during the New Year Festival are cases in point.Through the perspective of the boundary,we can observe the manifestation,essence and mechanism of village life-local commonness is based on "co-existence"with diversity,while "co-existence" is composed of not only the various boundaries of daily life,but also the convergence of boundaries within a specific space and time,which hence integrate the hierarchy implied in boundaries into "co-existence" of the rural life.When used to express or adjust social relations,boundaries themselves become a kind of culture tools.Culture configuration revolving around boundaries is bound up with formation,inheritance and changes of the local customs.In other words,the folklore itself is intertwined with boundary integration and crossing in the local society.Of course,order maintaining in the rural society has many forms,among which boundaries setting along with the related bottom lines is one of them.The core of boundaries is a set of long-established and preserved moral and ethical norms.In the community of a village,people within the same village are both divided and united,exhibiting the complex situation fused with both cooperation and competition.The bottom line of people's boundaries in daily life is associated with the concepts of village community,and manifested as a convention with ethic restrictions.It is noteworthy that the convention based on boundaries always contains certain hierarchical concepts.On the surface,boundaries create division;in essence,they signify hierarchy.Only through this way can cooperation in competition be achieved.In other words,the essence of boundaries lies not in the differentiation of you arid I,but in building a hierarchy and afterwards scarify the hierarchy during the process of differentiation,so as to express the social structure as well as the related cultural significance of the rural society.It can be said that setting and significance of boundaries in rural society is achieved by the name of tradition,villagers' initiative of holding the rituals as well as the selectiveness of the related interpretations.Studying boundaries in the context of villages is an expansive exploration for folklore fieldwork,while boundaries research based on villages builds momentum for advancing the existent "boundaries theory".