A Study On Religious Practices Of Bai Women

In the Bai villages around the Erhai Lake of Dali,women play the key role in religious activities.Almost all the Bai women worship gods in their houses,villages,foothill,and lakeside for their families's sake according to specific time.The gods they worship include local gods called Benzhu,primitive beliefs,legends,and saints in Confucianism,Buddhism and Taoism.Why are Bai women so enthusiastic about religious acticvities?Francis L.K.Hsu,who had investigated a small town called West Town(that is,Xizhou Town)in 1940s in Dali,thinks that it is due to status difference between men and women under the ancestor's shadow.Since women was in an inferior status in the patrilineal structure,they had to escape to the spiritual world to seek comforts sand compensations.Based on a whole year fieldwork in a Bai village called Zhoucheng in Xizhou Town,through the observance of Bai women's religious activities and the native explanations,the dissertation makes a counter argument against the evasion behavior or compensation behavior put forward by Hsu concerning Bai women's religious activities.This study finds that Bai women's religious activities are subject to social and cultural structure,which is not out of individual initiative.At the same time,the relational subjectivity of Bai women is showed in their religious practices,which change the structure in some degree.Consequently,they build a family relationship network with the power of relational subjectivity,maintain the connection between clans,and make the ethnic identity within the region community cohesive so as to promote the unity of Bai community between structure and history.In this process,the religious practice of Bai women features embedded condition between the sacred and the secular.In Zhoucheng village,the Bai women's religious responsibility is defined by family.Marriage ceremony has symbolized that women need to be in charge of the religious activities for whole family.If they do not do religious activities to pray for the family in everyday life,they would be considered as no offspring or ignore their children.Through worshipping gods together with their mothers' family and female friends,women build relationship network of their family which provide emotional and practical supports for them in patrilineal structure.As every family attached to a patriarchal clan in Zhoucheng,the male members of the clan are the main body in worshipping ancestor and gods,while women are subordinate men and obedient to the adjustment of the clan ritual.When there are important things in small family such as birth,death,and marriage,whole clan would help the family hold banquet and thank the gods of the village.In this situation,male members are responsible for the grand ritual to respect the Benzhu temple which relates to their family name,while women are responsible for respecting another Benzhu temple relaiting to the other family name in the village.Although the ritual of women is secondary and less obvious,the relationship role is to ease the tendency of the division of the village and maintain the ideal unity of a big village.When the children grow up,Bai women gradually withdraw from the family's actual affairs and join the local religious group called Lianchi Fellowship according to the custom requirements.They begin to engage in religious activities on behalf of the whole family in public religious groups.More than two thousand women of Lianchi Fellowship in this village update the relationship between their families and the gods through the annual religious activities.At the same time,the Lianchi Fellowship increasingly become a field of power,which deviates its purpose.And a small number of women breaking through the traditional customs join the religious organization called Dongjing Fellowship which is an old male-based group,changing the traditional religious pattern.In every lunar year from February to April,there are grand and continuous rituals of pilgrimage rite called picking up Jingu and Fuma in Dali,which is centered around Xizhou,north to Zhoucheng village and south to Wanqiao town.Bai women of these villages would have a long jouney to Weishan County to pick "our married daughter"Jingu back home on behalf of the entire community.Only after receiving Jingu,can the territory be safe,which is an expression of regional history and emotion.At the same time,the pilgrimage ceremony by Bai women representing their villages renews the identity of the region community.At last but not the least,Bai women leave their family and village which confines them and thus attain their own spaces in this religious threshold.From above we can see that the religious practices of Bai women also present the emmbedded condition between the sacred and the secular.On the one hand,Bai women worship gods through cooking and dine with gods to update the relationship of the family and deities.Through singing and dancing in the ceremony,Bai women realize the communion between their secular feelings and sacred emotion.At the same time,Bai women communicate with gods through exchanging between family and Lianchi fellowship.On the other hand,Bai women's relational subjectivity always establish imaginary links between secular fields and the sacred areas,which make the secular things sacred and sacred things secularized.In short,Bai women's practices in Bai folklore religion reflect a link between their external life and inner world.It is not only the presentation of Bai women's perception of self and others,but an imagination of their social world and spiritual world.