From Sacred Sacrificial Rites To Cultural Entertainment: A Study On The Changes Of Sacrificial Rites In Nanyang Region Since The Mid-qing Dynasty

As an indispensable cultural activity in the daily life of Nanyang people,sacrificial rites have been changing with the times since the middle and late Qing Dynasty.Considering that the sacrificial activity in Nanyang is the core circle of Confucian culture,its evolutions also represents the changes in local customs,culture and even living conditions.Judging from the transition history of sacrificial activities in Nanyang since the middle and late Qing Dynasty,By the 1860 s,after the ending of the war and banditry that lasted for decades from the late Qianlong period to the Xianfeng period,the social order in Nanyang was severely disrupted,so that officials at all levels invariably thought of rebuilding the feudal ethics through sacrificial rites.Since then,the originally simplified sacrificial rites in Nanyang area gradually developed into the most important cultural activities with politics,religion,education and aesthetics significance.In the same period,folk sacrificial activities also marched towards prosperity under the influence of cultural exchanges in commodity trade.Being impacted repeatedly with the changes of times,the previously grand Confucian Temple rites have been almost wiped out in Nanyang and the local sacrificial rite has changed into the form of private funerals and ancestor worships.But to this day,sacrificial rite is still extremely important to people's life in Nanyang,especially in rural areas.From the perspective of the relationship between the ritual attribute and the aesthetic attribute in the evolution of the sacrifices in Nanyang area,every change of sacrificial rituals weakens the ritual attribute while strengthening the artistic aesthetic attribute of local sacrificial activities.In traditional culture,the sacrificial rite representing ritual attribute and the music standing for aesthetic attribute are two important components of sacrificial activities.The former is to guide and regulate the behavior of sacrificial participants,which,as a whole,constitute the sacrificial ceremony,but the latter originally refers to the music in sacrificial activities,but with the changes of the times and the development of sacrificial activities,it evolves into artistic activities in sacrificial ceremony.At the beginning,music was integrated with rites.According to the Confucian classics,“Record of Music” was included in the Book of Rites,indicating that music is a part of ritual,and this relationship can also be found in the official rites in Nanyang.Since the rise of folk sacrificial activities,the relationship between ritual and music gradually changed,in which music was gradually endowed with an independent form by getting rid of the subsidiary status of “sacrificial rites—ritual”.With the improvement of the status of music,sacrificial rituals and art performance in folk funeral and sacrificial activities were separated into two interrelated but independent parts.Nowadays,not only “sacrificial music-art” takes up higher proportion of sacrificial activities,but also the sacrificial rite itself becomes more artistic.According to the functions of sacrificial activities,Among the sacrificial activities under the influence of Confucian culture,sacrificial rituals mainly aim to define the identity of individuals by means of the time and space transcending daily life,and then to construct people with different identities and statuses into a harmonious but different social entity so as to maintain social order.During this process,ritual music mainly plays the role of coordinating and supporting the relationship construction through emotional stimulation.The gradual improvement of the status of art implies that the aesthetic function of sacrificial activities gradually became the main function in Nanyang area by replacing the functions of order maintenance and construction.As can be learned from deeper analysis,in addition to providing the ritual functions such as rebuilding family relationships,changing individual identities and reminiscing ancestors,or simply helping relieving personal feeling,sacrificial rite is critical to the people of Nanyang because it possesses aesthetic value and brings the meaning of self-existence to participants when getting involved in the ceremony.In the characteristics of sacrificial activities,the sacrificial rituals in Nanyang area are characterized by “historical” culture,so that the sacrificial rites in all periods in Nanyang area generally present the characteristics of emphasizing the significance of time instead of the meaning of space.Although the official ritual and music activities represented by the Confucian Temple worship mainly affect the participants through their external space,since the Mid-Qing Dynasty,the ritual and music activities in Nanyang area have been increasingly dependent on time significance.On the one hand,spatial skills are easily to be lost because the reconstruction and inheritance of both official and folk sacrificial activities require writing and language.On the other hand,the worship of history as a temporal skill is also an important feature of Confucian culture,which symbolizes the rationality and legitimacy of the inheritance of rights.In sacrificial art,the dominance of temporal skill is reflected in the local people's preference for story art.In Nanyang,the narrative opera and folk art have been widely popular in folk sacrificial activities,which passed Confucian values from the gentry's class to the general public and generated profound influence on shaping the local cultural traditions and residents' ideas as well as concepts.The types and performances of today's opera and folk art are quite different from those in the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China,but the people of Nanyang still express their prefer to narrative art.In the viewpoint of the problems in sacrificial activities,at present,urbanization and population outflow is the greatest threat to the inheritance of sacrificial rites in Nanyang.In order to solve this problem,the network dissemination of sacrificial activities provides a possibility as it can transcend geographical restrictions and rebuild the ritual space.In this way,not only the tradition of sacrificial rites will be continued,but also the sacrificial activities can play its own role of providing a sense of belonging for the modern people separated from their hometowns or those feeling lonely in their hearts.