Folk Belief And Relationships Of Villages

Folk belief had a solid mass foundation in the traditional world, and constituted a major part of folk culture. Investigation of folk belief will contribute to the understanding of social culture of basic level, and the life of common people as well as the structure and operation in local society. At present most of relevant studies focus on folk belief in South China, while relatively less in the North, especially in Shanxi Province. This thesis aims to investigate diachronically to make up for this weak line by putting folk belief in the local society's circumstances with the methods of community studies and fieldwork in social anthropology. It has interaction of folk belief and relationships of villages as its subject, explores its situation, characteristics, and changes from the Qing Dynasty to the Republic of China, and discusses social belief's status and functions in local society, operation in lower society and the construction of local relationships. The study is based on the data findings from the five fieldworks in Taigu County, Shanxi, corroborated and complemented with local documents and uses relative theories of social anthropology, folklore, religious anthropology.During the period from Qing Dynasty to the Republic of China, these existed domestic folk belief such as ancestors, god of sky and land, kitchen god, door-god, local god of land, etc., in Taigu, Shanxi. Folk belief there was more embodied by the great number of temples and various functions of gods between villages. Folk belief in Taigu was featured by variability, locality, secularity, popularity, and utilitarianism. Among the relationships in and between villages in Taigu, folk belief also played a very important role: on the one hand, it is an essential resource of inter-village integration, and connection of intra-village association;on the other hand, it is also a response and way of competition, conflict of intra-clan, intra-village. When entering into the modern nation-state period, the folk belief encounters heavy beat because of rejection of modernized concepts. But after the reform and opening up, there appears active interaction between folk belief and local social economy, and will last for long time. So how to give play to active effects, and control negative effect becomes an important problem in front of us.