The Ancestors Of Man, A Woman Of God

Since the 1980s, a wide range of revitalization and rehabilitation of folk religions began to arise in the Chinese rural society. A prevailing phenomenon in the process is that women usually show more enthusiasm than men in the religious activities, such as praying, burning incense, and etc.. So, why do women appear so enthusiastic in the religious practices? What is the relationship between women's religious practices and men's? This thesis is intended to answer these questions. Through the fieldwok among the QunLe people of Meitan County, Guizhou Province, the author collected a large amount of information about their religious life. Based on the information, the thesis analyzes and reveals the actual existence of the gender difference in religion and the causes of the difference. The methods applied in this paper include literature collection, participant observation, case interviews, and so on. The author's major viewpoints are summarized as follows.In the society of QunLe people, men's religious life mainly focuses on ancestor worship and sacrifice while women tend to believe in the Bodhisattvas. The division is very probably derived from the gender difference. From the diachronic viewpoint, the religious practices of QunLe people are the result of the development of the local ancestor worship, the Nuo, and the Temple faith. Since the 1950s, the rite of ancestor worship, led by men and centered on paternal line, has begun to shift from the collective genealogical practice to the more private one exercised by nuclear family members. Meanwhile, the dimension and intensity of the practice also declined. The Nuo, originally the rite of purgation, has been transformed to theatrics and is gradually vanishing. The temple, which remained as a place of public communication before the 1950s, has been turned into a site where the ritual of Temple faith is practiced with women's dominance. While the ancestor worship and the Nuo go downhill, the temple faith gains momentum. For all of the above factors, QunLe people's religious life eventually presents itself as what we observe today.The current situation of QunLe is closely related to its history from the 1950s to the 1970s. The advocation of atheism has almost completely changed the mainstream thinking, ethics and codes of conduct. Atheism also greatly suppressed the traditional religious activities, leaving no room for their development. The collectivization reform in politics, economy, and organization almost replaced the lineage system which used to be the center of the traditional rural society, bringing all the activities of living and production into the collective order and leading to the collapse of the foundation of people's traditional religious beliefs.The reform in the 1980s was proved to be not only a transition of the Chinese society from collectivism to individualism but also a "re-ordering" process of the rural society. Right in the "re-ordering" process, the tension, caused by the structural differences of the gender role, is magnified. In the meantime, the differences in their knowledge structure and interpretation of the world become more obvious than ever. Therefore, the gender difference of QunLe people's religious life is a projection of their different social gender and a product of their local history and social practices.Accordingly, the gender difference of QunLe people's religious life is bound to maintain for a faily long time.