Between Power And Faith

With the speeding up of modernization, changes of rural community culture break the traditional social structure. Social customs are also affected by modernization. Funeral custom is different from others which contains the traditional culture of rural belief and ancestor worship and lags behind the social change. However, for reasons of environmental protection and land resources, management reform of the funeral is advancing across the country. The interpretation of past research and media for funeral reform generally ignored the personal choice logic, which is feeble and one-sided. This paper uses the field work method in anthropology, through participant observation of a reform in a village in detail. For the implementation of the funeral reform, the villagers and the government have their own explain. Governments try to establish a set of scientific discourse system, to achieve the purpose of their reform through the folk authority. Villagers seemingly accepted that system of discourse, but they have another set of logic on cognitive and behavioral choice: first, in the village there is a set of their own culture nexus of power; folk authority plays an important role in it. The power developed a set of scientific discourse system which seep into the villages through the influence of the folk authority and eventually become a trend. The main body of reform has no identity that anyone is equal, which let the villagers be easier to accept. Second, along with the social development, the village is no longer adapted the daily life of villages in some parts of the social structure. It gradually becomes a burden of villagers with the multifarious funeral ceremony. Not only it needs a lot of manpower and money, and funeral ceremony professional practitioners reduce gradually, but also the dissimilation phenomenon is very serious. Funeral reform provides an opportunity for young people to change the situation. In addition, under the influence of modernity, the idea of the villagers is not conservative. Modernity gradually deep into people’s ideas and makes the villagers to accept new things easier. Through the social change of funeral reform, the paper based try to reflect the change of rural social, the game between state power and villagers’ belief which is based on the collective unconscious for the villagers, local knowledge. Funeral ceremony is such a kind of collective unconscious. Funeral reform broke the original funeral customs and order. State power and tradition in constant adjustment in order to reach a new equilibrium, but traditional funeral custom is in decline. Under the impact of the modernization, the market also gradually involved, and penetrates into every aspect of the funeral.