Village In The Context Of Ritual Performing And Cultural Change

Bearing much information of its local society, folk custom is an important constituent of traditional folk culture. And in the village of Nanqiao, Xunwu County, Jiangxi Province it is a kind of symbolic culture. Through research and fieldwork, from a socially and culturally historical perspective, this thesis makes a detailed description of the folk custom Ying Gushi of Nanqiao Village in Gannan area. It traces back to its origins, investigates into its development and sheds light on its ritual performance, thus pointing out that Ying Gushi of Nanqiao Village is a kind of comprehensive narrative of its village culture. Its origins show themselves as inner families emotion, community memory and cultural identity. But based on the modern society, the greatest value to study this ritual performance lies in the discovery of its cultural changea of the village. These changes mainly displays in: First, the folk performance function changes into mainly entertaining people from primarily entertaining gods; Second, villagers as families get renaissance in ritual performance which is put into practice as a conceptually symbolic discourse instead of a traditional symbol of simple blood relationship; Third, the ritual performance reflects reconstruction of the community. Specifically, the driving force of these changes comes directly from the reduction in rural population caused by migration, from the change in modern entertainment habits and from the result of multicultural game playing. And the dominant speech right of these cultural changes is in the hand of government and elites of village cultures with the former playing a role as a macroscopic adjuster and controller both explicitly and implicitly while the latter, an intermediary agent between the government and its citizens to reconcile their contradictions, directly exerting microscopic influence on the changes. To sum up, the ritual performance of Ying Gushi itself is a micro folk custom while the cultural background behind it reflects a macro narration. Thus the present thesis tries to see more of the changes through a case study of Ying Gushi custom and probes into the changes in and promotions of village culture in the context of modernization.