Localization Of Christianity In Rural China

Christianity has been in China for more than200years, and at least100years in Shanxi province. During its spreading out, she has gone through the initial radical confrontation and contradiction with local culture and finally reached a harmony with it. Nowadays, the situation is no longer the same as the past featured as confliction and aggressive adaptation but communication and co-exist harmoniously. To some degree, Christianity is shaping the local culture.As far, localization is a heated topic which has been discussed much at home and abroad, but not those in empirical aspect. This dissertation approaches the topic by a Christian’funeral, and explores and analyzes the internal communication between Christian culture and traditional culture with the method of "process-event". In order to obtain an indepth understanding, we applied qualitative methods, namely, participant observation, interview on the funeral. Moreover, following the line of "process-event", we were able to describe the points of confrontation within the funeral. In our analysis,"discourse" and "situation" are paid much attention for clarifying the parts of modification and non-modification.During our survey, we found that Christian funeral conserved some core part which appeared in traditional one and they made some transformation towards those less important parts. Thus, the Christian funeral, on one hand, took on the similar effect of a traditional one; on the other hand, it also spread its unique understanding about life and death. According to the abundant data obtained from the field, we made a conclusion that in the new times, due to the presence of Christianity, the local culture was actually in a state characterized as "hybrity", which shaped by both strengths from Christianity and tradition.The dissertation contains eight parts. Chapter One is the introduction. Chapter Two is literature review, where we made definition of localization and Christian church. The third part is the research design. We provided the background of the interviewees in the fourth part. Later on, we described in detail the process of the funeral and quarrels happened there. The theoretic analysis is put in the sixth part, dealing with the inconsistence of Christian culture and traditional culture. In the end, some discussion about the reason of localization of Christianity is proposed and some flaws of the dissertation.