The Economy, Society&Culture Of A She Ethnic Village Which Is Located In East Fujian Called Xie Lingxia

By being based on one-year field work and combining interview,participant observation,questionnaire, document analysis and other methods,this paper takes a She ethnic village called Xie Lingxia which is located in east Fujian and administrated by Shekou Town of Fu’an County-level city as the site for investigation and attempts to make an integral description and analysis of Xie Lingxia’s economy,society,culture as well as their recent changes mainly from the perspective of anthropologic ethnography.In order to present the panorama of a She ethnic community as detailed as possible, this paper tries to seek the features of Xie Lingxia’s livelihood&food,population&family,lineage,village religion,family religion,fasti festivals,marriage,reproduction&nurture and funeral Customs.This paper involves12parts:First part is an introduction,which makes a brief summary and illustration of reasons&background of the selected topic,literature review,research methods&material sources.Chapter One describes the region background&general condition of Xie Lingxia in aspects of survey of geographical location,administrative division&evolution,ecological environment&village structure,which can create the sense of direction in region research.Chapter Two is divided in four sections,namely Paddy rice,Tea,Farming&Other,Food and focuses on the description of the livelihood and food structure of the She villagers’s who live in Xie Lingxia so that we can make clear the past and present of their economic life and seek for the reasons that bring about changes. Chapter Three is based on the demographic data which is got through door-to-door interview and local government,then through summarizing and analyzing Xie Lingxia’s population&family which includes population,family,family segregation and elder support,it aims at describing the panorama of population structure.Chapter Four takes Lan family who live in Shangcun and have the most outstanding lineage features as center and discusses its position and function from the origin development, symbols and organization&relationships of Lan lineage&ancestral identity.Chapter Five mainly depicts the wide varieties of local village religion system from the perspectives of temples&gods,ritual practitioners,managements of temples,ritual traditions so that it can exhibit the whole village religion overview in Xie Lingxia.Chapter Six is different from Chapter Five and primarily focuses on discussing religion in family.It includes constructing,moving to new house,family gods&ancestor worship,homestead talismans four sections and try to display the miniature of family religion in Xie Lingxia.Using seasons as timeline,Chapter Seven divides fasti festivals that Xie Lingxia villagers should get through every year into spring,summer,autumn and winter and makes a detailed description of festival customs and related ancestor&God worship rituals.The topic of Chapter Eight is marriage.This chapter is based on making a brief analysis about general description of marriage in Xie Lingxia,then it tries to show the main traditional She ethnic nuptual customs from the beginning to the end as well as other marriage forms&nuptual customs.In order to deepen the understanding of She ethnic value to the successors,Chapter Nine tries to depict the life customs and rites of passage from the perspectives of reproduction&nurture.Chapter Ten is funeral customs and mainly contains two sections:first funeral ritual and second funeral ritual.Through the indication of complicated rituals,it finally displays the situations in which local people show respects to their ancestors.The last part is conclusion and aims at making a summary of the topic that this paper discusses,generalizing changes of local customs and indicating the academic value and shortcomings of this research.This paper is one of the preliminary achievements that have gained through doing anthropologic ethnography research in She ethnic villages.The research of this paper tries to indicate that doing anthropologic ethnography research in She ethnic villages is the basis of the whole research of She ethnicity. The research can not only gain more specific and deeper understanding of the She ethnic lineage,society,culture and history in special space and time,but also can use the form of salvage ethnography to record the She ethnic culture that in changes so that can build a more objective and well-knit data foundation for the She ethnic culture heritage protection.