Order And Meaning-A Case Study On Religious Culture Of The Qiang Ethnic Group In Rural North-western Sichuan

The religious culture of the Qiang people is characterized by complexity and closely related with their daily lifes. As the wellspring of the religious culture of the Qiang People, the daily lifes of the Qiang people should be taken into account when religious culture of the people is discussed. This thesis is intended to explore the complex feature of the religious culture from the perspective of order and significance it produces and map out how religious culture is embodied in their gods’faith, religious practitioners , festivals, social structures ,life rites, geomantics(Fengshui) and lores and so on. A deep understanding of Qiang People’s society and culture is expected to be achieved through the holistic description of their religious culture given in this thesis which has also made a comparison between the Jiamen of Qiang and the Clan of the Han and listed similarities and differences of the two. In addition, the limitations of Turner’s ritual theory in explaining the rite of passage of the Qiang People are exposed and elaborated in details in the thesis.