The Research On Gift-giving In Life Rites Of An Cun Village

The gifts,reciprocity and accompanying gift-giving,which belong to a kind of universal form of social exchange in daily life,have been widely concerned by sociology,anthropology,economics and other social sciences.In the earthbound society,the gift-giving shows the living methods and its unique action logic of Chinese earthbound society.Therefore,scholars who are in home and abroad often analyze it by local talking methods such as face(mianzi),favor(renqing)and relationship(guanxi).According to the recent research of sociology,most scholars tend to choose the research object which is located in rural communities in underdeveloped areas,focusing on the differences of gift-giving between urban and rural areas,and trying to show the relational network by gift-giving.However,villagers in developed areas are not the main research objects in term of most scholars,and its research result in the observing of gift-giving in the villages of developed areas is rare.An Cun village of Shanghai suburb is an example in this paper,the author investigated the three life rites including birth rite,marriage rite and funeral rite in the community,and tried to outline the basic situation of the gift-giving in An Cun village's life rites and the principle of gift-giving and gift-returning by the help of the record of gift-giving and the villagers' memories.Different from previous studies,this paper placed life rites and gift-giving in An Cun village's historical changes,so as to find out the changing trend of life rites and gift-giving in An Cun village in the process of modernizationIn this regard,this issue can be discussed based on six parts of paper.In the beginning,this paper mainly clarifies the research problems,research methods and combing the previous research results.In the first chapter,this paper combs the historical and social background of An Cun village,and focuses on the analysis of its social capacity,relatives structure,folk religion and the historical evolution of the village.Next,the Chapters 2 to 4 are the main parts of this paper.In these three chapters,this paper analyzes the ritual process of birth rites,marriage rites and funeral rites in An Cun village.At the same time,it also highlights which ritual process has changed in the process of modernization and explores the reasons from the villagers' understanding.With the help of the life memory of local villagers,this paper attempts to reproduce the differences of the gift-giving of different subjects in different periods,so as to investigate the changing trend of the gift-giving with the subjects,gift types and gift quantities.Through the gift-giving record and the life rites of a family,the principle of gift-giving and gift-returning in different life rites is discussed in detail.In the conclusion part,this paper continues the analysis of the local research,and analyzes the gift-giving in the village's life rites by face(mianzi),favor(renqing)and generations(beifen).This paper finds that the gift-giving in An Cun village is mainly influenced by three factors: face(mianzi),favor(renqing)and generations(beifen).Among them,favor(renqing)is the main driving force for the emergence of gift-giving,and generation(beifen)is the main normal restricting gift-giving,and the gain and loss of face is a result of gift-giving,and people's mentality in order to save face or give face to others also restricts the occurrence of gift-giving.The relationship network reflected by gift-giving shows a pattern of Chaxugeju.In addition,this paper also finds that the life rites and gift-giving in An Cun village have not broken the original traditional culture.The process of modernization has not deeply affected the cultural value of villagers.Traditional ethics and rules still dominate the daily life of villagers in An Cun village.