Religion and Religious Practices in Rural China by Mu Peng

Author:Mu Peng [Peng, Mu]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Research, Sociology, Rural, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781000727067
Google: bHy-DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-11-13T04:59:14+00:00

Knowledge transmission and bai: Gender, roles, and perspectives

During my fieldwork, thanks to Liangwen, I witnessed more than twenty funerals, which were, of course, extraordinary. Yet during the same period, Meijiao, my little niece whom I described in the beginning of the Introduction, observed two funerals in her neighborhood and was personally involved in one in another village. This frequency, seemingly trivial, is actually significant. It should, in a great sense, represent the average frequency in a normal era that villagers, from childhood, encounter funerals, a crucial occasion during which visions about death and the yin world are not only transmitted but brought into play.

These visions, nonetheless, never manifest themselves as a synthesized whole. Rather, they are instilled through individual participation, which is not only partial but differs in gender and ritual roles. In a sense, mortuary rituals mean to display and stress distinctions. Status competition, as many scholars have noted, is a key concern in conducting funerals (see, for example, Ahern, 1973; Naquin, 1988; Chau, 2005; Sutton, 2007). Villagers often characterized and evaluated funerals by the number of participants and the variety of entertainment types, as well as the cost of gifts and sacrificial animals. In addition to these factors, which could be manipulated by villagers to achieve their personal aims, some distinctions, such as gender, birth order, and the proximity of kin relations, were intrinsic to the ritual per se that determined and developed its structure.

Funerals of men and women, for instance, differed in both organization and symbols. Her natal family members are the most honored guests for a woman’s funeral, as mentioned above, and there is a special paper banner held by one of her grandchildren (a girl, if appropriate) that leads the cortege. Nanzuo nüyou 男左女右 (men using left while women right) is the general rule that governs less-visible yet fundamental differences. For women, xiaohua 孝花 (filial flowers), a kind of paper-made funeral decorative symbol, and the dihu, should be posted on the right of the front door (viewed from the domestic altar), while that for men are on the left. The food jars, whether inside or outside the coffin, should be put on the corpse’s right side, and the circling of the coffin starts from the corpse’s right side. Apparently, the shared funeral in fact bears marked distinctions, and the line between men and women is never blurred, even if they are dead.

Although these seemingly trivial distinctions might not make a big difference for the deceased, they represent the transformed and symbolic manifestations of gender distinctions in real-life practices. Moreover, funerals excellently and clearly demonstrate the gender division in rural life through the participants’ different ritual roles. In other words, gender distinction matters greatly to the living. Mourning sons are obvious inheritors and central actors, taking senior, or left, positions in all rites, while daughters-in-law stand to their right or behind, and married daughters are total outsiders of the family. Daughters-in-law, who are responsible for taking care of families, offer food in front of the coffin

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