Author: Ziying You

Publisher:

Published: 2015

Total Pages:

ISBN-13:

This dissertation treats how tradition has been deconstructed, reconstructed, contradicted, negotiated, and practiced by competing and shifting actors after 1949, as both a cultural construct and a tool of power struggle in contemporary China. Instead of investigating the general usage and intellectual construction of the term "tradition," I focus on how rural people in northern China conceptualize and practice local traditions in both rituals and daily lives. The dissertation is based on six months of recent fieldwork (2012 and 2013), and site visits that began in 2007. My ethnographic case study observes living beliefs and vernacular representations of the ancient Chinese sage kings Yao and Shun, as well as Yao's two daughters (and Shun's two wives) Ehuang and Nuying, in several villages in Hongdong County, Shanxi Province. I explore how various local actors construct Chinese pre-history and worship mythical figures as their ancestors in both discourse and practice, and how they compete and negotiate with each other in transmitting and reproducing local traditions. In particular, I highlight the role of contemporary "folk literati" in the process of continuing and representing local traditions, especially during politically disastrous periods. I employ the term "folk literati" to describe a group of people who were trained in classical Chinese literature, knowledgeable about local history, legends, and beliefs, and are capable of representing them in writing. Furthermore, I analyze contentious relationships among folk literati and shifting power balances between the key folk groups that sponsor local temple fairs and ritual processions (she), temple reconstruction associations, and the state in the promotion and safeguarding of local traditions as China's Intangible Cultural Heritage in the late 2000s. I combine ethnography with history in my research, for history is crucial to the communities that I study, and it also makes my ethnographic observations in the present more meaningful. In conclusion, I make a proposal about the dialectics of tradition-making in contemporary China, the contested cohesion of local beliefs, the competing agency of different social actors in remaking local traditions, and the interpretation of tradition as a process of appreciation and "tradition ecology."