Form Follows Function in Community Rituals in North China: Temples and Temple Festivals in Jiacun Village

Yingshen saishe or saishe is a general name for all types of temple festivals held to offer sacrifices to deities of local communities. With its roots traceable to ancient shamanic beliefs and practices, saishe demonstrates itself as a closely integrated form of religious ritual performance and musical/theatrical performance and proves to be instrumental in the development of Chinese theatre from ritual to drama. Based on my fieldwork on Jiacun Double-Fourth Temple Festival in May 2016, this paper offers a close examination of Jiacun temple culture and temple theatre with focus on the religious ritual performance and musical/theatrical entertainment presented during the festival. In so doing, this paper provides an enhanced understanding of the highly dynamic, interactive relationships between temple and theatre and between efficacy and entertainment.

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The Practice of the Lord’s Supper in 1 Corinthians 11:17–34 as a Socio-Religious Ritual Failure

The Expository Times ◽

10.1177/0014524618792121 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 130 (5) ◽

pp. 202-214

Author(s):

Chelcent Fuad

Keyword(s):

Social Status ◽

Lord's Supper ◽

1 Corinthians ◽

Ritual Performance ◽

Religious Ritual ◽

Ritual Theory

This paper attempts to understand the abuses of the Lord’s Supper in the Corinthian church (1 Cor 11:17–34) from the perspective of ritual theory. Analyzing the abuses of the Lord’s Supper by using the types of ritual infelicity as described by Ronald L. Grimes, I argue that the practice of the Lord’s Supper by the Corinthians was a socio-religious ritual failure caused by its participants’ inappropriate manners. These inappropriate manners in the ritual performance were both social and religious, namely the stratification of social status and the defilement of the sacred meal, both of which are the results of the imitation of pagan meal practices.

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State Involution: A Study of Local Finances in North China, 1911–1935

Comparative Studies in Society and History ◽

10.1017/s0010417500014389 ◽

1987 ◽

Vol 29 (1) ◽

pp. 132-161 ◽

Cited By ~ 12

Author(s):

Prasenjit Duara

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

North China ◽

Local Communities ◽

Republican China ◽

Early Modern Europe ◽

State Structure ◽

Late Imperial ◽

Local Resources ◽

Charles Tilly ◽

State And Local

Beginning around the turn of the twentieth century, the Chinese state launched onto a course of development that seemed to resemble the process in early modern Europe that Charles Tilly and others have called state making (Tilly 1975). The phenomenon of an expanding state structure penetrating levels of society untouched before, subordinating, co-opting, or destroying the relatively autonomous authority structures of local communities in a bid to increase its command of local resources, appeared to be repeating itself in late imperial and republican China. The similarities include the impulse toward centralization, bureaucratization, and rationalization; the insatiable drive to increase revenues for both military and civilian purposes; the violent resistance of local communities to this inexorable process of intrusion and extraction; and the formation of alliances between the state and local elites to consolidate their power (Duara 1983).

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3. The big idea

The Middle Ages: A Very Short Introduction ◽

10.1093/actrade/9780199697298.003.0004 ◽

2014 ◽

pp. 59-87

Author(s):

Miri Rubin

Keyword(s):

Local Communities ◽

Community Life ◽

Religious Leaders ◽

Beliefs And Practices ◽

Parish Church ◽

Church Hierarchy ◽

Christian Beliefs

‘The big idea: Christian salvation’ shows how an elite of religious leaders shaped European life and extended the reach of Christianity further north. The monastic tradition—Benedictine and Cistercian monastic orders—and its effect on local communities are described. In the 11th century, the Christian centre of the popes in Rome promoted a vision of church hierarchy and discipline, and of freedom from secular powers. After c.1200, Christian beliefs and practices were disseminated widely to Europeans in some 90,000 parishes. The parish church was an important part of family and community life.

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Stagecraft and the Politics of Spectacle in Ancient Peru

Cambridge Archaeological Journal ◽

10.1017/s095977431100028x ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 21 (2) ◽

pp. 283-313 ◽

Cited By ~ 18

Author(s):

Edward Swenson

Keyword(s):

Essential Role ◽

Effective Means ◽

Specific Power ◽

Ritual Performance ◽

The Andes ◽

Theatrical Performance ◽

Late Formative ◽

Diachronic Study ◽

Northern Peru

Archaeological investigations of public spectacle as mediated architecturally can provide an effective means to interpret culturally specific power asymmetries in prehistoric societies and the essential role of ritual performance in the creation of diverse forms of political subjectivity. A diachronic study of Late Formative (300–100 BC) and Moche (AD 550–800) ceremonial architecture from the Jequetepeque Valley in northern Peru demonstrates that archaeologists can approximate how power relations were materialized, conceptualized and contested in the Andes through their theatrical performance. Ultimately, a comparison of the performative construction of power with traditional archaeological indices of class-based inequalities reveals intriguing contradictions that both complicate and enrich our understanding of changing political structures in ancient Jequetepeque.

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Feasting and Burials on the Peruvian Central Coast at the Onset of the Middle Horizon

Ritual and Archaic States ◽

10.5744/florida/9780813062785.003.0005 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Giancarlo Marcone

Keyword(s):

Political Process ◽

Inverse Correlation ◽

Local Communities ◽

Middle Horizon ◽

Ritual Performance ◽

Burial Practices ◽

Ancestor Veneration ◽

Social Meanings ◽

Political Roles ◽

Over Time

Drawing from ethnohistorical sources, many Andean scholars have modeled Inca expansion as a highly ritualized political process, with feasting and ritual performance as its principal components. This model was long projected onto all Andean societies on the assumption that feasting activities were similarly important and played similar political roles across societies over time. Other voices have proposed that burial practices and ancestor veneration were also of central political importance in the Andean states’ expansionist projects. Ancestor veneration was thought to be the ideological base that upheld these entire systems. Increasingly, however, new voices are proposing that ancestor veneration and burial practices need to be understood in relation to feasting practices. It is only in this relational way that we can fully understand their political and social meanings. In chapter 5, Flores proposes that this is particularly true in cases where local communities interact with expansionist polities. He argues, based on evidence from Lote B, a small rural settlement in the Lurín Valley, that the increase of feasting activities is related to the suppression of funerary practices or vice-versa. This inverse correlation not only informs us about the nature of an expansionist project but also about the compromise that takes place between local communities and expansionist polities in turn.

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Epilogue

Signs of the Spirit ◽

10.5622/illinois/9780252043253.003.0008 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 211-218

Author(s):

Tony Perman

Keyword(s):

Local Communities ◽

Ritual Performance ◽

Complex Processes

The epilogue shows that ceremonial traditions do not thrive simply because custom is resilient or because the so-called structures from which they emerge are fixed, but because they provide hope. Performing, playing, and doing are the means by which ideas and habits become action. Performances help form, solidify, and embody the values of local communities, meaningfully generating habits and habitus. Values properly embodied in ritual performance make people and their spirits happier, improving the communities involved. The model presented here is a tool for understanding meaning and experience as felt in lived moments, and for making that leap from the minute to the magnificent. Signs initiate complex processes of perception, interpretation, and experience that both distinguish self from other and integrate self with other.

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