Ritual, Legend, and Metaphor: Narratives of the Willow in Yuan Zaju

Narratives of willow trees in Yuan zaju 雜劇, or variety play, largely come in three types, namely, the ritual performance of shooting willows; the deliverance of willow spirits by Lü Dongbin, one of the Eight Immortals of Daoism; and the use of the word willow to refer to women. The willow shooting ritual depicted in Yuan zaju was highly reminiscent of the willow shooting ritual popular throughout the Song (960–1279), Liao (916–1125), Jin (1115–1234), and Yuan (1271–1368) dynasties, with its conceptual origins traceable to the ancient shamanic belief in the willow as a sacred tree prevalent among the Khitans and Jurchens who lived in what is now northeastern China. The legend of Lü Dongbin delivering a willow spirit to immortality is a recurring motif in Han Chinese folklore and Daoist hagiography, which also finds expression in the iconic image of Guanyin Pusa or Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara holding a willow branch with which they cure diseases for people and bring fulfillment to their wishes. The frequent use of “willow leaf-shaped eyebrows” (liumei 柳眉) and “willow-like waist” (liuyao 柳腰) in Yuan zaju as metaphorical references to women can be seen as a continuation of the great literary tradition of Shijing 詩經 (The Book of Songs) and also as a dramatic enactment of the fertility cult of the willow and women in Chinese folk religion. Evidence abounds that the narratives about the willow in Yuan zaju were not a new creation but an artistic manifestation of centuries-old folk belief and literary tradition.

Ritual, Performance and Children’s ”Play-drama”:

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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.

Indigenous Ritual Aesthetics on Stage: A Survey of Contemporary Syncretic Theatre of Oceania

<p>The use of indigenous ritual (both formal and informal), ritual performance, and mythology in modern Oceanic theatre speaks directly to cultural practitioners and informed audience/readers. Various contemporary syncretic plays originating from Oceania will be analyzed for their connection to indigenous ritual. These plays include John Broughton’s Te Hokinga Mai (The Return Home), Sudesh Mishra’s Ferringhi, Jo Nacola’s Gurudial and the Land, Briar Grace-Smith’s Ngā Pou Wāhine and When Sun and Moon Collide, Vilsoni Hereniko and Teresia Teaiwa’s Last Virgin in Paradise, Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl’s Ka Wai Ola, Albert Belz’ Te Maunga, and Makerita Urale’s Frangipani Perfume. Understanding the way in which syncretic theatre is created in postcolonial societies within Oceania will help to build a greater understanding of how cultures and communities are restructuring and reclaiming traditional cultural practices within their respective communities. Using various play-specific dramatic and anthropological theories, scripts are analyzed in order to identify the indigenous cultural element present within the respective scripts.</p>

Indigenous Ritual Aesthetics on Stage: A Survey of Contemporary Syncretic Theatre of Oceania

<p>The use of indigenous ritual (both formal and informal), ritual performance, and mythology in modern Oceanic theatre speaks directly to cultural practitioners and informed audience/readers. Various contemporary syncretic plays originating from Oceania will be analyzed for their connection to indigenous ritual. These plays include John Broughton’s Te Hokinga Mai (The Return Home), Sudesh Mishra’s Ferringhi, Jo Nacola’s Gurudial and the Land, Briar Grace-Smith’s Ngā Pou Wāhine and When Sun and Moon Collide, Vilsoni Hereniko and Teresia Teaiwa’s Last Virgin in Paradise, Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl’s Ka Wai Ola, Albert Belz’ Te Maunga, and Makerita Urale’s Frangipani Perfume. Understanding the way in which syncretic theatre is created in postcolonial societies within Oceania will help to build a greater understanding of how cultures and communities are restructuring and reclaiming traditional cultural practices within their respective communities. Using various play-specific dramatic and anthropological theories, scripts are analyzed in order to identify the indigenous cultural element present within the respective scripts.</p>

The Ritual Animal

The ritual animal longs to belong. Rituals are a way of defining the boundaries of social groups and binding their members together. The ritual modes theory set out in this book seeks to unravel the psychology behind these processes, and to explain how ritual behaviour evolved, including how different modes of ritual performance have shaped global history over many millennia. Testing the theory has meant designing experiments run with children in psychology labs and on remote Pacific islands, gathering survey data with armed insurgents in the Middle East and Muslim fundamentalists in Indonesia, monitoring heart rate and stress among football fans in Brazil, and measuring changes in the brain as people observe traditional Chinese rituals in Singapore. The results of all this research point to new ways of addressing cooperation problems: from preventing violent extremism to motivating action on the climate crisis. Although this book is about the role of ritual in the evolution of social complexity, more broadly it models a new approach to the science of the social—an approach that is driven by real-world observation but grounded in the cognitive and evolutionary sciences. More ambitiously still, it shows how cumulative theory building can be used to deliver practical benefits for society at large, perhaps even addressing problems on a global scale by harnessing the formidable cohesive and cooperative capacities of the ritual animal.

Monumental Painting: Post-Iconoclasm

Although few secular examples of Byzantine monumental painting survive, hundreds of churches throughout the Mediterranean and the Balkans preserve impressive decorative programs. Many of these churches are well studied. Others, however, remain unpublished. Close study of the paintings provides valuable information about techniques, materials, and artistic styles. Church decoration can show enormous regional variation: specific communities and patrons often exerted influence on subject matter. Inscriptions played an important role in many churches, providing an archive of liturgical texts to be spoken and sung and epigrams to be read. Liturgical texts, hymns, and ritual performance were important inspirations for painters and communities in the Middle and Late Byzantine periods. Phenomenological effects of sound and light were also considered in monumental decoration.

Commodification of The Mangalahat Horbo Bius Ritual on The Samosir Island North Sumatra: A Controversial Show

The mangalahat horbo bius ritual is a Batak tradition to offer the best sacrifice to God called Mulajadi na Bolon. This tradition is carried out since they still adhere to the parbaringin flow. The entry of Dutch colonialism into Tapanuli resulted in this tradition being a forbidden tradition. In 2008, the government of Samosir Regency raised this tradition as a show of its purpose as a tourist attraction. Since it was made into a show, there were pros and cons in the community. To explore this attitude research needs to be done. This study uses a qualitative method. The researcher chose the informant purposively followed by the snowball technique. Selected informants: government, religious leaders, and traditional leaders. Data analysis was carried out from the time the study began until the inductive analytic descriptive research results. Theories used as analysis: the theory of power/ knowledge discourse, postcolonial theory, commodification theory, and social practice theory. The theory is used eclectically. The results showed that this ritual performance was counterproductive in increasing the number of visits.

The Challenge of Indigenous Healing for Global Mental Health

Psychiatry and anthropology have a long relationship, and it is worth examining aspects of how that relation is carried over into the developing field of Global Mental Health (GMH). One place at which the two disciplines overlap significantly is in addressing religious phenomena and ritual performance in relation to mental health, and one of the greatest challenges for GMH is how productively to take into account forms of indigenous healing based on religion and ritual. In this paper I compare recent texts in GMH written from the standpoint of psychiatry and anthropology, observing that the psychiatric texts emphasize evidence-based determination of treatment efficacy, while the anthropological texts emphasize ethnographic understanding of treatment experience. Reconciling these two emphases constitutes a challenge to the field, attending to contextual variations in treatment events, illness episodes, phenomenological factors both endogenous and intersubjective, and sociopolitical factors both interpersonal and structural. In addressing this challenge, I propose an approach to therapeutic process that on the empirical level can facilitate comparison across the diversity of healing forms, and on the conceptual level can constitute a bridge between efficacy and experience. This approach is predicated on a rhetorical model of therapeutic process including components of disposition, experience of the sacred, elaboration of alternatives, and actualization of change that highlights experiential specificity and incremental change. Deploying this model can help meet the challenge of understanding efficacy and experience in indigenous healing, and prepare the ground for the further challenge of how practitioners of GMH relate to and interact with such forms of healing.