Shanxi province is the historian's paradise. Go wherever you would, historical steles lie strewn on the ground, ancient buildings dot the villages, and some of the villages, to this day, perform ceremonies that must have descended through many generations. This book gives a glimpse of what one historian has found to his excitement. Moreover he discovered, through those ceremonies, the ritual foundation of north China's village life.
The content of the book is, for the most part, descriptive. Readers who have followed the many studies of ritual life in China would recognise the style that has characterised the work of Tanaka Issei and the many followers of Wang Chiu-kuei. David Johnson has had the advantage of focusing on a part of Shanxi where ritual texts have also been discovered. Those texts are well used in this study, and they provide the very important backdrop of historical development that many ethnographic descriptions have lacked.
The reporting style that runs through the book carries a sense of excitement that derives from the spectacle of the ceremonies. It describes ritual arenas colourfully fitted out, gongs and drums skilfully played from years of practice, villagers who know precisely how to assume designated roles assigned in long-established repertoires, and, downright bloody and violent exorcism ceremonies, as, for instance, when the drought demon Han Ba appears wearing a fresh sheep's stomach on his head to run amok among the audience, splattering sheep blood from a bowl he carries in his hand until he is grabbed by the participating crowd and ritually beheaded. The titles of some of the ceremonies suggest the same flavour: Chicken-feather monkey, who, if caught by the crowd, has to be killed; the god Lord Guan “beheads Chi You” or “Killing the Yellow Demon.” Yet the popular mood changes from one ceremony to the next. By night, the lanterns light up and villagers walk the “nine beds of the Yellow River.” Johnson helps us visualize the beauty of the scene as he remarks, “[t]he stream of people moving through the huge array of lanterns under the icy full moon was an impressive sight” (p. 88).
Of course, there was opera. Operas were offered for the gods' entertainment, even though their human supplicants also shared in the pleasure of watching them. Johnson's speculation on the difference between the operas (held on stage) and the ceremonies (held “on the ground”) is suggestive. The operas were made up of stories taken from Chinese history, and, perhaps precisely because the gods would be watching from the audience, they had no place in them. The gods appeared only in the ceremonies, especially in processions, represented by villagers wearing masks. The short chapter on opera raises interesting comparison between ceremonial performances (Johnson quite consciously avoids the word “religious” in this context) in Shanxi villages, and what one might think of as “religion” in the West, or even in Japan. The argument is given in his choice of words: Shanxi village ceremonies are equated with spectacle and sacrifice, not worship, prayer, transcendence or salvation; with people acting almost by habit, not out of catharsis or inspiration; they evoke familiarity, but not awe or deep questions of human existence, pity, terror or transcendence (p. 173).
That is not to say that rituals are undirected. In the way the book is organised, Johnson detects at least two sorts of rituals, that is, those centred around times of the year, such as the lunar New Year, and those offered at designated temples, known as the sai. The former tend to be conducted by a single village, the latter by village alliances. Being conducted by a single village, seasonal celebrations such as those conducted at the lunar New Year, were highly “autarkic,” defined as being conducted “with no reference to outside ritual or ideological authority” (p. 141). The sai, conducted on a larger scale, are less autarkic (p. 179), being led by specialists employing written manuals. Status does not seem to matter, for the specialists include such low-status people as hereditary entertainers and relatively high-status “masters of ceremonial” drawn from the literate members of the village. How autarkic an institution could be if it relies on tradition for its ultimate justification is a question Johnson has not explored, and is unlikely to be revealed by single-village studies often made at the point ceremonies occur. One must, therefore, hold that concept in abeyance despite its utility in providing a thread through the book.
Yet, building on the concept of ritual autarky Johnson makes a bigger claim, namely that village rituals, even the sai, are conducted without the help of Daoists. The ethnography supports the claim, but the style of the ritual texts, the quite frequent reference to priests and monks in temple steles, and our sheer ignorance of what went on in the villages beyond living memory, all advise caution in coming to terms with that statement. An interesting thought, it may be, but it will need more research to make it stick.
