Crowning a long period of his career devoted to the study of folk/popular culture in late imperial China, Professor David Johnson has written a fascinating and passionately argued historical-ethnographic study on the role rituals and festivals played in traditional rural north China. His eight cases of New Year's festivals, folk operas, and temple festivals in southeastern Shanxi Province and neighboring areas each illustrate a different aspect of rural communal ritual culture. Johnson's sources are primarily ritual manuals passed down through the generations in ritualist households. Having somehow survived the Maoist anti-traditionalist suppressions, these were discovered by Chinese folklore researchers and local historians during the reform period. Johnson supplements these manuals with oral histories and interviews (most conducted by Chinese researchers) and reconstructed rituals (which have been photographed and filmed). Embracing anthropological approaches and perspectives, Johnson reconstructs these village-based folk productions and presents his materials as a sort of “salvage ethnography,” since most of these rituals and festivals are no longer performed in today's China. The bulk of the book consists of descriptions of the rituals and festivals, or at least those parts that can be reconstructed. Because of the necessarily patchy nature of some of the evidence, this veritable “ethnographic reconstructive surgery” required painstaking effort and not a little imagination. Johnson has translated large segments of the ritual manuals and at every turn provides detailed discussions on the reliability and ethnographic-historical value of these texts. The depth and range of these discussions make this book an ideal text for teaching historiography and research methods.
Johnson usefully divides village ceremonial life (“rituals” in an expanded sense) into two broad categories: seasonal and liturgical. The most important seasonal ritual was the New Year's festivities, especially the communal (she) celebrations surrounding yuanxiao (fifteenth of the first lunar month). One shared feature in these communal celebrations is the prominence of exorcistic ritual drama put on by the villagers themselves, often involving enactments of the violent killing of a demon-like figure. For liturgical “rituals” Johnson focuses on the temple festivals mostly dedicated to celebrating the birthdays of deities, which were often sponsored by alliances of villages. All of these village festivities lasted many days and required hundreds of participants with specific roles, with ritual spectacle and solemn offerings (i.e. sacrifice) constituting their twin pillars. Along the way Johnson presents some of the key figures at the heart of these festivities: the socially outcast yet ritually indispensable hereditary entertainers (yuehu), the masters of ceremonial (zhuli) who were drawn from the elite yinyang master households, and ritual chefs who made the beautiful and elaborate food offerings. The book will repay patient close reading and is a masterful contribution to the field of ritual/festival studies.
Johnson makes two important arguments. First, there was a mind-boggling variety of ritual culture among villages in traditional China (what he calls “ritual autarky”). Second, in traditional rural China the villagers were capable of creating and maintaining a rich ritual life independent of elite religious specialists such as Buddhist monks, Daoist priests, or the Confucian-literati elite. This second argument may provoke disagreement and stimulate debate. As a long-time admirer of Johnson's classic article on the various classes of people in late imperial China and the implications of these social divisions for people's cultural productions and consciousness (“Communication, Class, and Consciousness in Late Imperial China,” in Popular Culture in Late Imperial China, edited by David Johnson, Andrew J. Nathan, and Evelyn S. Rawski [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985], pp. 34–72), I am quite surprised by his Durkheimian turn arguing for the creativity and autonomy of an apparently undifferentiated mass of villagers possessing a sui generis cultural gemeinshaft. Having done fieldwork among the peasants in rural Shaanxi Province, I have of course witnessed the creativity and organizational prowess of ordinary villagers both as individuals and in collectives such as temple association committees. However, to argue that the Shanxi villagers' ritual and festival culture had limited influence from elites might lead us back to an image of village communities and folk culture such as that held by previous generations of scholars who misconstrued what Robert Redfield meant by “Little Traditions” (Redfield never intended it to mean a cultural realm autonomous from the elite “Great Traditions”). Rather, over the course of Chinese dynastic history, the traffic of symbols, images, ideas, values, and practices between the so-called cultural and socio-political elite and ordinary villagers and townspeople was frequent and multi-stranded, and Johnson's book provides plenty of evidence of such dynamic trafficking. One of the less commented-on mechanisms through which such exchanges took place was the repeated dispersal in times of socio-political upheaval of highly trained Buddhist and Daoist clerics, ritualists, musicians, chefs, doctors, martial artists, and many other kinds of elite cultural producers. When not in the service of the imperial court, local magistracies, garrisons, or rich and grand households, these cultural producers were dispersed into all nooks and crannies of society, making a living teaching their skills and/or conducting and performing rituals. Chinese villagers might have used rituals to assert their identities vis-à-vis their neighbors, but the uniqueness of their cultural production was more likely due to inter-communal rivalry and contingencies of transmission than any purported isolation from the elite.
