This book is about the ritual world of a group of rural
settlements in Shanxi province in pre-1949 North China. Temple
festivals, with their giant processions, elaborate rituals, and
operas, were the most important influence on the symbolic universe
of ordinary villagers and demonstrate their remarkable capacity for
religious and artistic creation. The great festivals described in
this book were their supreme collective achievements and were
carried out virtually without assistance from local officials or
educated elites, clerical or lay.
Chinese culture was a performance culture, and ritual was the
highest form of performance. Village ritual life everywhere in
pre-revolutionary China was complex, conservative, and
extraordinarily diverse. Festivals and their associated rituals and
operas provided the emotional and intellectual materials out of
which ordinary people constructed their ideas about the world of
men and the realm of the gods. It is, David Johnson argues,
impossible to form an adequate idea of traditional Chinese society
without a thorough understanding of village ritual. Newly
discovered liturgical manuscripts allow him to reconstruct North
Chinese temple festivals in unprecedented detail and prove that
they are sharply different from the Daoist- and Buddhist-based
communal rituals of South China.
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