While this site has become a labyrinthine miscellany encompassing a variety of themes in world music (including Indian raga, jazz, Western Art Music, and so on), as well as film, fiction, and jokes, at its core is my fieldwork from 1986 to 2018 on ritual life in rural north China. So as a navigational aid I may as well remind you of a few main themes:
- The amateur ritual associations of Gaoluo village, Laishui county, Hebei: many articles are rounded up here, based on my 2004 book Plucking the winds—a diachronic ethnography setting forth from my early exposure to
- Beijing temple ritual and amateur ritual associations on the Hebei plain just south: click here for an introduction, with a roundup of posts.
- The Li family Daoists in Yanggao county, north Shanxi:
Another regional topic is
These detailed studies are supplemented by our fieldnotes on a wealth of related local traditions under
- Local ritual, again mainly on Hebei and Shanxi (see also here).
See also under Other publications. One respect in which such work supplements that of my esteemed Chinese colleagues is a greater attention to the political context of the maintenance of ritual life since “Liberation” (see e.g. China: commemorating trauma, and China: memory, music, society).
And if all this gets a bit much, you can take a break with Mahler, Coltrane, Sardinian folk music, or Teach yourself Japanese…
Stephen Jones: a blog 