*For main page, see here! With two major new articles, and new layout!*

Here’s a link to some more vignettes from my 2004 book Plucking the winds on the ritual associations of Gaoluo village in Hebei. And while adding them, I’ve rearranged the way they all appear on the site layout: in the top menu (under Other publications), a general introduction (Gaoluo) leads to a sub-menu of pages, like so:

including the substantial new articles

• Gaoluo: other ritual groups
• Gaoluo: New Year’s rituals.

I’ve supplemented the related page on ritual images, and to the remarkable article on the Gaoluo Catholics I’ve added photos of the village’s own ordained priests, and Bishop Martina, from the 1940s. These articles overlap to some extent, so it’s good to read them in conjunction.

This new layout makes a certain arcane sense to me, at least… You can find much further related material with the help of the Gaoluo tag in the sidebar.

In most of these vignettes, conflict is apparent: from the animosity between the ritual association and the village Catholics that led to the Boxer massacre, to the social breakdown under Maoism, to the challenges of the reform era that I witnessed.