Over a summer hardly bathed in sunshine, but enlivened by football, tennis, Istanbul, and Proms, it may look as if I’m somewhat neglecting China. Still, just since May, posts include
- Two surveys of folk ritual and its soundscapes, based on the great Anthology:
- Fujian province
- Tianjin municipality,
- with more in the pipeline…
- Daoist ritual in Taiwan—a fine ethnography by Yves Menheere
- A film on the qin zither
- headsup for my forthcoming film on the 1995 New Year’s rituals in Gaoluo village, and
- recent Chinese attention to my work
- Qiao Jianzhong: Chinese folk music studies since the reform era
- A Buddhist centre in Peckham (with more notes on Wutaishan)
- The changing ritual scene of Xiongxian
- Daoism, society, and women in the Tang
- More Chinese crime fiction.
China even plays a cameo role in
Actually, that should be enough to keep you busy (not to mention all the fieldnotes under Local ritual)—indeed, a little break might be welcome… I’m working on several new essays for my site, but in the interim I regularly post on Twitter—other recent China retweets including
- A Daoist altar in west Fujian
- Layers of fieldwork
- A Tang couplet
- Spirit mediums in China: collected posts
- Ritual groups of Xushui—for the anniversary of Mao’s fateful visit on 4th August 1958 to launch the disastrous Great Leap Backward
- The art of the sheng repairer.
Coming up soon is a reminder of a crucial theme, still little addressed:
- Debunking “living fossils”: ethnography and history.
It’s always worth reminding people of my work on the Li family Daoists:
- the Must-Watch film Li Manshan: portrait of a folk Daoist
- and a roundup of posts.
And we should bear in mind the alternative perspectives of Tibetan, Uyghur, and Taiwanese cultures.
There’s a certain random quality to the topics of some of these retweets, but as with my original articles, I like to keep people guessing, and to remind readers of posts which may have escaped attention, or seem particularly apposite. So you may care to check my Twitter feed, or even “follow” me there…
Stephen Jones: a blog 