Seated at the Altar, New Year 1989.
Before studying the Li family Daoists in Shanxi, my most detailed work was on the ritual associations of Gaoluo village in Laishui county on the Hebei plain. In some ways it’s the most in-depth ethnography I’ve done (for a comparison of my methods at the two sites, click here).
Now I’ve finally made a film on the 1995 New Year’s rituals in Gaoluo (watch here!), complementing my 2004 book Plucking the winds: lives of village musicians in old and new China (Leiden: CHIME, with CD).
Edited from the book, and expanding on the film, under a revised sub-menu I assemble some vignettes, listed here:
- The New Year’s rituals
- A village scholar, and
- Early history
- A village elder
- Cai Fuxiang and Cai An
- Vocal liturgists
- Gaoluo: other ritual groups
- Women of Gaoluo
- The village Catholics, including the Boxer massacre and the Italian missionaries from the 1920s
- Ritual images
- Donors’ lists 2
See also
Other relevant posts (see also the Gaoluo tag in the sidebar) include
- Funerals in Hebei
- The Houtu precious scroll, and
- The Houshan Daoists
- Chinese folk religion: “belief”
- Customs of naming.
These articles overlap to some extent, so it’s worth reading them in conjunction. While they make for digestible reading, I do encourage you to read the book from cover to cover, encouraged by the film!
Since our fieldwork in the 1990s, both on the eve of ICH and since, Chinese scholars have written many articles on Gaoluo (listed e.g. under CNKI), some of which reflect on the association’s recent transformation (e.g. here). Note also Qi Yi’s project for the ICH—click here for notes, photos, and videos from their visit over the 2015 New Year’s rituals, a remarkable contrast with my film!
For an extensive series of field reports on other groups around the region, see under Local ritual. Further related themes are the ritual life of temples in old Beijing, and the Qujiaying association (posts linked here).
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