Hosting Funerals and Temple Festivals: Folk Event Productions in Rural China

Abstract

This article examines how Chinese peasants stage important folk event productions such as funerals and temple festivals, and how it might be fruitful to look beyond the ritual-procedural aspects of religious activities and examine how these activities are socially embedded and socially produced. I suggest that there is nothing particularly “religious” about the ways in which popular religious activities are organized; the same set of social skills and organizational idioms used in peasant secular life is employed in staging ostensibly religious activities: volunteerism based on principles of reciprocal labor assistance, division of tasks among helpers and specialists, and the symbolic weight put on the importance of being a good host. I introduce two key concepts, “event production” and “hosting,” to highlight the social aspects of popular religious activities that have not received adequate scholarly attention.