Music and Dance for Interment Rituals in a Chinese Village—On the Glocalization of Musical Performance for Local Religious Practice

Abstract

T telephone rang. On the other end of the line was my brother-in-law’s niece, Xiumin.1 “Uncle, Mrs. Zhou-Cao is going to the mountain on the 11th. Will you be joining us?” She was using a typical Chinese euphemism: “going to the mountain” refers to interment rituals. It was the night of January 7, 2004, and I was in my home town, Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian province in southeast China, on the coast facing the Taiwan Strait. For the past four days I had been attending, in Fuzhou, the 37th World Conference of the International Council for Traditional Music, but that evening I decided to cut short my attendance at the conference so that I could go and observe Mrs. Zhou-Cao’s interment rituals. Since the late 1980s, I have been examining contemporary sociocultural change in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) through case studies of performing arts in the Fuzhou region. My main focus has been on music and dance in religious events, including mortuary rituals. In this region, music plays an important role throughout the mortuary procedure, especially in the final part, the interment rituals. In this paper, I first offer an interpretive ethnographic account of the music and dance serving Mrs. Zhou-Cao’s interment rituals, and then discuss the following issues: since the early 1980s, under the impact of rapid social change in the PRC, how and why have the music and dance serving religious events in the Fuzhou region changed? What are the sociocultural implications and significance of the contemporary practice, especially with regard to religion? For this paper, my depiction and discussion are mainly focused on the glocalization of the musical performance in question.