Interrituality in Contemporary China as a Field of Tension Between Abstention and Polytropy

Abstract

This chapter explores interrituality in the context of contemporary China. Since the end of Maoism and the initiation of political reforms in 1978, a greater freedom exists for Chinese people to organize and participate in communal rituals. In this context, in the region called Southern Fujian, both a revival of popular religion and a wave of conversion to Protestant Christianity are taking place. My ethnographic research explores how practitioners in these different ritual systems live together as spouses; as parents and children; as grandparents and grandchildren. I refer to such households as ‘pluriprax households.’ Due to their conflicting ritual obligations, members of pluriprax households in Southern Fujian commonly face complex choices to abstain from each other’s communal rituals or to engage in polytropy, that is to enact rituals from multiple ritual systems. Considering the fact that polytropy was once the norm, how did abstention become a salient way to engage with the religious Other in modern China? This question is important because of the rapid pluralization of China’s religious landscape in recent decades. The chapter zooms in on the ethnographic example of a recently married couple who converted to Protestant Christianity and illicitly abstained from the ancestral lineage’s annual ‘incense division’ procession during Spring Festival. This example forms the basis to discuss how interrituality in contemporary China may be envisioned as a field of tension between abstention and polytropy.

My sister and I told our parents that we cannot participate in the traditional rituals. They announced this to the rest of the family at the funeral, but our family did not understand, they tried to convince us to participate.

…

When it was time for all women in the family to form a circle and kneel down [before our grandfather’s coffin], my sister and I did not kneel. Then, my aunt started pushing the back of my knees, to force me to kneel down. She forced me down on one knee, but God commands that we only kneel before him.

…

[At the grave site] a Daoist master invoked an idol, the Lord of the Soil, to release the ghost, but the ritual failed each time he tried. My sister and I were praying outside to God. When my mother told us to stop praying, promptly the ritual worked. Then she came to us and said: “Your God is also very powerful!” And I replied: “He is more powerful than your God!”

Interview, January 12, 2011

The fieldwork for and development of this chapter were made possible with funding from the Faculty of Theology of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam through the Sustainable Humanities program of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). I am grateful to Professor Yi Lin 易林 and graduate student Li Rongyu 李荣誉 of Xiamen University for their kind support during fieldwork. Pál Nyíri, Marianne Moyaert, and Peter Peverelli of the Vrije Universiteit, as well as Adam Yuet Chau at the University of Cambridge, have supported me during the writing stage of the chapter. I am also grateful to an anonymous reviewer for comments and suggestions.