Form without Social Foundation: Ritual Revival in Contemporary China

Shining Wang, University of Virginia

Existing ritual studies assume an organic relationship between ritual and society. However, traditional cultural forms of postcolonial societies are structurally displaced as Western-origin institutions reorganize the state and social life. Drawing on a bottom-up ritual revival in contemporary China, I ask how revivalists understand their efforts given that the social foundations that once sustained traditional moral practices have disappeared. I find that revivalists justify the value of revived Confucian rituals through their efficacy, particularly their capacity to morally transform participants, in comparison with existing ritual forms in Chinese society. However, whereas traditional Confucian ritual was historically embedded in a broader social and institutional context that enabled its cultivating function, the ritual revival takes place in a modernized context. For revivalists, certain conditions can be reconstructed to achieve ritual efficacy while others are irrecoverable—most importantly, the collapse of the ancient indigenous cosmology and the loss of Confucianism’s status as state ideology. Aware of the structural constraints, revivalists lower their expectations of ritual efficacy and focus on the ritual stage, through intensifying emotional and bodily experience to produce efficacy at the micro level. I show how cultural actors navigate the structural and cultural ruptures that Western modernity produced in the postcolonial context and present a complex relationship among social conditions, ritual practice, and ritual efficacy.

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 Presented in Session 82. Global Modernities and Alternative Epistemologies