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Alchemy of the Ancestors:

Rituals of Genealogy in the Service of the Nation in Rural China

Tim Oakes

University of Colorado at Boulder

Introduction

In 1984, a group of performers from Caiguan village in southwest China’s GuizhouProvince were invited to perform at the Autumn Arts Festival of Paris. Festival organizers that year had made Chinese opera a centerpiece of the festival program, and brought three opera troupes from around China to perform. They included a kunqu troupe from Nanjing, a yueju troupe from Shanghai, and this ragtag band of Guizhou villagers. The opera troupes were accompanied by a group of teahouse storytellers from Chengdu, puppeteers and musicians from Beijing, and choral groups from Xi’an, Chengdu, Beijing, and Suzhou. With kunqu and yueju, the festival featured two of the principle styles of traditional Chinese theater. Kunqu is performed throughout China, and was the dominant theatrical style between the 16th and 18th centuries, while yueju, also known as Shaoxing opera, is a well-known regional opera style originating in ZhejiangProvince.[1] Compared with these refined styles of opera, the Guizhou villagers performed a more rustic and primitive kind of theater, known asdixi – typically translated as ‘ground opera.’ Seeming more like an mysterious ancient ritual than a form of high entertainment, dixi was bestowed by festival organizers the title of “living fossil of Chinese opera.”[2]

Dixi is a relatively recent term for a form of masked ritual theater commonly performed by ‘tunpu people,’descendents of soldiers sent from central Chinain the early Ming to conquer the remnants of the Yuan Dynasty and secure the southwestern frontier over 600 years ago. The di in dixi is descriptive (a drama performed ‘onthe ground’ and not on a stage) as well as evocative, suggesting a performance that is unmistakably of the earth and of the folk. Xi, or ‘play, drama’,then locates this earthy folk drama within a broader landscape of Chinese opera.Dixiexplicitly subsumes local folk ritual under the umbrella of a national theater tradition. The term itselfthus conveys something of the ‘living fossil’ idea celebrated in Paris.

Before dixi was discovered by China’s rising tide of ethnographic and folklore research – part of the broader ‘culture fever’ and ‘roots searching’ that galvanized Chinese intellectuals and cultural producers in the 1980s – tunpu villagers simply calledittiaoshen, or ‘leaping spirits.’ Tiaoshen was a masked exorcism ritual performed over a several-day period during New Year’s celebrations.[3] In some tunpu villages, tiaoshen was also performed during mid-summer as well. Invoking heroic ancestors, legendary warriors, and protector deities, tiaoshen exorcised the community of evil spirits and entreated the gods’ blessings for good harvest and fortune in the coming year. Tiaoshen was the primary form of religious practice among tunpu men (tunpu women mostly practiced Buddhism), and it is often referred to by local scholars and officials as a form of ancestor worship.[4] But officially, tiaoshen amounted to what the Chinese government would call ‘superstition’ (mixin). This made it illegal. And indeed, the practice was banned in many villages throughout central Guizhou during the Cultural Revolution.

But in turningtiaoshen intodixi, and in suggesting by this renaming that it was a kind of ‘living fossil’ of national cultural heritage, scholars and local officials colluded to make tiaoshen legible to the state. Throughout China in the 1980s, scholars were discovering in the countryside the remains of folk cultural traditions thought to have been stamped out by ideological zeal of the Mao era. Their training in orthodox Marxist evolutionary theory led to a spate of ‘living fossil’ labels for any cultural practice that seemed to have survived encrusted in the sediment of China’s ‘timeless’ rural society.[5] Rituals such as tiaoshen were thought to have missed out on the evolutionary developments theorized by Engels (after Morgan and Tylor) and taken as a fact of history by a whole generation of Marxist Chinese scholarship. In the 1980s, masked ‘leaping’ dramas all over rural China were seen in this light, as frozen specimens with a direct link to a distant past.[6] Ironically, however, the ‘living fossil’ label did not simply take a cultural practice ‘out of time’ but allowed it to be understood from the materialist perspective of evolutionary social theory. ‘Living fossil’ practices like tiaoshen were thus explained in a way that was acceptable to the state. Instead of a superstition, tiaoshen became part of the nation’s ancient heritage, a primitive pre-opera form that occupied the key evolutionary transition from exorcism rituals to refined opera forms like kunqu and yueju.[7]

Dixi, then, is not officially regarded as a form of popular religion (which is viewed with suspicion), but as a form of national theater (to be promoted as cultural heritage). Dixi turns tiaoshen into a frozen cultural object rather than a dynamic expression of faith or belief. Observing this trend, David Holm notes the common practice of ascribing the ‘living fossil’ label to rural China’s vast repertoire of ritual theater. “Living fossil,” he writes, seeks to link the origins of masked ritual theater “back to the nuo ritual of classical times, as mentioned in the Confucian Analects and as described so colourfully in Han dynasty sources. The intervening two thousand years are seen as an unbroken line of traditions.”[8] Thus, by linking the local folk ritual of tiaoshen to classical tradition on a national scale, the term dixi frames that ritual with a modernist logic, seeking to calcify it as a state fossil, as national heritage. Referring to a similar process of state-sponsored heritage production in Daoist temples of Southeast China, Ken Dean and Thomas Lamarre argue that a modern logic tends to frame Chinese ritual activities “as remnants or survivals of traditional, archaic or premodern modes, thus ignoring the contemporaneity of ritual activities in Southeast China (as well as the history of ritual practices).”[9]

The transformation of tiaoshen as popular religion to dixi as cultural heritage is more than a labeling exercise. For as an artifact of cultural heritage, dixi is now consumed on demand. Dixi is now performed not once or twice a year to cleanse villages of malevolent powers, but many times a day – in quick 15-minute versions – to generate income from tourists and ‘promote Guizhou culture to the world.’ Scholarship on dixi has become something of a mini-industry in the region too, with some villages being promoted as ‘research laboratories’ of ancient Chinese culture. The situation appears to be one in which ancientritual has been captured by the modernist logic of both the state and the market, rendering its original efficacious properties incapacitated. In fact there are villagers who themselves make this claim, complaining that dixihas become meaningless even as its importance in village daily life has increased beyond measure. “No one understands dixi anymore,” one old performer told me with a sigh, “the tourists don’t understand it, the villagers don’t understand it. Even some of the performers don’t understand it. It’s just entertainment now.”

In this chapter, however, I want to offer a more complicated interpretation of this modern framing of ritual, one that highlights the fundamental role of ritual as a contemporary site of negotiation between villagers and the broader powers of the state and the tourism industry. As Dean and Lamarre point out, ritual practices in contemporary China find themselves at a dangerous intersection between the state and global capital.[10] While this always puts ritual at risk of capture by outside powers, it also provides an avenue by which that power is negotiated and, indeed, made efficacious in its own risky ways. Just as tiaoshen performers masked themselves forprotection from ritual danger when they conjured the gods and invoked the blessings of their powerful ancestors, dixi performers today risk the calamitous powers of tourists and state officials as they entreat the favors of policies and cash. In short, ritual efficacy in rural Guizhouis reconstituted through tourism.

Ritual and the boundaries of authority

Ritual is typically viewed as a symbolic and representational activity, as opposed to the instrumental activity of everyday life.[11] The term tends to evoke a kind of nostalgia for the world of enchantment, where symbolic acts carried deep meanings, and behavior was matched by faith and belief in a world beyond the here-and-now. But ritual is also a term that tends to carry with it the baggage of modern epistemology. Viewing ritual as symbolic action requires, in other words, that those symbols be decoded (by ‘experts’ and trained intellectuals). The study of ritual has thus focused on “a search to clarify the meanings of rituals, to show the ways in which their symbols encode and evoke systems of cultural discourse.”[12] This approach has viewed ritual as a “referent for meaning whose true essence resides only beyond the ritual itself.”[13] Ritual becomes a mere instrument of conveyance for some deeper meaning, ‘something else’ hidden behind a superficial world of symbolic practice. The symbols deployed in ritual acts, to draw on Roy Rappaport’s recent definition, are “not entirely encoded by the performers.”[14]

Yet, as Talal Asad has pointed out, what matters for ritual practitioners is not the interpretation of some stable foundation of meanings, but the skills needed to do what is prescribed. “In other words, apt performance involves not symbols to be interpreted but abilities to be acquired according to rules that are sanctioned by those in authority: [ritual] presupposes no obscure meanings, but rather the formation of physical and linguistic skills.”[15] Ritual is more about doing than about conveying meaning, and it can occur without much regard for meaning at all.[16] And while the implications of this view of ritual are many, one significant outcome of thinking about ritual as action more than interpretation is to notice the ways ritual practice negotiates one’s relationship to authority. Consider, for example, Catharine Bell’s view of ritual efficacy:

Ritual is the medium chosen to invoke those ordered relationships that are thought to obtain between human beings in the here-and-now and non-immediate sources of power, authority, and value. Definitions of these relationships in terms of ritual’s vocabulary of gesture and word, in contrast to theological speculation or doctrinal formulation, suggest that the fundamental efficacy of ritual activity lies in its ability to have people embody assumptions about their place in the larger order of things.[17]

Tiaoshen invokedthis “larger order of things” by enacting both the cosmos of ancestor deities and the social power relations that governed village life. Two of the most important ritual practices associated with tiaoshen - kaixiang qingshen (‘opening the box; inviting the gods’) and kai caimen (‘opening the gate of wealth’) – both enact clearly this larger order of celestial authority and the villagers’ position within that order. Kaixiang qingshen – carried out prior to the actual masked performance –involves opening areliquary box and inviting the masks stored there to come out. The masks are then marched through the village to temples, wells, ponds, roads, bridges, and gates. At all the prominent households of the village, kai caimen occurs as well, in which the spirits are entreated to bestow wealth upon the village. The deferential handling of the masks, and the reinforcement both of celestial power and material wealth enacted in these rituals suggests precisely the embodiment of power relations highlighted in Bell’s perspective above. As the authors of Ritual and its Consequences similarly argue, “ritual creates and re-creates a world of social convention and authority beyond the inner will of any individual.”[18] They add that, “Ritual acknowledges authority relations and their consequences for human existence in the world by positing existing relationships between bounded entities, rather than by serving as an instrumental information code that conveys descriptive messages. Ritual both relies on and supports shared social convention.”[19]

Like tiaoshen, dixi also invokes a “larger order of things” and enacts the villagers’ place in that order. But unlike tiaoshen, dixi is now performed in a world where epistemological assumptions about deeper meanings underlying symbolic actions have come to shape and even enable its very existence as ritual. The transformation of tiaoshen intodixi offers one instance of the state extending its authorizing power over the realm of ‘Chinese culture’,something it has done historically and continues to do today.[20] In making tiaoshen legible as dixi, the state has enrolled ritual practice into the task of nation-building, which is something heavily laden with symbolic action. Dixi has become a representational act ready-made for interpretation by experts. Framed in a modern epistemology, it is less important for what it does than for what it means. As such, dixi defines culture as the state’s business and turns cultural practice into a “technology of government.”[21] Dixi enacts the social conventions of state cultural authority, and the role of villagers as on-demand performers of a ‘culture’ not entirely encoded by themselves. For dixi is encoded by a broader set of authorities as a ‘living fossil,’ as ‘national heritage,’ and as ‘tourist attraction.’Performing dixi is no longer an obligation to the ancestors but to the nation, and to the tourists who consume the nation. Ritual practice is thus not viewed here as a category distinct from other realms of everyday life – that is, a vestige of the past – but as an expression brought about by the obligations of everyday life in which dynamic and powerful authorities are always present.

But as the authors of Ritual and its Consequences also argue, ritual both reinforces the boundaries of authority, andmakes the transgression of those boundaries possible. This is because they view ritual not simply as expressive of boundaries, but also as constitutive of them. If we consider dixi a ritual not in terms of what it represents but in terms of what it does, we find something more complicated going on. Once ritual is viewed more as an enactment of the world than as its symbolic representation, it becomes possible to appreciate ritual acts as constantly negotiating the boundaries of authority. I have found some of this ‘negotiation’ in the practice of dixi. With tourism as a major part of the development program to ‘Open Up the West’ (xibu dakaifa)in China, ritual and lineage today serve as sites where villagers link themselves to dominant discourses of nation-building on the frontier.[22] A recycled state discourse of civilizing the frontier is brought to life through the touristic framing of tunpu ritual. But in dixi we find tunpu villagers act both as objects of the state’s frontier cultural development strategies as well as active negotiatorsof the boundaries of their own power, autonomy, and authority within an rapidly evolving cultural economy.

Governing with culture

There should be nothing surprising about the claim that the Chinese state is intimately involved in managing cultural production and ritual practice. Yet while there is a long history of cultural governance in China, that governance is now articulated with a global discourse in which culture is increasingly viewed as an expedient resource for specific modernization and development objectives. Around the world there has been a ‘cultural turn’ in development policy and practice, with culture being valued as a resource both for the establishment of economic value chains and for community empowerment, ‘good governance,’ and ‘sustainability.’ As Sarah Radcliffe and Nina Laurie noted in a recent review, “Increasingly, development looks to culture as a resource and as a significant variable explaining the success of development interventions.”[23]

The global discourse of development has always carried with it the baggage of implicit norms in which an assumed hierarchy of standards and a teleology of progress were used as evaluative measures. Enlisting culture as a development resource not only fails to discard this normative baggage, but in fact reinforces it with another set of implied norms. Development policy, Radcliffe and Laurie note, often assumes that successful development “enhances economically and socially beneficial patterns of behavior and attitudes, while downgrading what is seen as ‘inappropriate’ culture.”[24] It turns out that both development and culture are underpinned by hierarchical notions of progress. And it is this normative quality of cultural development that lends itself so well to governance objectives.

States and institutions are investing in culture as a front line in combating poverty, substance abuse, and criminal activity associated, for example, with gangs.[25] One of the most explicit instances of this can be found in Brazil’s ‘Culture Points’ program, where the state invested in bringing hip hop to poor youth in the hopes of turning them into more governable citizen-subjects. As summarized by the Minister of Culture, Gilberto Gil, Culture Points has resulted in “young people who are becoming designers, who are making it into media and being used more and more by television and samba schools and revitalizing degraded neighborhoods…It’s a different vision of the role of government, a new role.”[26] It is precisely this kind of cultural development that was envisioned when the UN announced its ‘Decade for Cultural Development,’ which spanned most of the 1990s. Culture has been enshrined by such diverse institutions as UNESCO and the World Bank as a good in and of itself, both a consumable product and a vital tool in the ordering of society.[27]