History and Magical Power in a Chinese CommunityStanford University Press, 01/09/1987 - 280 páginas This book is a case study of history and culture in the Taiwanese town of Ta-ch'i and the group of rural villages that constitute its standard marketing community. However, its scope exceeds that of most community studies. The author attempts to construct a holistic view of Chinese culture from an analysis of the relationship between history and ritual in a particular locality. The author argues that social institutions and collective representations are dialectically connected in the process of social and cultural reproduction. He describes this dialectical process through an analysis of the key cultural concept of ling, the magical power attributed to ghosts, gods, and ancestors. In analyzing the symbolic logic of ling, he asserts that it can be fully understood only as a product of the reproduction of social institutions and as a manifestation of a native historical consciousness. Structuralist and Marxist insights are combined to explain how ling is best understood as both a cultural logic of symbolic relations and a material logic of social relations. The book is in three parts. Part I is a social and economic history that outlines what one might call an objectivist or positivist view of Ta-ch'i's history, describing events as they were, regardless of the perceptions of local participants. This material is a background to the synchronic sociological analysis of local territorial cults that constitutes Part II. In Part III, the author unsettles the objectivist assumptions of Part I by showing how the idiom of ling underlies Taiwanese constructions of history and identity and how the cultural construction of history dialectically reproduces society and creates history. The book is illustrated with 8 pages of photographs, 17 line drawings, and 9 maps. |
Índice
| 1 | |
An Objectivist Perspective | 13 |
The Ritual Construction of Social Space | 49 |
Territorial Cults and Pilgrimages | 61 |
Ritual Action | 93 |
Local Ritual Economic and Administrative Systems | 105 |
Efficacy Legitimacy and the Structure of Value | 127 |
Pilgrimages and Social Identity | 187 |
The Social Construction of Power | 207 |
Conclusion | 229 |
| 261 | |
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Palavras e frases frequentes
aborigines administrative analysis ancestors argue associated Atayal authenticating bodhisattva Buddhist celestial bureaucrats ceremonies Ch'ing Ch'üan-chou Chang Sheng Wang Chang-chou chiao China Chinese collective representations communal rituals Confucian context contrast defined disorder domain economic efficacy encompassing ethnic example female deities festivals Feuchtwang Fu-hsing Fu-jen kung Fukien ghosts gods groups Hakka heaven household identity ideology images important interaction Japanese K'ai Chang Sheng Kuan Kung Kuan Yin Kung shrines kung's ling logic Louis Dumont lu-chu lunar month Ma Tsu marketing community mass-grave spirits mediation neighborhood nested hierarchy nomic notion officials organization p'ing-an-hsi P'u-ch'i t'ang pai-pai patrilineal peasant Pei-kang pilgrimage pilgrims relative religion reproduction ritual role Sangren she-t'uan Skinner's social institutions social relations society spatial T'ao-yüan T'u Ti Kung Ta-ch'i Ta-ch'i's marketing Taipei Taiwanese Taoist temple's territorial cults territorial-cult deities tion town township traditional village temple village-level worship YANG YIN yin and yang yin/yang