Marriage Ritual Changes and Social Network Reconstruction

Author: Ji Guoxiu
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-07-01
Features: The author uses Qingyuan Town in the eastern mountains of Liaoning Province as a case study, comprehensively applying theories and methods from folklore, anthropology, and sociology. This expands the scope of traditional marriage rituals in folklore studies and explores the changes and functional transformations of marriage rituals. The author argues that the revival of traditional marriage rituals in the past two decades is a grassroots strategy employed by local people to respond to state power and social change. Through this strategy, people recombine traditional marriage rituals, update social networks, and thereby reconstruct social networks to give continuity to daily life, integrate past and present time experiences, gain a sense of belonging to the local community, and collectively transfer and release the stress of social change, ultimately reshaping the folk society. The author proposes that folk phenomena can transcend time and space because they possess two types of meaning structures: conservative meaning and added meaning. Focusing on people's daily life and emphasizing the rationality of folk knowledge are the distinctive features of this book.