This is to direct you to yet another vignette on the ritual association of South Gaoluo , based on my detailed historical ethnography Plucking the winds. Do explore the wealth of further material on Gaoluo as well as its tag and the many other village ritual associations on the Hebei plain also in the top menu! For the rich local traditions of Chinese ritual—as I never tire of observing—we have ample silent, immobile textual documentation, but much less material in the public domain on film see this list.
Ritual drama has been a substantial component of this field ever since the projects initiated by C. And besides documenting textual and material aspects, he avidly recorded local Chinese ritual drama on film—mainly in the early s, before migration, pop music, the lures of material enrichment, and heritagification were too rampant. The playlist of films mostly around half an hour, with French voiceovers on his YouTube channel includes exorcistic drama from south China, such as the nuoxi masked dramas of Jiangxi, Hunan including Mulian drama; see also here , and Anhui; as well as Nantong near Shanghai; and, again in Hunan, New Year rituals of Hengshan and among the Miao.
For a full list, with wide-ranging tribute, see here. Of two excerpts from shadow-puppetry in Shaanxi cf. Chinese shadows , the second also including marionettes from Chaozhou and again Shaanxi:. The playlist also ventures to Tibet —a grand monastic festival near Lhasa, and lhamo opera—as well as south and southeast Asia: Kerala, Java and Bali—as well as itinerant story-tellers of Bengal illustrating their religious paintings, part of a rich Asian tradition documented by Victor Mair in Painting and performance: Chinese picture recitation and its Indian genesis cf.
Tibetan lama mani , and for India, here. A reminder of my post on two local cultural workers in the heady days of fieldwork on ritual in the early years after the collapse of the Maoist commune system: early encounters with liturgists and temple fairs in rural Hebei, and my introduction to the ritual associations of Gaoluo. The Chinese provinces of Gansu and Qinghai including the Tibetan region of Amdo are home to a patchwork of ethnic groups for some basic resources on the region, see here.
Carter D. Holton —73 was a missionary who worked with his wife Lora in northwest China from until The footage itself is alas silent, with a basic voiceover recorded in by Robert Carlson — , himself son of missionary parents active in the region at the time. One element in the ritual practice in the region is self-mortification. While other ritual activities also suffer from 21st-century pressures, they seem to remain lively; but Roche notes that such mediums are now becoming less common.
