Traditional Rituals & Modern Adaptation

As a basic factor of culture and social symbol, belief and ritual are traditional topics for anthropologists. Two cases taken respectively in the Zhuang ethnic group in Bandeng village of Donglan County, Guangxi Province, China, and Tai Khoen (a branch of Shan ethnic group) in Jengtung City, Eastern Shan State, Myanmar for this research are aiming for a comparative study on the frog/drum worship rituals of the two ethnic groups during their traditional new year. Relevant theories of religious anthropology and cultural change are applied to answer the following two questions:A. How does culture of different ethnic groups reveal on the same worship objects of frog and drum;B. How does the functional transition of ritual symbol reflect its sociocultural change, and how do traditional rituals adapt themselves to the modern time, a theoretical discussion.The complexity of relations between traditional rituals & modernization determines that it is not enough to only look on the function of these rituals during the process of modernization from negative point of view. Traditional rituals can function in the new social environment by self-adjustment, or participate in social competition through cultural production and reproduction. As a matter of face, there is no absolutely binary oppositie concept of'tradition'and'modernization'. Both of the two cases meet with this point.Besides preface and epiloge, the dissertation includes 5 chapters.Chapter 1, Literature Review and Field Work;Chapter 2, Ritual Ethnography: Bandeng & Jengtung;Chapter 3, Ritual Inheritance and Development: An Embodiment of Multiculture;Chapter 4, Symbolic Meaning and Social Function of Rituals: Interactive of Culture and Society;Chapter 5, Adaptation of Traditional Rituals in Modern Time.