The Gods' Sett Lement-beliefs Commuinity In West China

This paper is a study of rural communities and it's characteristics in west China. In accordance with different religious beliefs, China western society could be divided into Tibetan Buddhism region, Islam region and the Evil-ghost Belief in southwest region. Based on the three board divition, this research establishes a structure with three dimensions which includes Space, Time and Behavior to reveal the influence and function of religious spirit and beliefs schema upholded by different religions within settlement and community construction.The spiritual world and schema of religious believers are hugely different to non-religious believers, which is bound to shown in reality world. In this research, I mainly focus on the physical characterization of religious beliefs. Through the inspection of how religions project its ideas and schemas on space createing, time order and social behavior, and transform it to appearant symbols in community, Ireveal the village-level communities characteristics in vast western-there is akind of pattern that I would like to call it "Beliefs Community". Among these communities, the mainstream ideology is not about market, commodity, andeconomic but about ghosts, heaven, hell, afterlife.......which is mainly related toreligion. During the course of interaction between environment, beliefs and behavior, Beliefs Community is formed, this pattern is, and will be in long terms a basic pattern in vast western rural communities. Within the dimension of Space, the most direct physical characterization of religious beliefs is the settlement and housing patterns. In the settlement and house building, the sacred-secular duality law and religious expression could be found in various details such as the site, towards, materials, patterns, decoration, alleys and paths, water, temples and other public spaces. The highlight in the village space is the hallmark of religious symbols and religious buildings, which create a space imagery with religious guiding, and show the religious spirit of the place as well.In terms of dimension of Time, firstly, religions involve in all important moments or stages of people's life, especially birth, old, illness, death and marriage. The religious contents are expressed by folk and formed an "Experience Bank" of social life. By providing spiritual comfortment, the bank helps both individuals and families to face with the important events and to transit smoothly in a traditional way. Meanwhile, the time spend on religious events organize the life of the individual and the community. Ceremonies and worships, particularly vairous repetitive, simple, and easy to imitate movements, such as chanting, kow-tow, make individual pay his/her life time to religious affairs, the cumulative amount of the time of each individual and the community is terrific huge, which deeply impact to local region. It not only strengthens people's religious emotion, but also organizes their structure of daily life, therefore establish the specific time order for the community. Finally, as public activities, religious ceremonies and festivals integrate the community group and their annual course. Various kinds of religious ceremonies, festivals, divide the annual period into small satges according to the sacred-secular law. People step into two kinds of time in turn, organize their life in accordance with two kinds of time, and form sense of belonging and identification by doing something specific in some specific time together.In terms of Behavior in community, first of all, religious influence exists in the social resource organization. The institutionalized responsibility for social resource in charged by religions historically now is transfering to non-institution format to maintain in some degree, especially in the rural settlements and mountain regions, where the cost of modern society system is too high, and the social undertakings is lacking of. Culture, education, medical care and other public resources still demonstrate religions influence and importance. Secondly, the behavior and attitude tendency in communities reflect the ethical and moral values which are deeply influnced by religions. What people do, or do nothing, what they praise on, or reject to, normally comply with or depend on the requirement of religious doctrine. Finally, religious strengthen community integration therefore maintain the social order and adjust the social relationship. As a kind of occupation, religious provide upward social mobility as well to some extent for people in community.Through the above three aspects of description and analysis, this study reveales the religious connotations and characterization of space, time and behavior in the communities of western society. Such kind of community, both its physical patterns and its ethos, show very different appearance and characteristics to mainstream and modern society. Therefore, this paper believes that the existence of west China, is an existence of "another China". In addition of institutionalized rules, religions, as a non-instituion factor, profoundly affect the western social system, which can be evidently found from physical space and time till to the human soul. Based on this, I will further discuss the value advantage of the settlement pattern, living mode, and the religious spirit included in which at the age of globalization. In beliefs community, the existence of human being is in a state of harmony with nature, others and environment. This state is exactly scarce resource in mainstream society. Cultural and ecological diversity and harmony will become the most valuble exchange resources of the western to the eastern even global society.For the point of religious research, this paper is an empirical study which follows up the line of inductivism. It achieves qualitative judgment by detailed description of community sapace-time pattern and social behavior characteristics. The conclusion mainly comes from site and field work experiences. The research materials are mainly first-hand, in addition to providing evidence summary conclusion, it also intendes to provide an on-going description with historial meaning. For the point of community research, community has been regarded as an unit of production for long time, its material contents are particularly concerned on while the ethos and spirit nomarly are ignored. This paper attempts to remedy the deficiency of fragment and disaggregated breakdown of community-based research. With a comprehensive of sociology, psychology, architecture, anthropology and other disciplines vision and approach, and a structure in which the elements of space, time and community behavior are as three dimensions, and religion is as a cross-dimension, I'm trying to build a three-dimensional framework in order to display both the spirit and the material, dynomic and static of community in a unified framework.