A Study Of The Stability Of Temple Based Celebrations Of Chinese Folk Religion

Huanghui started from a type of folk activity Niang Niang Hui,is a greatcelebration which is organized to honor the birthday of Ma Zu in the area of Tian Houtemple in March23rd of Chinese Lunar every year.Huanghui plays an important rolein the cultural and historical development of Tianjin and it represents thecharacteristics of the local people. People even say that the Tian Hou temple wasfounded before the city. Huanghui is also regarded as The Chinese Carnival.However, with globalization and the fast development of the economy, the culturespace formed around agricultural society has been destroyed badly. This was theenvironment in which Huanghui existed. Although the destructive power from theoutside is enormous, the people who use to do the performance in Huanghui insist oncarrying their custom and passed down the tradition to the next generation with aunique way of the stability. With the perspective of the cultural anthropology, thispaper will investigate into the origin of HuanghuiMany social factors have formed the stability of Huanghui tradition. First of all,the loyal faithful belief in Matsu of the local people permeated the religion into everyaspects of their physical and mental life. With the taking advantage betweengovernment and folks, the faith in Matsu expanded itself and contributed to thedevelopment of Huanghui. In addition, Huanghui reconciled the relationship amongthe government and normal people, official life and local life, Great tradition andlittle tradition， the daily life and the carnival, the both inside and the outside socialcircle of the Matsu worship. And Huanghui develops in a stable social atmosphere.The relation among a nation and its government, local cultural elites and commonfolks is the stable base of the development of a faith and an organization. Thus,investigation into the stability of Huanghui must be done comprehensively from theaspects of social structure, blood and geographical relationship, religious belief, socialrules, moral relationship and class relations.The purpose of this paper is to find out the special factors which can keepHuanghui develop steadily in the period of after the intangible cultural heritagepreservation. Therefore, the thesis is trying to use Huanghui as the study case in orderto provide the indication for the further cultural protection.