The Research Of Folk Religion Change

This thesis was established through the analysis of folk religious transition form and by describing the ethnography of villager's life in a natural village in northern Shaanxi to interpret the changes of folk religion in Chinese rural society.The study was based on holism and the perspective of internal religion, setting from three levels of religious life-family, clan, and community-which individuals relied on. Each level was analyzed from six aspects-time, space, rituals, beliefs, featuring and audiences. Besides, the transition form and developing process of folk religious in local village was summarized, and the causes of changing was also researched from the features of local social structure to explore the mechanism of transition in folk religion. The family-oriented "rites practice" has the biggest change in form as the society develops, but the responsibility and emotions for family of what expressed in rites of passage was always the most important content; Although the family-led "ancestor worship "has adapted the increasingly dynamic mobile society to some extent, the blood of human relations and the reverence for ancestors of what highlighted in memorial ceremony always occupied a vital place in the hearts of the tribe; the community-led "yeye worship" has enriched in content and form with the improvement and openness of society, but what more prominently implied by the carnival-themed worship ceremony and temple fair was still the stick to human ethics and value manifested in principal life.Through field survey and literature research, this study argued that: firstly, what has been influenced by external changes in local village folk religion was its organizational form, but there has not been a fundamental change in the most intrinsic beliefs and emotions, especially the foundation and origin of emotions-"home" culture. And there was no real change in the innermost religious spiritual quality, which in local range can be understood as embedding into cultural mechanism of local social structures, and closely connecting with local social norms and moral orders. Secondly, the change of folk religion in local village was affected by joint force of both external society and inner village, and the change was not the content demise of original religion, but the stacked transition of traditional elements with new elements, model of which was the demonstration the cultural transitional law. Thirdly, the natural of local folk religious change was the awaking and highlight of individual consciousness, the normalizing and dominance of collective consciousness. On the one hand, the individual consciousness has promoted the transition of folk religion; on the other hand, the local regulation formed by collective consciousness has defined the boundary of change. Therefore, the mechanism of changes in folk religion presents an interactive coordination of individual consciousness pushing the boundary defined by collective consciousness. In the final section, based on the previous three conclusions and combined by the practice of local folk religious transition, the thesis extended to discuss the relationship between religion and society, complex interactions between which have exhibited coupling relation of crossover, overlapping, parallel, then and again.