Rites And Gift Lists: Reciprocity In Farmer's Gift-giving

As general sense of social action, gifts and its corresponding ritual behavior have been gained comprehensive as well as sustained attention in sociology, anthropology, folklore and some others disciplines. Especially, as one of the important parts of rural daily life, farmers'gift-giving has engaged a large number of both domestic and abroad scholars' attention and interest.From the existing studies of gifts and gift-giving, we can find that researchers tend to choose some developed cities or underdeveloped rural areas to mainly study renqing consumption, social network construction, but rarely focus on the gifts-giving and its inherent principle of reciprocity of farmers from the metropolitan outskirts.This paper is based on a case study of one suburban village in Shanghai, to describe there rites of passage such as marriage ceremony, fertility rites, and funeral rites through careful analysis of some gift lists, focusing on the difference of participants and their gift-giving among the three ceremonial occasions to show the whole family social network and grip the inherent principle of reciprocity in the behavior of gift-giving, in pursuit of responding the existing research and making up the blank.For the above reasons, this study will be divided into six parts. Introduction clarifies the research background, research methods, and a brief account of the object village. Chapter One starts from Chinese traditional rites culture, review domestic and abroad gift research. Chapter Two introduces the major occasions of gift-giving in village N, presents the changes of gift-giving in three passage rites. Chapter Three respectively analyzes three gift lists of marriage ceremony, fertility rites and funeral rites of one village family, presents the family's network construction, and makes a comparison among the three different occasions; and then starts from four wedding gift lists of four families to concentrate on people's gift-giving and relationship in the occasion of wedding. Chapter Four is based on a village family's wedding gift list and gifts-giving expenses to explore the obligations of giving and reciprocating, proposes a new-type principle of reciprocity, which gathers not only renqing but also rationality. Conclusion will be in response to several studies on gifts and gift-giving; finally, states the viewpoint that there are no fundamental changes in farmers'gift-giving, and farmers in the metropolitan outskirts have not been influenced by the urban civilization deep into the level of culture and value, so the inertia of Chinese traditional culture and native culture still play an significant role in farmers'daily life.