The Tradition And Modern Invention Of Fangfeng Ritual

Nowadays, the flourishing intangible culture has set off the booming of various rituals, which are created by government. And Fangfeng ritual is one of them, which is just like a spectacular show manipulated by actors. In order to demonstrate Fangfeng ritual practice reasonable, Deqing County government says it's an oldest ritual in this area. However, this demonstration isn't satisfying .For people will easily neglect an important phenomenon, which famous British Scholar Eric Hobsbawm points out in his book "the invention of tradition". It says this which claims to be the old tradition is in fact are recently happened and sometimes is being invented. People only know Fangfeng ritual is a local custom, but they do not clear what this custom is in end and what has been happened in history, and even they have no idea of the break between tradition and normal practice.Moreover, people often use theory "Cultural Adaption" and "Cultural Consciousness" to explain the revival of ritual practice, wishing that traditional culture can adapt to their own culture and make live in the new social environment and play a role. But, those two aspects possess the meaning of Cultural rationalism. Further on, today's ritual practice is just like being created, and even the same tradition will have different meanings which are given by people. Thus, ritual has different interpretation in different contexts and has different interpretation in the same context.Therefore, this article intends to look into today's ritual phenomenon by describing the different courses of ritual through different stages, by noting the desirable discourses on ritual during the same period.