The Folklore Study On Funeral Customs Of ZhongPai Village

Funeral ceremony, Memorial ceremony, Initial ceremony and Wedding ceremony are the most important ceremonies in traditional customs. Funeral ceremony is so special because it is a custom that the dead couldn't experience. It reflected not only a duty or a filial piety or a ceremony that the dead's family members settled down their relatives, but also contains a mystical soul worship in people's heart, a comprehension that the world beyond death. More importantly, Funeral ceremony enhances the blood relationship within families, and help to communicate with its surrounding social relationship. This paper, chooses my hometown, a village lies in middle of Anhui Province named ZhongPai as the research subject. According to observation the whole process of funeral ceremony of ZhongPai County through some field works as collecting literature, in-depth interview, and participant observation involved in funeral ceremony, recording the "living folk" populated in this region and gets the first-hand information. On the basis of analyzed and interpreted some folkloric activities that have symbolic meaning in funeral ritual so that to understand the essence of the rural area in AnHui, grasp the context in funeral custom correctly, and sort out different custom way to heritage. By this mean is beneficial to know the new social environment and expand a variety of resources, make it better to promote cultural and ideological progress.The rural region in Anhui always advocate Confucianism.The Confucian always emphasized that Earth is the best shelter in funeral customs, Pay attention to protect dead body, and take this as the way to show people's filial obedience. For the dead show the filial piety in essence to pay attention to funeral mass. In 2004,I personally experienced the whole process of my Grandpa's funeral, and very interested in my hometown's funeral customs. At the same time some ideas existed in his mind. In 2007, I major in folklore master degree in AnHui University. During this period, I read a lot of books about funeral customs in the school's library as I took all the courses about folklore and anthropology. I finally decided to choose the funeral customs in the middle of Anhui province as my master's dissertation after three years' learning experience. In 2010,I went back to my hometown to do field investigation during vacations and gathered much first hand information through interviews and observations which is the groundwork for my paper.The first part of the essay sketches ZhongPai's location in the middle of Anhui province and gives a summarization about the studying of funeral ceremony by researchers at home and abroad. The next part of the essay describes the whole process of the funeral ceremony in ZhongPai in detail. The third part analyzes the folk customs underlying the funeral phenomenon that happens in the funeral ceremony. In the end of the paper is a brief summary for the three previous chapters.ZhongPai funeral and burial customs is the most important folklore culture in the rural region in AnHui, and has great influence in its people. Even it has melt into people's life and become an unchangeable rule of them. Despite it has its advantages, dregs exist in it in a cetain degree, especially its religious superstition: extravagant of money in funeral, "Immortal spirit" idea evokes luxurious funeral ritual, which runs counter to strengthening of spiritual construction. As a result, reform must be carried on in its customs, though it is a hard and long term politic task in thought.