East Village Funeral Thing Disputes: The Power Of Cultural Aspirations And Characterized

Based on the fieldwork among the Han people community of Dongcun, Menyuan county, Qinghai province, the auther mainly applies interpretive anthropology to dicuss a disputed funeral himself experienced. In the ceremony involved the state, local villagers, and relatives of the death. And the ceremony once had been suspended by the heated dispute about nature of the death, ritual of the funeral ceremony and way of burial between the side of the death's father/mother in law and the side of her father/mother. First, the writer gives a detailed introduction about the event. Through a contractive analysis of three types of funeral ceremony, i.e. death happened at the old age caused by oldness or illness; death at the age of young caused by illness or something like car accident; death caused by murdering; the author gives a picture of local villagers' understanding about death, which was reflected during the process of the ceremony and uncovers, by analyzing other related events, the relationship between people's attitudes towards death and their daily lives.In addition, since villagers' understanding about death was undoubtedly concerned with the spatial concept of the local ritual, which was reflected in the case, the article also gives a description of the villagers' spatial concept of the ritual while describing the event of the funeral ceremony. By this way, the paper attempts to illustrate the interaction between the state and the local village and that among villagers in their daily lives, as well as the power relationshipsjiidden in the symbolism of ritual.Finally, by the event, the author attempts to argue the followingpoints: the ways that villagers of East village combine the traditional ideas towards the culture with the power of the country in their daily lives and the ways that they perform their subjunctive activity when the tradition of the community has been destroyed. In other words, Cultural schema is not only the guide to action but the resources people used to explain the rationality of their action.