School Flag-raising Ceremony Of The Ethnographic Study

With the publish of "the National Rag Law of the People's Republic of China" in June 28th, 1990, flag's raising ritual has been held in primary schools and junior middle schools every week. The ritual is a special culture activity. Since it entered the school, it began to influence the culture of the school, of the education, and even of the society. Nowadays, the flag's raising ritual seems to be an essential part of the primary and junior middle schools. To be an essential part, it hasn't been researched properly-what affects on earth the ritual makes? And how it works? With the deepening of the education researching, and with the fining of the research objectives, we should give out an answer to the question."For a start, the god has given each nation a cup, a contented cup, from which people drink their life." To be an apothegm from Indian, it seemed to predict the way of culture anthropology researching-a way of study culture in the culture. Meanwhile, to study the flag's raising ritual and to gain its proper meaning, we should root in a certain kind of culture.I selected S middle school of Lu Wan , Shanghai as my objective of field research. In October, 2003 I began the field research on flag's raising ritual of schools with an attitude of anthropology researching and researching way of participation observation and interview. On the basis of gathering, coordinating and analyzing of the related materials, I fixed my research framework on three levels: my presence and observation, participators' opinion, flag's raising ritual of schools in the culture system.To be a researcher, I got my observation and understanding on the ritual of S middle school when I entered the school. In my view, the ritual is in a process of structure-antistructure-structure. It tells the differences between holiness and common customs, demonstrates the power as a sign, realizes the cognition of the nation, as well as constructs the society memory of nation, city and schools among the teachers and students. The students and teachers of S middle school understand the ritual as participators. In their minds, the ritual is an obvious educational activity, and a habitual activity, which shows they would pay less emotion in it As a part of the culture system, the ritual not only reflects the features of S middle school's culture, but also constructs the school's culture of S middle school. Meanwhile, the ritual also shows the features of education culture: achievements standard and hierarchy.When laid in the whole society culture and history, the ritual shows deeper meaning: the common wills of people community endows the nation with holiness. At the very beginning, people community empowers the nation in the form of religion. And when the religion can't show the common wills of people, the concept of "nation" was promoted to a holy position, which empowers the nation. It is the "myth of nation" which needs transferring and reconstructing as well. The ritual with its natural holiness, especially the direct flag's raising ritual of schools, works in the transferring and reconstructing the "myth of nation".