Optional Day: Time And Life Forms

The so called Day-choosing folklore, one of the folk-faith in China, means Chinese select good day and avoid unlucky day to act according to day-choosing art. Instancing the inhabitants of several villages in the north of Qin'an County, Gansu Province, the article explains the meaning of the habit and faith, regarded as a kind of life-form, and its relation to time. The key view is that time originates from labor, i.e. profane life, and that day-choosing habit creates another life-form and neglects and confines it. As a result, it produces a non-time experience. There is seven parts in the article.In Introduction, I will argue that it is necessary to interpret folk culture from ontological structure of human and life-form, based on phenomenology.From Chapter One to Three, it is an ethnological record of day-choosing folklore in the region. In the first chapter I will present farmers' life in the horizon of time, such as calendar, labor and leisure, festival, the idea of destiny, taboo, etc. In the following chapter I will introduce art, occupation, art classics, and operating method in day-choosing folklore. In the third chapter I will show the way by which people choose a lucky day for several great activities, their views of sprites, their suspicion and alternative, and rites in it.In the forth chapter I shall argue that human labor is the origin of time conscious and is the principle and model of the profane life that emerges with temporal.The following chapter concludes that labor isn't the only life-form and that in the dialectic view it contains negative dimension and leads to a sacred life dimension. This is a non-time or beyond-time experience. Participants in the day-choosing folklore reach the domain of this experience which gives meaning to their profane life by means of following the time-order of cosmos.In the last chapter I will show interdependence and competition between profane and sacred life, which shapes the structure and characteristic of day-choosing folklore. Lastly I describe that this folklore is mixed with other folk-faith and time experience, and briefly contrasts with modern time.