| For decades, the subject of whether China is a religious society has been absorbed many sinologists and domestic scholars. The sub-subject of this issue, folk believes, also called the diffused religion, has caught the scholars from a variety of disciplines such as folklore, religious study as well as anthropology. However, most of these researches focus on the Han ethnic society, trying to obtain certain conclusion from the study of diffused religion among Han people and to construct the panoramic shape of folk believes in China.This article is based on the fieldwork in Wase, Dali, Yunnan province, and systematically investigates two festivals which called the Sakyamuni Festival and the Benzhu Festival, using fieldwork method, participatory observation and literature study. With ethnography, this article tries to display the shape and the operation mechanism of the diffused religion of Bai people, and to bring about the idea of that the diffused religion in this area is institutional, including the structured space and time as well as the institutional operation of sacrifice activities.Chapter one is trying to obtain the cultural location the villages that are involved in the two festivals, and to reveal the differences between the east and the west of Er Hai lake, and between the farming community and fishing community. With the comparison among ritual space, administrative and market space, and the investigation of temple system, the second chapter tries to illustrate the stability of ritual space, so that to support the idea that in the term of space, the diffused religion is structural. Chapter three and four are the ethnographical description of the Sakyamuni Festival and the Benzhu Festival, using the material of the fieldwork to elaborate the operation mechanism of the diffused religion. The last chapter using professor Yang Qingkun’s binary paradigm of the institutional religion and the diffused religion as background, combined with ethnographical materials to illustrate the features of the diffused religion in Wase area from several aspects as theology, time and space and operational mode of the festivals. |
