Ritual Chang And Livelihood:the Tensions Between Beliefs And Interests

Religious phenomenon contains two basic categories:beliefs and rituals, of which the differences are ideas and behaviors. According to Durkheim, the ritual itself also can be divided into two categories of ’positive and negative’. The former is characterized by varieties of cults, while the latter contains all kinds of religious taboo. TABOO is a word from Polynesian language, including a couple of totally contradictory meaning, with noble against dangerous and scared against dirty. In Chinese, taboo mainly exists in the folk culture and popular religious.Since taboo is an important part of religious practices, with the change of religion and its social background, ritual taboo will also appear, change or vanish. This article bases on the surveys of the disappearing taboos in one kind of ritual professional group, called ’Nian FO Hui’ in DongZhou Island. Through the analysis of the changes of local social background and religious practices, also the features of Chinese society and folk religions, to analyze the local factors of the changes of Chinese beliefs and ritual taboos.As a result, there are two central issues:the reasons for the declining of ritual taboos’ binding and what causes the utilitarianism in the religious practices of today. In fact, from the fieldwork data, we can clearly see that the pursuit of monetary benefits is the most direct reason for the disappearance of taboo binding.This article consists of five parts. The first chapter "introductory" gives the question consciousness, the significance of the research, the relevant existing research, and the research methods. The second chapter basically introduces the history and current situations of folk religions and ritual practices in DongZhou Island. Especially, describing the status of the NianFoHui. The third chapter mainly descriptively analyzes the processes and consequences of three kinds of ritual taboo disappearance, and points out the Utilitarian change of NianFoHui. The forth chapter starts from the two dimensions of ritual taboo:belief binding and social binding, combining with the social background and the commercialization and specialization of DongZhou Island, to analyze the reasons for the elimination of taboo bindings. The fifth chapter deeply discusses the relations between beliefs and interests in modern china, which is to answer the second central issue of this article.