| In 2022 the village of Pingzhai,Xijiang Town,Leishan County,Guizhou Province,celebrates the 13-yearly Guzang Festival.Apart from the extraordinarily long festival period,the two most notable traditional events of the festival are the ancestral rituals and the collection of flower ribbons,not only because of the solemnity and grandeur of the spectacle,but also because the financial pressure generated by these two events is not easy for ordinary families.Human societies are created and sustained by reciprocal relationships based on the exchange of goods.This perspective will help to understand and give a name to the ’irrational consumption’ of the Hmong during the Guzang Festival.By examining the gift-giving behaviour in the Guzang Festival,this study concludes that on the one hand,the Guzang Festival carries the migration history of the Hmong people as they gathered and dispersed,gathering friends and relatives in the form of ancestral rituals,and strengthening the ties between friends and relatives and even within the community through the sharing and giving of offerings;on the other hand,the Guzang Festival,held at two important points in time,during the important stage of consolidating the achievements of poverty alleviation and rural revitalization,and during the the COVID-19 pandemic,is a modern-day feast of potlatch,showing the outside community through the revelry and display of the local people the great changes in Hmong society since the last Guzang Festival and the resilience of the Hmong people. |
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