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Abstract
Reflections of a historian on doing fieldwork in Chinese villages.
Notes on Contributor
David G. Johnson is Professor of History Emeritus at University of California at Berkeley. His research focuses on pre-modern Chinese non-elite culture, including popular religion and ritual, popular performing arts, popular literature both secular and religious, popular iconography, and vernacular architecture, especially in North China. He is the author of numerous books.
Notes
1 The results of the project were published in the Monograph Series of Studies in Chinese Ritual, Theatre and Folklore (Minsu quyi congshu 民俗曲藝叢書), ed. Wang Ch’iu-kuei 王秋桂, 86 vols. (Taipei: Shi Hezheng Folk Culture Foundation, 1993–2008).
2 Harvard University Asia Center, 2009.
3 It was first published under the title “Yingshen saishe lijie chuan bu sishi qu gongdiao zhu shi” “迎神賽社禮節傳簿四十曲宮調” 注釋 in Zhonghua xiqu 中華戲曲 3 (1987).
4 For example, the text entitled Tang yuexing tu 唐樂星圖, published in Zhonghua xiqu 13 (1998) and elsewhere.
5 Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1980. The original Italian edition was published in 1976.
6 New York: Braziller, 1979. The French edition was published the same year.
7 History Today 34.8 (August, 1984), pp. 7–15, reprinted in his Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984), pp. 75–106.
8 Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
9 Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, eds., Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).
10 See p. 3 and the “Acknowledgments” of The Great Cat Massacre.
11 Princeton University Press, 1981.
12 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 23.
13 In his Studies in Historiography (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966), pp. 1–39.
14 Ibid., pp. 3, 6. Note the emphasis on literary texts; Momigliano is here probably referring to classical texts, not the sort of archival and vernacular materials used by Darnton et al. Granted that coins and vases are seldom of use to the student of Chinese popular temples and cults, statues and inscriptions certainly are.
15 Ibid. This too strikes home; I can recall commenting to more than one person on the curious influence that actually seeing the temples where the great sai had taken place, or even the sites where they once had stood, had on me.
16 Ibid., pp. 3, 25. Emphasis added.
17 Arnoldo Momigliano, “Historiography on Written Tradition and Historiography on Oral Tradition,” Studies in Historiography, p. 220. Emphasis added.
18 Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964), p. 122.
19 Thomas Eriksen and Finn Nielsen, A History of Anthropology (London: Pluto Press, 2013), p. 19. For a classic example of this process, see the history of the collection of Augustus Pitt Rivers and its transformation into the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford.
20 Hodgen, chapters 4 and 5. The quotation, from Richard Eden’s 1553 translation of Sebastian Muenster’s Cosmographia (1544), is found on p. 163.
21 An early example is the German Second Kamchatka Expedition of 1733–43. See Han F. Vermeulen, Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), p. 22. For other early expeditions, see Vermeulen, p. 220.
22 Ibid., pp. 164–70; Joseph-Marie de Gérando, The Observation of Savage Peoples [1800], trans. F. C. T. Moore (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 70 ff.
23 Eriksen and Nielsen, A History of Anthropology, p. 23.
24 Obviously there also were differences from the early expeditions: the investigators were natives of the area they were studying, they spoke the local dialects, and they were concerned only with rituals and opera.
25 I refer only to the parts of Shanxi with which I have some familiarity.
26 The other two basic types of history are narrative (telling stories), and analysis (answering questions). Portraiture ignores change over time in favor of complex description.
27 Momigliano, “Historiography on Written Tradition,” p. 214.
28 Ibid., p. 216.
29 See note 1.
30 As appears to have been the case with the Shangu shenpu 扇鼓神譜 ritual of Renzhuang Village in southwestern Shanxi, described in Huang Zhusan 黃竹三 and Wang Fucai 王福才, Shanxi sheng Quwo xian Renzhuang cun Shangu shenpu diaocha baogao 山西省曲沃縣任莊村⟪扇鼓神譜⟫調查報告 (Taipei: Minsu quyi congshu, 1994). For an introduction to the Chinese Ritual, Theatre and Folklore Monographs, see Ethnography in China Today: A Critical Assessment of Methods and Results, ed. Daniel L. Overmyer (Taipei: Yuan-Liou Publishing Co., Ltd., 2002).
31 The major rituals of two neighboring villages in Zhejiang are so different as to each have their own volumes in the Chinese Ritual, Theatre and Folklore Monographs, both by Xu Hongtu 徐宏圖: Zhejiang sheng Pan’an xian Shenze cun de lianhuo yishi 浙江省磐安縣深澤村的煉火儀式 (The ritual of refining fire of Shenze Village, Pan'an County, Zhejiang Province) and Zhejiang sheng Pan’an xian Yangtou cun de Xifangle 浙江省磐安縣仰頭村的西方樂 (The happiness in the west ritual of Yangtou Village, Pan'an County, Zhejiang Province). For “within shouting distance of each other,” see p. 5 of the latter volume.
32 For the original of this celebrated statement by Freedman, the most influential anthropologist of Chinese kinship and ritual of the preceding generation, see his “On the Sociological Study of Chinese Religion,” p. 20, in Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society, ed. Arthur Wolf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), p. 20.
33 The most recent of Grootaers’ publications is The Sanctuaries in a North-China City. A complete survey of the cultic buildings in the city of Hsüan-hua (Chahar) (Bruxelles: Institut Belge des Hautes études Chinoises, 1995).