The Sensorial Production of the Social

Abstract

In China temple festivals are replete with noises, sights, smells, tastes, and ambient sensory productions. When worshipers converge on a particular temple festival, they produce and experience honghuo (social heat or red-hot sociality). This native concept of honghuo highlights the importance of the social production of a heightened sensory ambience as well as the sensorial production of sociality. In co-producing honghuo the festivalgoers are exhibiting a ‘resonant body-person’ that is in accord with the spirit of mutual responsiveness. I propose a sensory-production model of sensory analysis that foregrounds the active participatory role of social agents in producing a sensorially rich social world. This model extends from, yet also critiques the prevalent cultural phenomenological approach to investigating sensory orders in different cultures. A ‘mindful body’ or an ‘attentive body’ is only the pre-condition for any person's action-full lifeworld.

Keywords:

• Red-hot sociality
• social heat
• temple festival

Acknowledgments

I thank Elisabeth Hsu, Stephan Feuchtwang, and an Ethnos reviewer for their constructive comments and suggestions. Some of the ethnographic materials in this article are drawn from my fieldwork conducted in Shaanbei between 1995 and 1998. I gratefully acknowledge the following agencies and organizations for having funded my field research in Shaanbei and write-up: the Mellon Foundation, Stanford's Center for East Asian Studies, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Committee on Scholarly Communications with China, and the China Times Cultural Foundation.

Notes

Some sections of this article are derived from chapter 8 of my book (Chau 2006). However, with these materials I am making a new argument on the dialectic relations between the social and the sensorial.

Honghuo literally means ‘red and fiery,’ and it can be variably translated as red-hot, fun, lively, crowded, hectic, chaotic, confused, messy, exciting, enthusing, hustle and bustle, festive, carnivalesque, intense, frenzied, sensational, social heat, red-hot sociality, or even ‘collective effervescence’ (Durkheim 1965). In an extended usage it also means prosperous. The word honghuo is composed of two characters: hong, meaning red, and huo, meaning fire. Red is the most highly valued color in Chinese culture. It is the color of happiness, success, and good fortune. Red is thus the dominant color at weddings and the Lunar New Year. On these occasions people wear red clothes, give out red packets with gift money inside, hang couplets written on red paper, release red-coated firecrackers, and generally indulge in red-themed merrymaking. Fire (huo) symbolizes the stove, hearth, warmth, heat, and excitement. Honghuo is the Shaanbei colloquial equivalent of the Mandarin word re’nao. The word re’nao is composed of the two characters re and nao. Re means hot, heat, heady, emotional, passionate, fervent, or feverish. Nao means to stir up and connotes a wide range of excitement: rambunctious, agitated, hustle bustle, playful, busy, noisy, conflicted, exuberant, colorful, to express dissatisfaction, to vent, to plague, to turn upside down, to be naughty, to make a scene.

We have been seduced by the elegance of the rite of passage model (and that of the rites themselves) as well as the exuberance of native symbols while neglecting what is felt but often not remarked upon, experienced but poorly articulated: sociality.

Though Shaanbei villagers do not use the expression ganying in the context of producing red-hot sociality, I believe the concept points to the underlying inter-subjective and inter-responsive nature of sensorialized sociality.

Similar to the Indonesian concept of ramai/ramé, the essence of honghuo is noise: loud, chaotic, and heterogeneous noise. I thank Kostas Retsikas for discussions on the similarities between ramai and honghuo.

I build my concept of a resonant body-person partially upon Elisabeth Hsu's concept of the ‘body ecologic’ (Hsu 1999: 78), though the latter stresses the interpenetration of the corporeal and the environmental while my concept stresses the mutually responsive social body-persons.

Playing drinking games is probably the most important social skill for Shaanbei men. Being good at swinging the fist is a sign of cultural competence and mastery of good human relationships (it has to be played with appropriate courtesy and good humor). It is also one of the most important means of fostering brotherhood and friendship among male peers (usually one only drinks and plays the drinking game with partners of similar age and of the same generational cohort).

This concept draws inspiration from Bakhtin's concept of the ‘popular-festive form,’ though it differs significantly from his more influential concept of the ‘carnivalesque.’

Many non-Chinese societies have concepts similar to honghuo or re’nao: hlermu (fun, pleasurable, exciting) among the Sherpas (Ortner 1978: 81), ramé (crowded, noisy, and active) among the Balinese (Geertz 1973: 446), ramai among Javanese, marua’ among the Toraja in Sulawesi (Volkman 1985: 69). The Japanese use the term nekki (literally ‘hot air’) to refer to the heated ambience at a concert or political rally. They also use the term ninki (literally ‘people breath/air’) to mean popularity (i.e. a person or event drawing many people and their breaths). This word has entered the Chinese language in recent years as a loan word to also mean popularity (renqi). Its usage has evolved into more Chinese ones such as the expression renqi henwang (‘teeming popularity’). The Ethnos reviewer suggests that renqi is a common Chinese term to mean ‘vitality generated at social gatherings’; however, I am not aware of this usage except in the sense that popularity would mean the gathering of a lot of people. Shaanbei people also use the expression renqi (not as a loan word but as an indigenous word), but referring to quite different things. A person with renqi in Shaanbei means that he or she behaves morally, has a good reputation, and is respected by others.

Tradtionally dragon kings (longwang) were agrarian deities par excellence in North China, responsible for granting timely rain for the crops. Each dragon king in each local area has its own legends of origin and magical exploits. In Shaanbei, as in other North China regions, there are a large number of deities being worshiped, the most common of which are dragon kings and fertility goddesses (see Chau 2006).

The ultimate happiness and good fortune in traditional Chinese culture is expressed by the phrase ‘the hall (house) filled with sons and grandchildren’ (ersun mantang). It is not good enough if one has many sons and grandchildren if they are dispersed; the cultural ideal or ideal imagery is to have them all (crowded) under one roof. The opposite of a full, crowded, and joyous house is living by oneself: the worst fate imaginable.

Massing is originally a concept used in architecture referring to the volume (massiveness) of built structures. I have pilfered it for my purpose to describe the large volume of people at a gathering. I prefer massing over crowd because the latter word has accrued a negative connotation (though of course the word ‘mass’ also has negative connotations, such as in ‘the masses’). It is important to point out here that there are of course occasions where a large gathering of people do not generate social heat, though mostly due to the conscious suppression of honghuo-generating interactions: a group meditation session, a mass vigil, etc.

This experience is akin to what Richard Schechner has characterized in the Indian theatre: ‘This blending of theatre, dance, music, food, and religious devotion is to many participants a full, satisfying, and pleasurable experience that cannot be reduced to any single category — religious, aesthetic, personal, or gustatory’ (Schechner 2001: 35). I thank Caroline Osella for bringing my attention to this piece and for wider discussions on comparisons between Chinese and Indian ways of producing sensorialized sociality.