ABSTRACT
This chapter surveys the changing modern fortunes of amateur village-wide ritual associations on the Hebei plain just south of Beijing.1 Their communication with the gods is represented by a core group of ritual specialists, performing both vocal liturgy and melodic instrumental music for funerals and a rather sparse calendar of festivals for the gods. These groups were revived with cautious enthusiasm around 1980, but by the time we visited them in the 1990s, they faced problems in maintaining activity and recruiting ritual specialists-by contrast to some other types of religious groups. I will try and suggest some reasons for this. In the Introduction I set the scene by outlining broad and narrow senses of ritual specialists in north China. The next section introduces amateur ritual associations on the north China plain, and related terminology. I then refine the picture by discussing how, before the 1949 Communist Revolution, they shared the religious domain here with sectarian groups. Although religious life was doubtless constrained under Maoism, our assessments of the post-Mao revival are often based on flimsy assumptions, not only about Maoism but about the preceding period, itself no “golden age.” Through interviewing senior practitioners, a more nuanced view of twentieth-century ritual practice emerges. Since focusing on revival since the 1980s tends to dismiss the Maoist period too readily, I discuss the maintenance of the ritual associations under Maoism. I then explore how, despite a clear revival in the 1980s, these ritual associations later appeared to be facing difficulties in adapting to the loss of village community, faring worse than other types of religious practitioners in north China-individuals such as spirit mediums, household groups such as occupational lay Daoists, and intra-village sectarian groups with inter-village networks such as sects and Catholics, whose more defined and frequent practices promise more specific salvation. The Conclusion seeks to locate such varied manifestations of religious practice in north China in the wider Chinese context.
