Asian Popular Culture in Transition

John A Lent, Lorna Fitzsimmons

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136300974
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Asian Popular Culture in Transition examines contemporary consumption practices in South Korea, China, India, and Japan, and both updates and extends popular culture studies of the region. Through an interdisciplinary lens, this collection of essays explores how recent advances and shifts in information technologies and globalization have impacted cultural markets, fashion, the digital generation, mobile culture, femininity, matrimonial advertising, and a film actress' image and performance. Drawing upon a diverse range of sources and methods including historical research, content analysis, anthropological observation, textual analyses, and interviews, Asian Popular Culture in Transition makes a significant contribution to this growing area of research.

Given its broad range of countries, theories, and approaches, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Asian studies, cultural studies, media and communication studies, and gender studies.

Part I

Cultural Markets

1 Market, Popular Culture, and Popular Religion in Contemporary China

The Market/Temple Fairs of Jinhua

Eugene Cooper

This chapter explores how in the context of state economic reform efforts to revive and stimulate rural political economy in China during the early 1980s, secular commodity exchange fairs were given space to function. And once these secular “temple-less temple fairs”¹ were in place, they not only came to serve as venues for the proliferation of a great variety of popular cultural performance genres, but also as sites where a popular religious revival, already underway in many parts of China, found familiar and fertile ground in which to spread. Through their practice in these venues, performers both secular and religious have thereby played a role in expanding the envelope of acceptable popular discourse in contemporary China, while at the same time participating in the improvisation of a new habitus.²

There are many folk genres and practices that we might have chosen to discuss here to make this point, but this paper focuses on three. One is the narrative genre xiaoluo shu (small cymbal narrative), an individual performance art that began life as a counter-hegemonic weapon of the weak in the early twentieth century. The second is the genre with the broadest mass appeal in the temple fairs of the Jinhua region (Wuju opera), and the third is the temple fair of Hugong Dadi and the ying an performances for his entertainment, where we have occasion to observe the contemporary revival/recycling of popular religious symbols and practices represented in some contemporary market and temple fair activity.

Background

The fairs first came to my attention during fieldwork conducted in Dongyang County in 1988 and 1989 in collaboration with Professor Jiang Yinhuo of the Department of Economics, Zhejiang University.³ For an extended period during that work, focused on the rural artisan and light industrial sectors,⁴ our itinerary through the southern townships of the county happened to coincide with a succession of these secular fairs. As we proceeded from the town of Hengdian on lunar 2/23, to Nanma on 2/25, to Huangtianfan on 3/3, to Louxi Zhai on 3/11, to Wuning on 3/28, we encountered a market fair in every town.

Our itinerary also coincided with that of the many peddlers we encountered repeatedly at each successive venue, who were clearly taking advantage of the clustering of fairs in the region during the late spring to hit successive fairs one after another with their arrays of furniture, agricultural tools, clothing, etc. With my curiosity thus engaged, I determined to return to Zhejiang to study the subject further. For the last six months of 1998, I carried out a multi-site field study of market/temple fairs in the Jinhua municipality of Zhejiang Province, and investigated fairs in the towns of Fangyan and Huku (Yongkang County), Qianxiang and Huqi (Dongyang County), Fotang (Yiwu County), Luodian (Jinhua County), Zhudaishi and Shangwang (Lanxi County).⁵

Temple fairs were suppressed or secularized during the early communist period of the 1950s. Temples were closed down by the secular regime, their activities judged to be the “dregs of feudal superstition.” And during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), even the surviving secular fairs, devoted exclusively to trade with no religious content of any kind, were deemed to be the “sprouts of capitalist restoration” and suppressed, along with the four olds – old habits, customs, belief, culture. Temples or idols that had escaped destruction in the early period of secularization were destroyed, defaced, or otherwise vandalized. Popular cultural expressive forms were suppressed except for those that celebrated the virtues of the workers, peasants, and soldiers.

But once China embarked on its path of free market reform, the fairs were recognized as an important medium of commodity circulation and given the geographic and metaphoric space to function. At the same time, the reduction of Communist Party surveillance and attempts to control the minute details of daily life left some space for people to begin to express themselves creatively, spiritually, and ritually, and in pursuit of personal gain/desire. This was experienced by most people in China with a great collective sigh of relief.

The fairs now reverberate (Marcel Mauss would have said “effervesce”) with the performances of popular cultural genres of all kinds, operatic, narrative, acrobatic, craft, artistic, and musical, not to mention games of chance, competing for the attention and patronage of the assembled multitudes. They have become arenas for the expression of creative voices of the most disparate sort, sites where local popular creativity has had the opportunity of responding to, while further enlarging the scope for, individual initiative and expression offered by China’s economic reforms.

Significantly, the fairs in traditional times were ritual occasions, celebrations of the “birthdays” of deities, occasions to make offerings of incense and sacrificial goods at their temples, seeking their intervention in relieving hardship, or granting a favor or blessing. Indeed, when the fairs were brought back for the commercial purposes of the state, popular sentiment often required that they be scheduled according to tradition on the birthdays of the deities of the past, even when their temples no longer existed. The beliefs, discourses, and practices of popular religion were an important component in the cultural nexus of which the traditional fairs were part. Thus, even while the commercial and recreational functions of such fairs have been celebrated and their religious elements officially downplayed in contemporary media, the cooptation of this traditional institution of rural trade to serve the interests of the modern secular state has also added fuel to the revival of popular religion and a recycling of popular religious symbols and practices that fly in the face of the secular state’s stand against “superstition.”

Temple Fairs and Popular Culture

Mikhail Bakhtin wrote of the European carnival: “Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people.”⁶ He continues,

The carnivalesque crowd in the marketplace .... is the people as a whole .... outside of and contrary to all existing forms of the coercive socioeconomic and political organization. ... This festive organization of the crowd [is] ... concrete and sensual ... the pressing throng. ... The individual feels that he is an indissoluble part of the collectivity, a member of the people’s mass body .... [T]he people become aware of their sensual, material bodily unity and community.⁷

C. K. Yang, in his classic work on Chinese religion, echoes Bakhtin (presumably without ever having read him), observing of Chinese temple fairs:

For three days and nights, the emotional tension and the religious atmosphere, together with the relaxation of certain moral restrictions, performed the psycho-social function of temporarily removing the participants from their preoccupation with small-group, convention ridden, routinized daily life and placing them in another context of existence – the activities and feelings of the larger community. In this new orientation local inhabitants were impressed with a distinct sense of community consciousness.⁸

In these “islands of time,” scattered throughout the year, “the world was permitted to emerge from the official routine ... under the camouflage of laughter,” that expression of “universalism and freedom ... relat[ed] to the people’s unofficial truth ... the victory of laughter over fear ... over the oppression and guilt related to all that was consecrated and forbidden.”⁹

In Bakhtin’s analysis, it is the grotesque that expresses the mockery of the quotidian, and he might well have been describing modern Chinese market and temple fairs when he wrote:

All these jugglers, acrobats, vendors of panaceas, magicians, clowns, trainers of monkeys, had a sharply expressed grotesque bodily character... most fully preserved in marketplace shows and in the circus .... [There is] the important role of the inside out and upside down in the movements and acts of the grotesque body.¹⁰

Among Chinese scholars of temple fairs, Zhao Shiyu is most explicit in his evocation of Bakhtin and of the carnivalesque and counter-hegemonic character of China’s traditional temple fairs. The mass character of the temple fair transgressed the hierarchical class restrictions of Chinese society, asserting a counter-hegemonic egalitarianism.¹¹

Compared with the standards of behavior imposed by everyday life in Chinese civil society, the temple fair was a free for all, an arena for the expression of the irrational.¹² From Zhao’s dialectical perspective, the “rational” constraints of traditional Chinese society were to a great extent quite irrational, even to the point of being inhumane, and thus forms of expression involving seemingly irrational behavior and speech often possessed great and humane rationality by contrast.¹³

In Zhao’s analysis, the “carnival spirit [of the temple fair] is an irrational spirit which breaks through regular social standards in the performance of mass cultural activities ... often displaying rough and carnal modes of behavior, revealing people’s natural unrefined character.”¹⁴ The clothing, equipment, and other symbolic goods of temple fair performances often express ridicule of the “official symbolic system,” men wearing women’s clothes and vice versa implicitly critiquing traditional attitudes toward the sexes and their moral standards – all this for Zhao, “a means of borrowing spiritual power to oppose tradition.”¹⁵

For Zhao, the most prominent expression of the heterodox character of the Chinese temple fair was the relatively unrestricted participation of women in the activities of “entertaining the deity.”¹⁶ In traditional society, the words and actions of women were hedged about with restrictions of all kinds, not to mention their bound feet. But the temple fair gave them a legitimate and “legal” opportunity to enjoy a variety of entertainment activities outside the home, one of the few situations in traditional society where men and women could intermingle, even to the point of uproarious talk and laughter.¹⁷

Zhao argues that even in relatively settled times the fairs allowed for a release of people’s feelings, performing something of a “safety valve” function, expressing ridicule of the traditional orthodox restrictions in a socially approved arena. But at times when social relations were tense, the fairs also provided an opportunity to assemble large numbers in insurrection, while submerging the instigators and participants in the anonymity of the crowd. Some religious rebellions of the late Qing Dynasty were actually instigated during temple fairs,¹⁸ and even the Chinese Communist Party used temple fairs in t...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I Cultural Markets
• PART II Youth and Technology
• PART III Gender
• Index