Page 180 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

WOMEN’S WORK AND RITUAL SPACE IN CHINA 167
paradigm uncritically. Recent path-breaking work by Dorothy Ko (1994) has led to a fresh
assessment of the dominant image of ‘the Chinese woman as victim’. Ko asks different
questions of her historical data, including the issue of women’s perceived ‘vested interests’
and complicity with a system that seemingly kept them in subordination. Where scholars
have looked, often in vain, for signs of female resistance to historical injustice, Ko looks
instead for signs of women’s ‘contestation and negotiation’ with the social processes that
sought to constrict and define them (1994:8).
Ko’s important book deals with communities of elite women in the lower Yangtze
delta during the seventeenth century. She is able to demonstrate how these women built
up communities based on letter-writing and shared activities and interests. These
communities valorized women’s activities within the home, allowed for ‘diversity and
plurality of expression’, and thrived precisely because they were not subversive of the
status quo (1994:292). Ko is fully aware of the limitations of her focus on this ‘tiny and
highly atypical group of men and women’ for the study of Chinese women in general
(1994:296) but demonstrates convincingly the huge gap between Confucian ideology and
actual practice for her group of elite women.
Did rural non-elite women also have ‘vested interests’ in the existing system? Are there
signs of ‘contestation and negotiation’ with oppressive patriarchal structures? Here I will
ask what role women’s oral and ritual culture played in individual and community
perceptions of a woman’s value and the worth of her labour. This is a question rarely
asked, not least because of the general lack of recognition that women do in fact have an
oral and ritual culture that is not just one of ‘assisting’ at the rituals important to men and
the lineage. Women’s oral culture has little or no place in ‘scriptural Confucianism’—
that is, formulations in the classics, memoirs of the literati, stipulations of the state and
similar. However, this does not mean that a rich oral and ritual culture associated with
women did not exist. In recent decades, anthropologists have explored rituals involving
either female deities or fertility cults (Sangren 1983; Cahill 1993; Baptandier-Berthier
1994, 1996; Shahar and Weller 1996; Gates 1996:177–203) and women spirit mediums
and healers (Cass 1999:47–64). One finds occasional mention of household deities but
little analysis (e.g. Feuchtwang 1974). Many studies refer briefly to links between ritual
culture in general and women’s labour—for example, cooking and the God of the Stove
(Chard 1995) and ritual and sericulture (Mann 1997:151–9; Bell 1994:196–201; Bray
1997: 251). Emily Ahern has noted the ‘pollutive’ and ‘dangerous’ nature of women’s
ritual role, especially in funeral rites (1975). However, in the absence of a comprehensive
study of women’s role in Chinese ritual culture, it is hard to assess the extent to which
women’s ritual culture related to their productive labour. It is also difficult to assess how
women’s ‘ritual work’ was perceived within the community. The case of women’s ritual
culture in Korea may well be instructive here. As Laurel Kendall argues in her book on
Korean women shamans, women’s rituals have been commonly regarded as ‘peripheral’
cults, remnants of a ‘primitive’ or ‘discredited ancient faith’ (1985:24). In
contradistinction to the perceived marginal and ‘primitive’ nature of women’s cults,
Kendall argues that the women’s rituals she investigated ‘are integral components of Korean
family and village religion. Women and shamans perform essential ritual tasks that
complement men’s ritual tasks’ (1985:25).