Page 185 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

172 ANNE E.MCLAREN
Reinventing the patriline in the reform period
The cult to the Lavatory Goddess and the Nanhui bridal laments live on today only in the
recollections of middle-aged and elderly women. They provide a valuable glimpse of the
symbolic construction of ‘women’s labour’ in pre-modern China. My next two examples,
however, are instances of revived and ‘reinvented’ rituals. These examples offer a striking
illustration of the way that women have reinvented rituals once considered to be the
prerogative of men alone, including ancestral rituals intended to perpetuate the patriline.
Both examples come from southern coastal provinces.
Li Yongji (1996) carried out research into the lineage rituals of Jiayuan village, Zijin
County, Guangdong, beginning in the late 1980s. Throughout China women were not
supposed to take part in the sweeping of the tombs or worship in the ancestral temple. This
was true for Jiayuan village as well; women were not even allowed to observe the rituals.
After the males returned from sweeping the tombs, they would dine at the banquet table.
Women were not allowed to sit down at the banquet and busied themselves serving the
men. Once the banquet was finished, the women ate the leftover food in the kitchen
(Li 1996:119).
In the 1980s the ancestral rituals were revived in Jiayuan village but the changed
environment of socialist China shaped the revival in surprising ways. Families of means
(families of cadres and business bosses) started to rebuild the lineage tombs. Tomb-
building became an aspect of conspicuous consumption as wealthy families competed to
construct lavish tombs and memorial stones (Li 1996:120). However, the male cadres and
business bosses were reluctant to play too prominent a role. Li notes that ‘due to poli-
tical considerations, they relied mainly on their mothers or wives to carry this out’
(1996:119).
Women have been important not only in the reinstatement of lineage rituals but also in
the rebuilding of many temples smashed during the Cultural Revolution. Some of these
new temples are devoted to female deities. Sometimes a local woman will claim to have a
vision calling for the building of a particular temple (Li 1996:120). There are even cases
where certain older women are said to be transformations of the deities concerned or to
have received special skills from the deity, or to have become ‘wives’ of the deities (Li
1996:121). Senior women in the village played a leading role in initiating younger women
in this reinvented ‘women’s ritual culture’. In Jiayuan village, four women were most
active in local religious activities, two of them in their sixties and two in their thirties.
Their chief advisers were women in their seventies who had previous experience of
‘seeking help from the gods and asking questions about the future’ (Li 1996:120). The
younger women seek advice from the older ones on how to proceed then go around to
every household to get financial support. Women gathered funds to rebuild temples such
as the Five Crops Temple (Wugumiao) (Li 1996:121). Women who donated more than
10 yuan to this project had their names engraved on a stone memorial. The men played a
supportive role behind the scenes. For example, since the older women were illiterate,
they relied on their literate menfolk to help with the stone engravings. Li observed that
although cadres did not take direct part they gave tacit support to these activities.