Page 188 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

WOMEN’S WORK AND RITUAL SPACE IN CHINA 175
placed in an inner room of the house, not the formal living room, together with sticks of
incense. Through the cult of the furenma, women can maintain the health of the
household. Unhappy events such as sickness (especially the sickness of a son) are seen as a
sign of the ghosts’ displeasure (Qiao and Chen 1994:769).
The cult of the paper ‘ghosts’ is associated with married women. Elderly village
women can often be called ritual specialists or shangshen. These women are believed to
have magical power to communicate with ghosts through the medium of a special ‘ghost
official’. In ritual ceremonies they fall into a trance and speak strange utterances in a
performance known as ‘yawning’. The ghost speaks through them in the archaic language
of the region that only older people can understand. On awakening they cannot
remember what they said. When asked about the experience of becoming a shangshen, the
women often said that it happened during a period of sickness. They believe that if they
become shangshen then they will be cured (Qiao and Chen 1994:768).
Within the Dazuo community at large, it is the senior women, not the men, who
preside over the birthday of the Earth God and other deities. Women even carry out rites
for the well-being and safety of the fishing expeditions of the men. Men participate in
these ceremonies but do not control them. For example, men carry a statue of Guanyin
from the temple to the fishing boat, but it is women who preside over the actual
ceremony (Qiao and Chen 1994:773). Women also preside over the birthday celebrations
of the god of war, Guandi (1994:777).
Qiao and Chen conclude that the women preside over and organize virtually all of the
significant ritual activities of Dazuo village and that men participate only marginally. In
this region the women ritual specialists known as shangshen appear to have replaced the
former male ritual specialists known as jitong. Particularly striking is the active
participation of women in ancestral rituals, an activity without precedent in pre-1949
China. In this case one can assume that the preoccupation of men with fishing and stone
engraving, activities that take them away from the village, has opened up a public and private
ritual space in which women could find new forms of agency in a relatively harsh
economic environment.

Conclusion
The revival and reinvention of tradition in China of the reform period has been a much
noticed phenomenon (Siu 1989; Dean 1993; McLaren 1998). Here I have concentrated
on women’s rituals and work practices. I have argued that these gender-specific rituals
comprised an important but ignored aspect of ‘women’s work’ in pre-revolutionary
China and, in some areas, have been reinvented in the contemporary reform period.
Women’s ritual work adds another symbolic dimension to popular perceptions of the
nature of work. To date, our understanding of the conceptual underpinnings of Chinese
notions of work in the pre-modern period has relied almost completely on classical
formulations composed by men (Mann 2000). With further investigation into women’s
ritual work we will be able increasingly to enrich scholarly paradigms concerning the
gendered division of labour in China. From this initial study, it appears that women’s
ritual work reinforced popular understandings of inner and outer domains and the