College students headed to China
Toolbox
By Gordon Dritschilo Staff Writer - Published: March 19, 2006
POULTNEY — Americans who complain their children are not respecting them anymore may not know the half of it.
A professor and five students from Green Mountain College will travel to China this summer, conducting an anthropological study of how traditional Chinese ancestor worship is changing in the modern day. The trip is funded by a grant of up to $33,000 from the Freeman Foundation.
"What people believe about ancestors and how they believe it is changing rapidly," said professor Mark Daily. "How it changes tells us a lot about Chinese society and the choices facing contemporary people in China. We're thinking what people believe about their ancestors could be a sort of a Rorschach test about how the Chinese are negotiating their traditions in the modern world."
Daily said ancestor worship has a long history in China.
"It's very ancient," he said. "Traditionally, in China, your kinship group was very important. You trace descent through your father's line. Property is inherited patrilinearly and farmland is collectively owned by your patrilinear group. It makes sense to build special rituals to honor and legitimate this kind of social organization."
For centuries, Daily said rural Chinese would bury their ancestors in a mound and honor them each year during a festival. In modern China, he said, those connections are becoming less important.
"Anything involving belief in the spiritual was punished for a few decades," he said. "People are allowed to do this again, but ancestors seem very dead and unimportant today. Cities are expanding rapidly, poor farmers being pushed off their property. What do they do with the ancestors in the backyard?"
For some, Daily said the answer is nothing.
"They care less and less," he said. "They want to go to the big city, they want to make money. Ancestor worship is seen as old-fashioned."
However, Daily said he has theories about how the customs may be surviving. "I'm wondering if people will inflame ancestor worship as a way to resist relocation," he said. "Another possibility is they do the same rituals in different places. They used to go to the gravesite, burn paper money."
Even when ancestor worship disappears, Daily said a certain reverence toward ancestors can remain, with the rituals of the folk religion giving way to a more secular interest in genealogy expressed on Web sites.
"People now are getting together on the Internet," he said. "They make family trees together, things like that."
Daily and his students — Ashley Converse of East Poultney; Tala Wunderler-Selby of Rhode Island; Felipe Estudillo-Colon of Oregon; HariNarayan Khalsa of New Hampshire; and Keith Solmo of Connecticut — will spend five weeks in the Jiangsu province of eastern China.
"It's a flat, fertile rice-growing area," he said. "We're going to get in touch with different households, interview them, do a little participant-observation, do a little genealogical work, a lot of observing, basically good, old-fashioned cultural anthropology."
Contact Gordon Dritschilo at gordon.dritschilo@rutlandherald.com.
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