Agency, Households, and the Practice of Li (Social and Ritual Protocols): Paper-Offerings in Rural Shandong, North China

Abstract

A common sight at Chinese funerals is the presence of vibrantly coloured and elaborately designed paper-offerings used as spiritual gifts to gods, ancestors, and ghosts, in funerals and religious ceremonies. The ubiquity and continuity of this practice in China suggests that the use of paper-offerings is an important ingredient of Chinese culture, yet an explanation of its longevity remains incomplete. This thesis aims to answer the question: why do contemporary Chinese people still use paper-offerings? Most studies of paper-offerings recognise a close relationship between paper-offerings and religious belief, particularly ancestor worship. Burning paper-offerings serves as a means of communication between the living and afterlife worlds. However, paper-offering practice is not only a religious act explained by ancestor worship but also a dynamic socio-cultural practice. The social practice of paper-offerings reveals ‘structural’ features of Chinese society, including the ‘standardised’ funeral culture involving li (ritual) and su (custom). It also presents distinctive local practices that vary greatly across different regions of China. This thesis ethnographically explores such practices carried out in Shandong Province, northern China, examining how and why paper-offering practice occurs by discussing the interactive activities and relationships among individuals/ households, paper-offerings, and spirits/dead, in daily and ritual life. The practices of paper-offerings concurrently reflect the habitual actions and flexible agency of actors (individuals and households) in local Chinese societies, executed to facilitate human-human and human-spirit relations. These actions and agency are embodied in the practice of li in Shandong. The practice of li is not only a cultural/habitual logic (including filial piety and reciprocity) driving actors to produce social actions, but also refers to the agency enabling them to properly perform and reproduce new actions (and new li). It should be regarded as a process: individual actors, households, the dead, and paper-offerings themselves, are not passive in this process; they gain their own agency through their actions to accomplish the purposes and interact with each other. Ultimately, the practice of paper-offerings is not only produced based on this repertoire of practices of li, but also by interaction among actors, providing them with agency and power.