CHINESE RELIGION AND RURAL COHESION
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beings and cosmic processes, but as member of a wider community, were then other kinds of religious and semi-religious groups. Let me start my analysis with ancestral cults.
1. The Ancestors and Integration of Local Communities
Popularly included in the term "ancestor worship" are: rites performed by certain close kinsmen in the post-mortuary period for the soul's peaceful progress through an underworld, usually into rebirth, and performances at the grave-side; regular performances at graves and before tablets or other symbolic representations of the deceased, again by close kinsmen and for the remembered and "socially mature" i.e. married with sons; and performances at similar centres by remoter kinsmen, again for the socially mature but not necessarily remembered, and usually after attentions to them by closer kinsmen have ceased. Such performances might activate different groups based on kinship by descent and marriage, and comprising persons in common households, separate households and even different villages.
I cannot consider all such groups and their worship here although several kinds of ancestral rites are relevant to problems of village cohesion. Those I will discuss and which are of most significance, however, are related to remoter kinsmen and oriented to tablets and other representations of the deceased. A full analysis of ancestral rites and kinship groups has been made very competently by the anthropologist Maurice Freedman and part of his analysis is most relevant to the discussion here2.
Worship of remote ancestors could be a force for integration and control of a community when numbers of members of a village were descended from them. Mono-lineage villages (having their main distribution in southeastern and central China) engaged in common worship of their founder, but wealth was important to the expansion of such cults and their associated organization. A poor village might have only a simple shrine to its founding ancestor, while wealthy villages often had elaborately built halls in which both their founder and other important ancestors were represented.
While it was probably the desire of most mono-lineage villages to have a fine hall and elaborate cult they could only be achieved
CHINESE RELIGION AND RURAL COHESION
11
beings and cosmic processes, but as member of a wider community, were then other kinds of religious and semi-religious groups. Let me start my analysis with ancestral cults.
1. The Ancestors and Integration of Local Communities
Popularly included in the term "ancestor worship" are: rites performed by certain close kinsmen in the post-mortuary period for the soul's peaceful progress through an underworld, usually into rebirth, and performances at the grave-side; regular perfor- mances at graves and before tablets or other symbolic repre- sentations of the deceased, again by close kinsmen and for the remembered and "socially mature" i.e. married with sons; and performances at similar centres by remoter kinsmen, again for the socially mature but not necessarily remembered, and usually after attentions to them by closer kinsmen have ceased. Such perfor- mances might activate different groups based on kinship by descent and marriage, and comprising persons in common households, separate households and even different villages.
I cannot consider all such groups and their worship here although several kinds of ancestral rites are relevant to problems of village cohesion. Those I will discuss and which are of most significance, however, are related to remoter kinsmen and oriented to tablets and other representations of the deceased. A full analysis of ancestral rites and kinship groups has been made very competently by the anthropologist Maurice Freedman and part of his analysis is most relevant to the discussion here2.
Worship of remote ancestors could be a force for integration and control of a community when numbers of members of a village were descended from them. Mono-lineage villages (having their main distribution in southeastern and central China) engaged in common worship of their founder, but wealth was important to the expansion of such cults and their associated organization. A poor village might have only a simple shrine to its founding ancestor, while wealthy villages often had elaborately built halls in which both their founder and other important ancestors were represented.
While it was probably the desire of most mono-lineage villages to have a fine hall and elaborate cult they could only be achieved
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