60
GÖRAN AIJMER
local rustic habits and ways of life. The Chinese ethnographers have left us with a treasure of information, a vast ocean of data which is for us to combine in various ways in attempts at making more systematic sense out of them.
One current anthropological interest is in the development of ‘automaton’ theories in cultural investigation. Such an approach may be of considerable help for the historically minded anthropologist who aims at an interpretative reconstruction of a possible cultural system, and would account for and relate given data (few as they may be) to each other in an interesting way. We cannot resort to discovery procedures as true discoveries will be rare. If we wish to make progress which is not tied up with accidental luck (although we may still need good fortune) or diligence in archival research (which still is of fundamental importance) we have to construct hypotheses. Thus, the basic question we as anthropologists, looking at traditional Chinese society, should pose is: What sort of cultural system would produce such acts as those which have been recorded by Chinese chroniclers? The features of this productive system we must make up ourselves and we must design it so that it not only accounts for one particular instance, or a case, but for all possible cases. We must take a synthetic view which reduces the occurrence of exemptions to a minimum, and accommodates for local and social variation within the generative system that is our hypothesis.
We have to guess at traditional China. Our guesses may go wrong, especially as we sometimes have precious little to guess about; but as long as there are no other and better explanations at hand, for instance explanations which are more inclusive with regard to data, we may feel temporarily satisfied with such hunches as seem to make some sense out of the scattered and few data. This sense should add something which goes beyond what the data qua data say. The present essay is such an attempt at understanding some aspects of the traditional Chinese calendar. By an examination of the Qingming rituals I wish to offer an explanation of the various conventions and institutions of the spring celebrations, which accounts systematically for the descriptive ethnographic data, and contributes to an explanation of the Chinese festival calendar, the whole string of ritual events repeated cyclically from year to year.
60
GÖRAN AIJMER
local rustic habits and ways of life. The Chinese ethnographers have left us with a treasure of information, a vast ocean of data which is for us to combine in various ways in attempts at making more systematic sense out of them.
One current anthropological interest is in the development of ‘automaton' theories in cultural investigation. Such an approach may be of considerable help for the historically minded anthropo- logist who aims at an interpretative reconstruction of a possible cultural system, and would account for and relate given data (few as they may be) to each other in an interesting way. We cannot resort to discovery procedures as true discoveries will be rare. If we wish to make progress which is not tied up with accidental luck (although we may still need good fortune) or diligence in archival research (which still is of fundamental importance) we have to construct hypotheses. Thus, the basic question we as anthropo- logists, looking at traditional Chinese society, should pose is: What sort of cultural system would produce such acts as those which have been recorded by Chinese chroniclers? The features of this productive system we must make up ourselves and we must design it so that it not only accounts for one particular instance, or a case, but for all possible cases. We must take a synthetic view which reduces the occurrence of exemptions to a minimum, and accomodates for local and social variation within the generative system that is our hypothesis.
We have to guess at traditional China. Our guesses may go wrong, especially as we sometimes have precious little to guess about; but as long as there are no other and better explanations at hand, for instance explanations which are more inclusive with regard to data, we may feel temporarily satisfied with such hunches as seem to make some sense out of the scattered and few data. This sense should add something which goes beyond what the data qua data say. The present essay is such an attempt at understanding some aspects of the traditional Chinese calendar. By an examina- tion of the Qingming rituals I wish to offer an explanation of the various conventions and institutions of the spring celebrations, which accounts systematically for the descriptive ethnographic data, and contributes to an explanation of the Chinese festival calendar, the whole string of ritual events repeated cyclically from year to year.
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