56
BARBARA E. WARD
The New Year celebrations were in a class of their own. Essentially private, family performances they yet had a public aspect in that they included a jointly observed taboo upon junk movements. From noon on the 30th day of the 12th month until a selected auspicious day in the New Year the junks might not move from their moorings. On the selected lucky day and hour all junks made at least a token move to the accompaniment of a vast noise of firecrackers, after which the prohibition was lifted. Until then all water traffic had to be carried on by sampan alone,
Personal Rhythms: the Life Cycle
In addition to the daily, monthly, seasonal and annual routines that every member of a community experiences more or less at the same time, there are those other rhythmic patterns of social behaviour also experienced by all, but separately: these are the patterns of the life cycle. Birth (and birthdays), entry into adulthood, marriage, entry into parenthood, death, are the common human experiences that many people mark with special observances. Most of the life cycle rituals common among Cantonese in Hong Kong were also practised by the fishermen of Kau Sai, though some, notably weddings, had idiosyncratic features. Briefly, they comprised, a 'coming out' ceremony for babies who had completed the first month of life, a day which marked also the end of ritual pollution for the mother and her junk; a ceremony to mark the entry into adulthood which was held on the eve of the very much more elaborate ceremonies of marriage and more or less assimilated into them; and the rituals following death, which were identical with those of the landsmen with the one exception that the Kau Sai fishermen, like most traditional Boat People in Hong Kong, represented their dead not in tablets of the classical Chinese sort set up in ancestral halls but always in brightly coloured images which were housed in small shrines set into the port sides of their junks.
4. THE RHYTHMS OF MOBILITY: KAU SAI IN ITS
"TERRITORY"
In chapter 3 the emphasis was upon the temporal rhythms of
Page 75
Page 76
56
BARBARA E. WARD
The New Year celebrations were in a class of their own. Essentially private, family performances they yet had a public aspect in that they included a jointly observed taboo upon junk movements. From noon on the 30th day of the 12th month until a selected auspicious day in the New Year the junks might not move from their moorings. On the selected lucky day and hour all junks made at least a token move to the accompaniment of a vast noise of firecrackers, after which the prohibition was lifted. Until then all water traffic had to be carried on by sampan alone,
Personal Rhythms: the Life Cycle
In addition to the daily, monthly, seasonal and annual routines that every member of a community experiences more or less at the same time, there are those other rhythmic patterns of social behaviour also experienced by all, but separately: these are the patterns of the life cycle. Birth (and birthdays), entry into adulthood, marriage, entry into parenthood, death, are the common human experiences that many people mark with special observances. Most of the life cycle rituals common among Cantonese in Hong Kong were also practised by the fishermen of Kau Sai, though some, notably weddings, had idiosyncratic features. Briefly, they comprised, a 'coming out' ceremony for babies who had completed the first month of life, a day which marked also the end of ritual pollution for the mother and her junk; a ceremony to mark the entry into adulthood which was held on the eve of the very much more eleborate ceremonies of marriage and more or less assimilated into them; and the rituals following death, which were identical with those of the landsmen with the one exception that the Kau Sai fishermen, like most traditional Boat People in Hong Kong, represented their dead not in tablets of the classical Chinese sort set up in ancestral halls but always in brightly coloured images which were housed in small shrines set into the port sides of their junks.
4. THE RHYTHMS OF MOBILITY: KAU SAI IN ITS
"TERRITORY"
In chapter 3 the emphasis was upon the temporal rhythms of
Page 75Page 76
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