The academic study of the customs of rural peasants and other local populations began in the early 19th century in Germany, Britain and other European countries. Its emphasis was on the classification of material for comparative analysis, including folktales, ballads and myths. After the Second World War, folklore studies began to include people in urban centres as well. All of this developed in a religious context dominated by monotheistic religious traditions that had long been studied by church historians and theologians, so locally based religious activities of ordinary people were generally not a focus of observation, unless perhaps they included beliefs and activities considered heterodox. This cultural context helped shape the development of folklore studies in the West and elsewhere.
Pages 5–18 of this book include a discussion of the history of folklore studies in China, noting that its early forms were influenced by Japanese scholars and by scholars at Peking University. In 1925, Gu Jiegang and four colleagues at Peking University organized a survey trip to a temple in a suburb of Beijing to study a popular pilgrimage (p. 8). In my view this study of a local religious tradition was a good start, but one that seems not to have been emphasized in later decades. I have enjoyed reading all the essays in this book, but regret the lack of engagement of its authors with the rich and lively scholarship on Chinese local religion that has been carried out by such scholars as Wang Ch'iu-kuei, John Lagerwey, Kenneth Dean, Paul Katz and many others in China, Taiwan, Japan, the US, Canada, France, Britain and elsewhere. Ordinary people in China through the 20th century lived in families and communities permeated with spirits, gods, ghosts and demons, filled with home altars, ancestral tablets and shrines, and local community temples centred on images of deities and murals portraying their stories. If you want to know about the folk, this is where they were and what they were doing. One wants to shout out, “Hello! Hello! this is where the people are!”
In any case, in the 1930s and 40s folklore studies were disrupted by the long war against Japan, and after 1949 by the Maoist revolution. Beginning then, the government began the task of differentiating ethnic groups by language, customs, religion and other factors, which led to the identification of 55 minority nationalities in addition to the dominant Han. In 1950 the Chinese Folk Literature and Art Research Society was founded with government support. After the destruction of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) the Chinese Folklore Society was established in 1983, with an emphasis on folk tales, folk songs and proverbs. From then on Chinese scholars began to collaborate with Japanese, European and American folklorists. As the chapter here by Yongyi Yue demonstrates, their work now includes the study of urban folklore, made important by China's rapid urbanization. This topic includes studies of customs, marriage, childbirth and childrearing. It is good to read these detailed discussions of women's activities in modern Beijing, including the right to refuse childbirth.
The chapter by Junxia Wang is also excellent in its discussion of the history and current trend of women's folklore studies in China, all of this the beginnings of a good correction for the long history of the neglect of women and their social activities. The author writes, “Nowadays, gender equality has become an unshakeable fact at the institutional level. However, does this mean that gender equality has been achieved in practice? It is hard to give an optimistic answer … gender inequality still exists widely in everyday life practice” (pp. 70–71).
Ziying You's chapter on Yao and Shun stories in Shanxi is also good, but still in the 19th and 20th centuries there were thousands of stories about local gods, spirits and ancestors throughout China, so the focus on the ancient deities Yao and Shun, while useful, still shows the old Chinese academic interest in ancient history. In my view, folklore studies worthy of the name are about the beliefs and practices of local folk, wherever and whenever they happen to be.
Lijun Zhang's chapter on tulou buildings in Fujian is fine but lacks a good photo of its topic. These impressive village buildings can be shaped round or rectangular, as I myself have observed, but the photo of Hongkeng village on p. 154 does not show a round one. In any case, the tulou are not a characteristic form of village architecture. Most farmers’ homes in the old days, and certainly in the north, were rectangular, one-storey structures made of fired or mud bricks, with courtyards in front containing pigsties with privies next to them. This and other chapters of this book, while of value, demonstrate that Chinese folklore studies has still not gotten down to the ground to discuss the real lives and activities of the folk. The odour of residual elitism still lingers.
The notes and bibliographies for the chapters of this book are excellent. One hopes that with careful fieldwork the lives and activities of ordinary Chinese people can gradually be better understood.
