Spectacle and Sacrifice is a historical study of the role of ritual and festival in the village life of pre-1949 north China. David Johnson tells us in his introduction that “the subtitle of this book was chosen very deliberately: I am interested in the ritual foundations of village life, not the religious foundations. Although I use the terms ‘religion’ and, especially, ‘popular religion’ from time to time, I do so only when there is no alternative.” The reason for this avoidance of the term religion is, as Johnson further writes, “‘religion’ implies an ecclesiastical organization; and traditionally churches have been defined by their doctrines. One was not born into a religion; one became a member by means of formal rituals, such as baptism and confirmation.” “China,” he proposes, “did not have religions in this sense of the word” (11). Many scholars of European and Asian folk religions, myself included, would contest his assertions about the differences between religion and ritual, however. While it is true that Catholicism or Russian Orthodoxy, for instance, have ecclesiastical structures, these matter far less on the local level than has often been thought. Nor is it clear that a person is not born into one of these religions—people are just as much born into Russian Orthodox folk culture as they are into Chinese folk culture. In Russian Orthodox folk culture ritual is every bit as important as it is in Chinese folk culture. I think many scholars of folk religion would also contest his assertion that ritual and festival are not religion. But where I think Johnson is right is in his idea that ritual and festival mattered (and matter) in many religious communities in the world, where rituals and festivals have marked so much of the year and the stages of life. Thus we have had too few studies of the ritual life of people (but, even here, the situation is much better in recent years than one would think from Johnson’s remarks) and it is as a study and reconstruction of the role of ritual and festival in north China that his book makes its contribution.
Spectacle and Sacrifice is divided into three parts. The first is Greeting the Year in Shanxi. Johnson notes that the “most important of the seasonal festivals was New Year.” The village rituals examined in this first part of the book were performed outside of temples and by single villages alone. Here an inconsistency in Johnson’s terminology should be noted: he tends to conflate “ritual” and “festival.” Indeed, on page 19, to take one example, he uses both terms to refer to the same events. But, while festivals and rituals may overlap, the one is not necessarily the other. In this chapter we also see some other inconsistencies that will occur throughout the book: although Johnson says he is writing about pre-1949 China, many of his references are to current times, as, for instance, his photographs of the rituals on page 37, or lack any precise location in time.
In Part Two of his study, Shanxi Ritual Opera, an Overview, he examines “operas performed on stages as offerings.” This is the briefest of the three sections for the simple reason that little evidence for the ritual drama exists for the region Johnson is studying. As a result, many of his remarks refer to Chinese ritual drama more generally, and then to the limited evidence for the local ritual drama.
Part Three of the book then looks at three different multi-village festivals centered around particular temples. Here he wants to give “thick descriptions of both spectacle and sacrifice—the processions, the operas, and the food offerings of the great temple festivals of northern Shanxi—together with the specialists without whom a sai was not a sai: the Entertainers, the Masters of Ceremonial, and the chefs.” He further notes that “all this should make permanently untenable the assumptions (conscious or unconscious) on which so many theories of Chinese history and society have been based, that ‘Chinese peasants’ lived in a simple world where they labored only to stay alive, were powerless to act in their own interests (except when unbearable conditions drove them to rebel), were uneducated and thus incapable of managing complex undertakings, and were so beaten down by life that they did not have the imaginative energy to create their own symbolic worlds but had to make do with customs inherited from their ancestors and what they were taught by their betters; that they were faceless, voiceless, powerless, unknowable, and irrelevant, and therefore could be ignored” (303). This is worth quoting at length because Johnson sets up some straw men here (without naming any of these previous scholars) while he is at the same time rediscovering the wheel: there have been other sophisticated studies of Chinese ritual and religion that have escaped the assumptions he rails about. In fact, considering some of the problems with his own book, it is rather uncharitable of him to lash out at the work of other scholars this way. Indeed, what he says in his next sentence, “But once one stops ignoring the country folk and begins to pay attention to their world, questions begin to arise,” (303) is obvious to the point of banality from the folklorist’s perspective.
Spectacle and Sacrifice is at its best when Johnson is describing or reconstructing the ritual life of the north Chinese villages he is studying. It is clear, however, that much more could have been done: even from his own descriptions it is obvious that the rituals kept their importance at some level throughout the later-twentieth century, but this aspect of the rituals is mostly ignored. Still, even though there are some serious problems with Spectacle and Sacrifice, whether considered as history or ethnography, it provides a useful reconstruction of the traditional ritual and festival world of pre-1949 north China.
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[Review length: 975 words • Review posted on March 23, 2011]