Fuji Lozada's Webpage    

Catholic Ancestors: Being Catholic and Chinese in Rural Southern China

Eriberto P. Lozada Jr.
Harvard University

Paper Abstract

Multiple social processes such as modernization and state consolidation have resulted in vast changes in contemporary Chinese rural communities. In littoral southern China, where communities are increasingly integrated into global systems, to understand what makes a village a meaningful social group means understanding how villagers produce locality. Even the most conservative practices such as funerary ritual have been transformed as cultural practices adapt to the changing needs and expectations of villagers in the Chinese countryside. Based on fieldwork conducted in Meizhou Prefecture from 1993 to 1997, this paper will examine the funerary practices of a Hakka Catholic village to depict how villagers produce locality through the especially charged moments of ritual events. Villagers' participation in the prototypical transnational organization, the Roman Catholic Church, paradoxically creates locality. How is transnational space made into a place where everybody knows your name? What is the role of ritual in the everyday production of locality? Through the lens of funerary ritual and ancestor veneration, this paper will argue that the challenges of transnationalism, modernity, and the evolving nation/state, faced by individuals and the village community as a whole, are being met through transformed boundary mechanisms that define who is and who is not a member of this community. Faced with processes of deterritorialization and fragmentation, villagers reframe their community through the adaptation of cultural practices such as All Souls' Day as they contextualize their place in history and implement their visions of the future.

---

  Dept. of Anthropology
  Davidson College
  Box 6969
  Davidson, NC 28035 USA

  office: Chambers B12
  tel. 704-894-2035
  fax. 704-894-2842
  erlozada@davidson.edu

---