China Review International

This book is written by a well-known anthropologist, but unlike his earlier works it is based on historical data drawn from local gazetteers and Chinese encyclopedic sources such as the eighteenth-century Gujin tushu jicheng. The author has studied Chinese traditional symbolism by analyzing Chinese New Year celebrations in the region around Lake Dongting in Hunan Province.

Part 1, "The Ethnography of the Hubei and Hunan Plains," consists of fifteen short chapters that describe the celebrations from the Little New Year to the Establishment of Spring. The Little New Year was celebrated on the twenty-fourth day of the twelfth moon. This was the day the Stove God was worshipped, a practice that is still observed among Chinese in both China and Southeast Asia. From what we can observe today, New Year celebrations involve the symbolic ridding of the old (and all unfortunate events) and the welcoming of the new (with symbols of hope and prosperity). However, the author's symbolic analysis is largely derived from an agnatic lineage structure, which views women married into the lineage as a threat and a source of pollution. This, coupled with a number of speculations (the words "may be" and "possibly" appear rather often), allows the author to make a number of interpretations that are rather speculative. They raise the question of what is the use of anthropology if it is reduced to presenting knowledge deduced from a logical structure constructed by an anthropologist [End Page 267] rather than knowledge based on ethnographic data or, as in this book, historical evidence? Moreover, how far can one extend the symbolic interpretation of practical actions that have straightforward symbolic meaning?

For instance, in present-day Chinese societies in Southeast Asia and Taiwan, sweeping the house before the New Year proper is a symbolic act of ridding the old to welcome the new. Aijmer, however, further associates this with the sweeping of the graves in the spring (p. 40); the removal of grass and dust at the grave site is associated with the imagery of an agnatic lineage "invaded from the outside by women" (p. 40). He then points out that sweeping houses during the Little New Year was a matter of sweeping away not just dust but the polluting influence of women on an agnatic lineage in order to make the house agreeable to ancestors who would visit during the New Year (p. 42). Dust was a "manifestation of what is foreign, outside and possibly of affinal force" (p. 44) and had to be removed. The ritual sweeping of the house was done with bamboo (p. 41), and Aijmer points out that bamboo is a symbolic device that "can represent a number of notions such as the uterus, dead ancestors, and the force of protective expulsion." This is all well and good, but there is hardly any historical or ethnographic data to back up such an association. I remember how in my childhood my family still used bamboo poles with leaves attached to them to clean the house in preparation for the New Year, but I understood that this was for the practical reason that the bamboo was long enough to reach the higher part of the house. Today, as my friends from Quanzhou in Fujian also confirm, one often lengthens a broomstick to reach a higher spot while doing the ritual cleaning before the New Year. It is not even necessary to use bamboo.

Symbolic analysis is important, but it needs to be grounded in good ethnography or relevant historical data. In relying solely on limited historical data one does not have the advantage of being able to ask people what they think, but the subsequent findings still need to be based on a good interpretation of the record of events rather than a reliance on an abstract analytical construct or an interpretation appearing in some other publication. It...