In Search of the Folk Daoists of North China by Stephen Jones (review)

In the twentieth century, studies of Daoist rituals at temple fairs and funerals in China have had fruitful results. Since the 1980s, more in-depth studies have been achieved by both domestic and international scholars. But most research done by Western scholars has been focused upon rituals in southern China. Among the few book-length studies on northern Chinese rituals is Stephen Jones’s In Search of the Folk Daoists of North China (Huabei Minjian Daoshi yu Fashi《华北民间道士与法事》). Jones’s book is the result of a great deal of personal fieldwork, which provides firsthand information about rituals performed in the rural north.

The rituals Jones investigates are performed by folk Daoists for temple fairs and funerals. Jones stresses that the Daoists who perform rituals as a profession are virtually ordinary farmers, not temple dwellers as most Westerners suppose them to be (5). A humorous description of such Daoists in the Chinese newspaper Haixia Dushi Bao (2010) does accord in a sense with Jones’s statement that “[l]ay Daoists are those who perform funerary rituals for the dead at daochang (land of the way) based on traditional customs. They live their daily lives in the same way as ordinary farmers. Once informed of a ritual gig, they dress themselves up in daopao [道袍 Daoist robe] and get into the business right away.” No Chinese dictionaries of Daoism have included an entry for “folk Daoist.” However, “folk Daoist,” or minjian daoshi/tu daoshi (民间道士/土道士) in Chinese pinyin, is popular in many rural regions and used to refer to lay Daoists, most of whom are farmers but do ritual business when requested by neighbors. Perhaps because of their way of life as laypersons and as folk Daoists living in the countryside, their etiquette and customs in serving funerals and temple fairs have been neglected by scholars of Chinese Daoism. Official Daoist associations in the country also look down on such Daoist rituals because of the practitioners’ double status as poor farmers and household Daoists. Thankfully, In Search of the Folk Daoists of North China describes a cultural context of folk Daoist rituals in northern China.

Part 1 (chapters 2–3) is a survey of Daoist rituals performed in the upper part of Shanxi Province and in Hebei Province located to the east of Shanxi. The fieldwork done by the author includes observing various performances of rituals and interviewing folk Daoists. To demonstrate the result of such field-work, Jones describes ritual sequences through tables and photographs that illustrate performing manuals. Jones observes that most folk Daoists in the countryside have learned their ways of performance either as a family legacy passed down from generation to generation within the circle of the family or from masters in their own village. Folk Daoist performers of one household usually practice rituals in collaboration with other Daoist performers. These Daoists live in the same way as other villagers and do not consider themselves to have special status in the village. They gather for performance only when occasion requires it. On such occasions, they mainly play instruments to accompany singing for liturgical sessions. Their musical band features blown instruments as melodic leaders. Jones finds that the main instruments include mouth organ (sheng 笙) and double-reed pipe (guan 管), which lead the band with a frame of small gongs (yunluo 云锣) as percussion. Other instruments may join the band if available, for example, bamboo flute (di 笛), small shawm (suona 唢呐), and two-stringed fiddle (huqin 胡琴). Jones’s fieldwork, however, appears too limited to support his conclusion that this system of instruments is dominant in the rural north (24). In fact, other systems of musical ensemble different from the above instrumentation might have also been used by folk Daoists in northern China. For instance, Chu’s monograph (2008, 9–25) shows that drumming plays an important part in folk Daoist rituals in the rural...