While this site has become a labyrinthine miscellany encompassing a variety of themes in world music (including Indian raga, jazz, Western Art Music, and so on), as well as film, fiction, and jokes, at its core is my fieldwork from 1986 to 2018 on ritual life in rural north China. So as a navigational aid ..read more

To remind you of my mini-series on Hunan province—its ritual and expressive cultures, the famine, and social issues: The great Yang Yinliu’s wide-ranging fieldtrip in summer 1956 including remnants of the Confucian ritual in Liuyang The famine, and glimpses of the early 1960s’ cultural revival in response to desperation (for more on the national famine ..read more

During interludes between rituals,my Daoist friends enjoy trying to decipher the weird squiggles in my notebook. Talking with Chinese people, when one doesn’t understand a bit of dialect or an obscure term, they sometimes adopt a device that supposedly solves the problem, as the wise Victor Mair describes in his recent post on Language Log ..read more

Taipei: Daoist priests working for the Hsien-miao altar 顯妙壇,led by master Chu K’un-ts’an 朱堃燦, “open the eyes” of a god statue damaged in a temple fire. All images courtesy of Yves Menheere. [1] Pursuing a major theme that I broached in my superficial survey of music-ritual cultures in Taiwan, I learn much from Yves Menheere ..read more

It’s always worth consulting the Taiwan series Minsu quyi (Journal of Chinese Ritual, Theatre, and Folklore”, introduced here). I look forward to reading the two volumes (2023, vols. 221 and 222) of “Special issue on popular beliefs, religious texts, and local communities in the sinophone world: in memory of Professor Daniel L. Overmyer” 民間信仰、宗教經典與地方社會：紀念歐大年教授專輯. Indeed ..read more

I still find it worth reminding you of my page on Rethinking Zhengyi and Quanzhen, for its fundamental rethink of Daoist ritual practice. In my book In search of the folk Daoists of north China (2011) I began exploring the false dichotomy between Orthodox Unity (Zhengyi 正一) and Complete Perfection (Quanzhen 全真) branches (note especially pp.17–18 ..read more

For Roger Federer, click here.In snooker, another instance of “effortless grace” is Ronnie O’Sullivan. Always (nonchalantly) on the trail of non-action, I came across the stimulating article Helen De Cruz, “Sprezzatura and wuwei: a Daoist approach to European courtly grace” (2023). While Daoism and Zen have long become glib buzzwords in the West, some such ..read more

Like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheelNever ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel […] Or the ripples from a pebble someone tosses in a stream […] Like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind! —The windmills of your mind. I’m both amused and bemused ..read more

Fujian province in southeast China is one of the most vibrant areas to explore folk and ritual expressive cultures, which its local scholars have been particularly avid in documenting. Its traditions—always rooted in life-cycle and calendrical ceremonies—are known to outsiders largely through the Minnan region in the south of the province, particularly the treasury of ..read more

Itinerant beggars performing for funeral, north Shanxi 2018. My photo. In vocal traditions of Chinese expressive culture (as I keep harping, or drumming, on), the neat pigeon-holes of folk-song, narrative-singing, and opera disguise a continuum from solo singing though to fully-staged genres with larger forces, all oscillating between a range of points along the ceremonial–entertainment ..read more