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Editor's note: On the occasion of the Spring Festival, the WeChat public account of "Exploration and Controversy" specially planned the "Spring Festival Caprice" column, inviting a number of humanities and social science scholars to talk about their individual experiences and learning feelings in the past year. Through full and keen brushstrokes, or narrative, or lyricism, or discussion, or academic exploration, or cultural perception, or realistic thinking, scholars provide a feast of unique ideas for readers who have long cared for and supported "Exploration and Controversy". A series of articles will be launched during the festival. "Exploration and Controversy" would like to wish everyone a happy Chinese New Year!
In the post-pandemic era, how can cities place our "year"?
Peng Minzhe | Associate Professor, School of Literature and Journalism and Communication, Ocean University of China
This article is a special column of the WeChat public account of "Exploration and Controversy"
It only represents the personal views of the author and does not represent the position of this official account
Unless noted, the pictures in the text are from the Internet
Spring ploughing and autumn harvest, in the winter, the crops into a dormant period, people who have worked hard for a year can finally stop, enjoy a short rest, and pray for the coming year. Through festivals, a nation divides nodes in natural time and establishes a cyclical rhythm in which nature and society are in harmony. The Spring Festival, which is regarded as the "beginning of the year", is the most important mark in the time vein of the Chinese nation. In the traditional Spring Festival folklore, many of them are closely related to farming culture, and the growth cycle of crops determines the time consciousness of farming peoples.
The twelfth month of the lunar calendar is called the "Wax Moon", and in this month, the official ceremony of the solemn "Wax Festival" is held, and the "Li Ji Suburban Special Sacrifice" cloud: "The Son of Heaven is the Great Wax Eight." "There are eight gods to be sacrificed: Xianshi I, Si Xi II, Nong III, Postal Table Four, Cat and Tiger V, Fang VI, Shui Yong VII, and Insect VIII. The objects of worship include the founding gods of agriculture, the gods in charge of agriculture, the gods of field pavilions and roads, the gods of rivers and canals, the gods of embankments, the gods of insects, the gods of ceres, and even the gods of cats and tigers, as they help eliminate voles and wild boars that destroy the bookmakers.
Some folk customs that have been handed down today are also imprinted with distinct agricultural civilization. For example, "sacrifice to the god of vesta", the twenty-third day of the waxing moon to "send the god of vesta", and the fourth day of the New Year to "welcome the god of vesta", the sacrifice of the stove activity reflects the human worship of "fire". The third day of the first lunar month is The birthday of Taniko, to celebrate the beginning of the festival, and fasting to eat rice, the third day of the first lunar month is also known as "Xiaonian Dynasty" and "Red Dog Day". On the tenth day of the New Year's Day, all stone tools such as grinding and milling cannot be moved, and even sacrifices are set up to enjoy the stones, fearing that the crops will be hurt, also known as "stone immovable" or "ten immovable". Henan customs on this day the family pays tribute to the stone incense, in Shandong Yuncheng and other places there are acts of lifting stone gods. In the Annual Customs, the dragon dance is to pray for the wind and rain to be smooth and the grain to be abundant. Since the dragon is the master of the ocean in mythology, and the main water of the ocean, the dragon has naturally become the rain god of crops. Another example is the Spring Festival's divine drama and social drama, which are to sacrifice the land god, and the social god originates from the worship of the land. Land is the place where human beings live and live, the most important source of human beings' needs for subsistence data, and the place where crops are bred.
Due to the geographical climate of different regions and the different agricultural production habits, different customs will also be derived from different places. The "new customs" that we often experience are actually the products of agricultural civilization in traditional society, and some of these customs have a strong utilitarian nature to match the process of local agricultural production.
Today, when China is striding toward urbanization, the function of new customs is gradually weakening, and the process of urbanization has made more people move from the countryside to the city, which has further diluted the original rural customs. In the past two years, under the normalized management of the epidemic, many units have required employees to "not leave the city unless necessary", primary and secondary schools have recommended that students do not leave the local area 14 days before the start of school, "non-essential non-travel" in the epidemic area, and inter-provincial travel needs to carry nucleic acid reports... Various "travel restrictions" policies have made the return of urban people to the hometown for the holiday a choice that needs to be carefully considered and weighed. For various reasons, people can only choose to celebrate the New Year in place. As a result, "and recognize other places as hometowns" has become a common urban memory in the post-epidemic era.
The characteristics of the urban New Year are very different from those in the countryside, and netizens joked: "Now the 'New Year's taste' is getting weaker and weaker, and the New Year has become a 'holiday'." In the city, all kinds of "annual customs" are no longer linked to farming culture, no longer have the "utilitarian" of production, and more towards a kind of consumerism "entertainment", businesses show their magic, launch a variety of activities to attract tourists. In the post-epidemic era, leaving the city often requires nucleic acid test reports, which makes long-distance travel a "luxury", and local travel and peripheral travel have become the first choice for everyone to chat about entertainment, after all, it is better than being a "fat house" at home.
Moving from the countryside to the city is a typical representation of the era of agricultural civilization to the era of industrial civilization. China's unique "only child" generation has brought a new look to the urban New Year. Children can not return to their hometown, and "reunion" is an indispensable theme of the Spring Festival, so parents moving to a new city with their children for the New Year has become a norm in the post-epidemic era. Some parents have retired and are no longer constrained by the regulations of the unit, and some parents are unemployed and have relative freedom of travel. Of course, there was also this phenomenon before the epidemic, and after the epidemic, urban employees were more restricted by travel, and parents who were relatively free in their hometown chose to accommodate their children, although the Spring Festival replaced the geographical space, they did not miss the due meaning of "reunion".
This new type of New Year's Eve has brought new urban cultural needs. We need cities to provide us with more clues to awaken the "Taste of the Year" in our memories, and many of the ancient towns/villages/ancient street tours around the city launch a splendid and diverse "New Year's Customs Activity". The antique and old residential alleys and pavilions overflowing with ancient style restore the modern people's cognition and imagination of "traditional villages". And strolling through it, you will meet a variety of performances, or a group of Hanfu masters roaming the streets and alleys, performing ritual sacrifices, or ethnic minority song and dance parties, or traditional dragon and lion dances, local operas, lantern festivals, or various food craftsmen who knead noodles, paint sugar people, and push stone grinding... Urban people gather around a semi-new, half-old or even new, artificially created "rural space" to feel the traditional and rural smorgasbord.
The annual customs of the ancient town
This ancient town/rural space composed of folklore separates the original residential meaning, and has a new spatial significance in the commemorative nature of historical heritage and the reproduction of cultural memory. Some of these ancient towns/villages/ancient streets are renovated on the basis of the original monuments, and some are newly built as a whole. Lefebvre pointed out that space is both a spatial practices, that is, an extended, material environment; a representation of space, that is, a symbolic system of concepts that guide practice; and a representational space, which is the connection between the practitioner and the environment, the fusion of matter and spirit, feeling, and imagination. In short, space consists of three levels: lived, conceived, and perceived. The ancient villages/ancient towns/ancient streets attached to the city are not crushed under the bulldozer of the urbanization process, but are reborn with the construction of modern urban culture, which is not only a material existence of cultural heritage, but also gives people the spiritual space to conceive and recognize, and integrates with people's inner spiritual and emotional needs. Some newly built antique villages and towns no longer even have the commemorative significance of material heritage, but point to a more pure cultural space function, through a series of traditional elements, they are endowed with the spatial connotation of symbolism, imagination and metaphor.
Whether it is an ancient town or an ancient village, or in the old streets and alleys, the annual performances launched in various places are more of an immersive cultural root-seeking and awakening our lost memory field. Whether it is our past life memories or the historical memories of the Chinese nation, the Spring Festival folklore has always been a symbol of "New Year's taste". With the deepening of the urbanization process, the annual custom has long lacked its original function, but has become a spiritual direction of "looking back at the past". We traveled from the countryside to the city, and finally tried to "return" to the countryside from the city to find lost memories. On the one hand, we complain about the over-commercialization of artificially created "traditional space", losing its original taste and authenticity, but on the other hand, we still can't stop looking back. Perhaps, the city is the foothold of our dreams, but the countryside is always the starting point of our lives.
As a living space inhabited by human beings, cities play an important role in the lives of modern people. As the Italian novelist Calvino put it: "Cities are like dreams, made up of longing and fear." "Our dreams rise and fall with the development of the city, and we breathe with the city. Since covid-19, we have guarded our city for fear that it will be invaded by the virus and destroy the peace it deserves. The urban memory of daily life allows us to stitch together and depict the outline of the city, but her inner temperament still has to be forged by the heart and hand of every urban person. The city, in the change of the times, is constantly adjusting the style to adapt to the residents of the city, renewing its cells and essence. In the post-epidemic era, in the mobile migration between the original land and the settled city, we need a space to place the lingering "new year's taste".
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