Li Xin/Wen
▲ [Qing Dynasty] Tang Dai and Sun Hu, Qingfeng Tu, ink and color on silk, 393×234cm. Collection of the National Palace Museum, Taipei.
Written by Li Xin
To put it simply, festivals are special days with mass, periodicity and relative stability, while traditional festivals are concentrated displays of the vitality of traditional folk culture. It has gone through the process of moving from spontaneous to conscious, from casual to stereotyped, and gradually developed and supplemented, and is the carrier of national culture. But this division of time is not only determined by people's subjective conception of time, or as Husserl put it, by "inner time consciousness". It is an organic combination of the natural time (seasonal time) process and the humanistic time consciousness. The festival is an opportunity for people to understand and deal with the natural time process and coordinate with human activities. The festival constantly adjusts its cultural theme with the changes of the historical and social stages. In the early society, it was mainly manifested in people's time compliance with nature and the sacrifice to the gods. Later, with the enhancement of people's subjective consciousness and the strength of social forces, people emphasized the influence and status of the state and society in people's lives, and the natural time nature of the annual festival became increasingly indifferent, and the time ritual of seasonal sacrifices gradually became secularized into family or social gatherings and celebrations, and the annual festival mainly became a social and political time expression. The analysis of national traditional festivals is, in the final analysis, to analyze the characteristics of national traditional culture and the national psychological characteristics and behavior patterns under the coverage of this culture.
Traditional Chinese festivals have a long history and are colorful, such as the Spring Festival, Lantern Festival, Shangsi Festival, Qingming Festival, Dragon Boat Festival, Qixi Festival, Mid-Autumn Festival, Double Ninth Festival, etc. These festivals are the products of social development to a certain stage and the conventions of human groups in social life, and have an inseparable relationship with astronomy, calendar, national way of thinking, folk beliefs, cultural psychology, etc. Festivals are born from social life, and then fed back to social life, and are selected by social life, and at the same time, they are inherited and circulated as a cultural consciousness in the mutation, and gradually form a cultural form. In China's long agricultural era, traditional festivals have had a significant and far-reaching impact on people's social psychology, values, moral standards, aesthetic characteristics and even national spirit, and play a role in integrating national emotions, forming cultural consensus, accumulating social culture, and promoting commodity exchange.
For example, Christmas, the feast of the birth of Jesus, is the greatest holiday in Christian countries, and Easter is established to commemorate the resurrection of Jesus.
Traditional festival culture is the most universal and rich element of the elements of national culture, and its content covers almost all aspects of national life and culture, such as the way of thinking, behavior, psychology and character of the nation, all of which are reflected through the festival. Traditional festival culture not only includes various cultural elements at the material level such as residence, food, and clothing, but also reflects cultural elements such as the social structure, system, system, and laws and regulations of the nation. At the same time, because the festival culture contains the historical origin, belief and worship, customs and etiquette, fashion and human feelings, social entertainment, ethics and morality, literature and art and other elements, it can show the connotation of the national culture from the depth, reveal the essence of the national cultural psychology and national spirit, and inherit these traditional ways from generation to generation.
Just as the traditional Chinese festivals represent traditional Chinese culture, the foreign festivals are also the embodiment of the values and lifestyles of Western culture, which have similarities in the collective cultural memory of human beings, but also have great differences due to different cultural systems, mainly in the following aspects.
1. The restraint and wildness of carnival in festival entertainment
The Spring Festival, a typical festival of the Chinese nation, can be traced back to the "wax sacrifice" of ancient times, that is, the year-end sacrifice activities to repay the gods after the completion of a year's agricultural work. The main content of the event is to celebrate a good harvest, thank the gods for the previous year's gifts, and beg for good weather and abundant crops in the coming year, accompanied by activities to ward off epidemics and disasters. By the Tang Dynasty, in addition to worshipping the gods and causing disasters, the Spring Festival greatly strengthened the element of secular entertainment. Liu Yuxi vividly described the activities and scenes of the Spring Festival in "Yuan Ri Feelings": "The fire is empty, and the children are dazzling in colorful clothes. There is no old knowledge in a foreign land, and the carriages and horses are scarce. "The Remains of Kaiyuan Tianbao" recorded: "Mrs. Han placed a hundred lamp trees, 80 feet high, erected on the high mountain, lit in the Yuan night, seen for hundreds of miles, bright and moonlight." It can be seen that there was already a lot of entertainment content during the Spring Festival in the Tang Dynasty.
Christmas is celebrated on December 25 every year, which is said to be the anniversary of the birth of Jesus Christ. There is no record of the exact date of Jesus' birth, but the present date of Jesus' birth was established by the Roman Catholic Church in 353 AD. The reason for choosing this day is said to be related to the ancient Romans' worship of the sun god from December 17 to 23 every year, in order to praise Jesus for bringing light to the world like the rising sun. Because the Bible says that Jesus was born in Bethlehem in the middle of the night, the celebration of Christmas begins on the night of December 24. In the beginning, the Christmas activities were all religious, revolving around the celebration of the birth of Jesus. The Christmas tree and Santa Claus, which are widely loved by children, were produced in Germany after 1600 and gradually spread to the United Kingdom, the United States and other places.
Judging from the origin of the two traditional festivals in China and the West, these two festivals have the characteristics of worshipping gods and entertaining people at the same time, and they are sacred, important, beautiful and happy days.
But in the same entertainment festival of emotional catharsis, the Chinese are very restrained, and the West is even more wild. One of the most influential traditional festivals in China, the Lantern Festival, is a joyful festival celebrated by the whole people, and since ancient China, there has been a saying of "Lantern Festival", and the word "noisy" represents the joy and emotional catharsis of the Chinese in this festival to the extreme. The Tang Dynasty poet Zhang Hu's poem "The Fifteenth Night Light of the First Lunar Month" can make us think about how "noisy" the Lantern Festival in Chang'an was: "Thousands of doors unlock and thousands of lanterns, and the emperor moves in the middle of the first month." Three hundred people danced with their sleeves, and for a while there was a sound of words in the sky. Although the "noise" of the Lantern Festival has the spirit of carnival, it is quite different from the Western carnival in terms of cultural substance. China has been influenced by Confucianism for thousands of years, and "happiness without lewdness, sorrow without sadness" has been the emotional norm that Chinese have adhered to since ancient times, so it is difficult for ordinary adults to really "carnival". People are more willing to be bystanders and less impulsive to get involved. This leads to carnival-like events where one part of the population is passionate and the majority is out of the equation. The carnival in the West shows an irrational spiritual carnival, and people devote themselves to it, such as the famous four carnivals in the West, all of which strive to highlight the natural behavior of human beings, and have a subversive spirit of mainstream culture. The Lantern Festival, which is regarded by some scholars as a "Chinese carnival", is more associated with folk beliefs, commerce, shopping, entertainment activities, etc., although it emphasizes "the government and the people have fun" for a certain period, but not
It's a real subversion of hierarchies. Therefore, China's carnival spirit is restrained and non-release.
2. Secularization and sacredization of religious beliefs
In traditional festivals in China and the West, people have to worship the gods, but the difference is that the gods in the minds of the Chinese are the gods used by me, the so-called "sacrifice."
As it is, sacrifice to God as God is." Chinese folk believe in religious ghosts and gods, and there are countless gods and goddesses sacrificed, and even prostitutes, beggars, and thieves have their own worship gods. This people-oriented cultural characteristic is evident in traditional sacrificial festivals, such as the worship of "Stove Jun" on the 23rd day of the lunar month. Stove Jun is the god of the stove, the folk call it "Stove Jun Si Ming", "Si Ming Zhenjun", "Stove Jun Ye", "Guardian Tianzun", etc., is the subordinate of the Jade Emperor, the main division of the blessings and misfortunes of each family, monitor the rights and wrongs of people's behavior, good and evil, and report to heaven at the end of the year. Therefore, on the day of the sacrifice, the people had to prepare for him rich, sticky, and sweet food to stick to his mouth, so that after he went to heaven he could not speak ill of the Lord's house, but only spoke good words with a sweet mouth. In addition, people would burn money paper to worship him, in fact, bribing him.
Another major purpose of traditional Chinese festivals, ancestor worship, is a ritual based on secular blood patriarchy. This type of festival often focuses on the remembrance of ancestors, and ancestor sacrifices are often carried out at the same time as the sacrifice to the gods, and it is believed that the ancestors and the gods are in an equally important position, looking down on all living beings in the sky together, and blessing the safety and prosperity of future generations. However, such sacrifices did not really enter the spiritual level of communion with the ancestral "gods" in the strict sense.
However, in the traditional festivals of the West, whether it is a productive prayer, a daily blessing or a religious sacrifice, it is rare to see a prayer similar to the traditional Chinese festival that highlights the appeal of practical interests. Because the God of Western Christianity is the creator of everything in the world, he does not allow people to worship other gods and idols, and people do not need to worship other gods and idols; human beings are only a process in this world, and their blessings and misfortunes, longevity, wealth and poverty are all predestined by God, not acquired by nature. Each person is accountable only to God, or to seek God's forgiveness or favor by taking responsibility for his actions, in order to enter heaven after death, and not to his ancestors. In the presence of God, when the "Last Judgment" comes, all are equal in terms of intimacy, dignity and humility, wealth and poverty. Therefore, Westerners are extremely reverent of a just and selfless God, while Chinese have hidden selfishness towards gods and ancestors, pursuing some kind of worldly interests.
3. Collective consciousness and the pursuit of individuality
After the development of China's agricultural civilization to a certain period, traditional festivals began to serve the family system supported by Confucian ethics from nature to form. Traditional Chinese culture respects people, but does not pay attention to the value of the individual and the free development of the individual, but integrates the individual into the group, emphasizes the patriarchal collective, and focuses on the group and the overall situation. This is manifested in the traditional festival culture, which pays attention to the blood and group of all members of the family to share the feelings of reunion and family happiness, emphasizing the reunion and harmony of the family. "Reunion", "family affection" and "family peace" are the theme words of traditional Chinese festivals. For example, the Chinese New Year's Eve dinner on Chinese New Year's Eve, the Lantern Festival on the fifteenth day of the first lunar month, the mooncakes of the Mid-Autumn Festival and other foods symbolizing family reunion, China's unique "Spring Festival" phenomenon, and visiting relatives and friends during festivals are all used to close people-to-people relations and exchange information on production and life, reflecting the strong patriarchal family concept and social group consciousness of the Chinese nation.
Western society also has festivals such as Thanksgiving Day for family reunions, but in many traditional festivals, they are more keen to explore individual values, emphasize individual independent struggle and personal pleasure, and pay attention to the publicity of personality and the emotional appeal between individuals. In today's era, such a proposition is easily recognized and accepted by many individuals with different cultural backgrounds, so it has a strong cross-cultural transplantation ability. Chinese festivals focus on "family happiness", while foreign festivals are highly individualized, pursuing "self-happiness" and external tension, "carnival", "novelty", "sacred", "romantic" and so on are the main core of its festival spirit. These are undoubtedly very attractive to Chinese who have been imprisoned for thousands of years, and can be seen as a supplement and enrichment to the long-term lack of individual awareness of traditional Chinese culture.
4. Food culture and spiritual culture
Traditional Chinese festivals are based on the reverence for the gods, and before the festival arrives, people will prepare a variety of delicacies for them according to the "hobbies" of various gods, and people will also share a delicious meal after the sacrifice. In the era of lack of food and clothing, festivals have almost become a special time for human beings to inherit their excellent food culture. This situation is particularly obvious in the Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties, where hedonism spread. Therefore, in addition to its uninterrupted inheritance of the ancient spiritual civilization, the festival also retains a considerable wealth of material civilization for mankind behind the luxurious rituals. The Spring Festival, Lantern Festival, Beginning of Spring, Dragon Boat Festival, Mid-Autumn Festival, and Laba have inherited unique festival food customs such as dumplings, Lantern Festival, spring cakes, zongzi, moon cakes, and Laba porridge. Many of the supporting banquet dishes are also developed on the basis of large-scale festival recipes such as Chinese New Year's Eve dinner, worship to the gods, and worship to ancestors. Therefore, in the eyes of most Chinese, especially young people, a wrong impression has been formed: China's traditional festivals are basically just "eating".
Although Western festivals also have a series of festive foods, such as Christmas roast goose, Easter eggs, Thanksgiving turkey, cranberry moss jam, sweet potato, maize, pumpkin pie, etc., but more of a modern longing for the spiritual pursuit, or a religious sense of sacredness, such as towering churches, flickering candlelight, like a heavenly Christmas carol, or a very modern romantic atmosphere, such as delicate roses, sweet and hearty chocolate, or with the ability to release tension, Stress-relieving extravaganzas such as whimsical ghost masks, exuberant hand dancing, and more. At least on the surface, foreign festivals can better meet the spiritual and emotional needs of modern people after solving the problem of food and clothing than traditional Chinese festivals, which mostly represent the full connotation of festivals with food.
As an important carrier of national culture, the traditional festival culture of China and the West from different cultural backgrounds has a very strong characteristics of inclusiveness and coverage. It can be said that the traditional festival culture is an "exposition" and "prism" that comprehensively reflects the national culture, and contains rich connotations such as sociology, human culture, philosophy, literature and art. Traditional Chinese and Western festival cultures have their own charms, and for Chinese, who have been accustomed to a fixed way for thousands of years, cultural differences give the festival a sense of novelty and attractiveness. Riding the tide of globalization, foreign festivals have created a trend of competition with traditional festivals in China. How to maintain the national character and uniqueness of China's traditional festival culture on a global scale and inherit the splendid traditional festival culture of the Chinese nation will become the direction of our long-term efforts.