Study of Ritual Process and Oral Transmissions of Shamanistic Rites in Southwest China

2007 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary

• Project/Area Number: 17401009
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B)
• Allocation Type: Single-year Grants
• Section: 海外学術
• Research Field: Religious studies
• Research Institution: Waseda University
• Principal Investigator: MORI Yuria Waseda University, Faculty of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Professor (30247259)
• Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha): INAHATA Koichirou Waseda University, Faculty of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Professor (30063803)
• Project Period (FY): 2005 – 2007
• Keywords: religious studies / China

Research Abstract

This research aims at taking after and developing the study we had had during the Japanese academic year of 2003-2004 under the name of The Study of Daoist and Shamanistic Ritual Documents Transmitted among the Practitioners of Ritual Operas in Southwest China.(Research No. 15520063 ; MORI,Yuria as the Director in Chief.)In the previous study, we, both Japanese and Chinese scholars listed as the member of this research group, recorded one-day ritual(chong nuo 衝儺)performed by the ritual masters in Hekou village, Daozhen prefecture, Guizhou, China, on digital video tapes while we had preliminary interviews with the masters, which successfully established good, reliable relationship between the scholars and the interviewees. In this new study, we focused our examination on the ritual performance we had filmed in Hekou village in the previous research, in regard to which we recurrently had a series of long interviews with the same group of the practitioners to transcribe the whole content of what they chanted and spoke in THAT particular program. In the academic year of 2005, we divided our group into two groups (A and B) to have interviews separately. There, the same ritual masters revived the same speeches and chanting they had performed in 2004 in front of us, who now transcribing the content of them word by word. While practitioners re-acted their performance, they saw the videos we filmed of their own performance in 2004, which proved to be an excellent method to facilitate the interactions between the interviewers and interviewees. However, the grope A did not make as good progress as the group B which mechanically transcribed the content of the performance without giving detailed(and sometimes bothering to the practitioners) questions relevant to the contents and structures of deep knowledge about the ritual during the interviews. After the academic year of 2006, both groups concentrated on the successful method having taken by group B in 2005. Consequently, we successfully finished making word-by-word transcription of the chanting and speech of the one-day ritual opera practiced on a day of 2004, which surpassed the all expectations in terms of quality and quantity we had made before starting our research. Especially, we felt our research attained high standard of reliability when we succeeded in involving every practitioner into checking the written record(that is, our transcription) by reciting them in group in December 2007. Thus, our records were all proofread by the ritual practitioners themselves.