International Social Science Journal (Chinese Edition)

No.4, 2022

 

Relaxed at the House: A Case Study of the Reconstruction of Sacrificial Space in a Demolished Township in Southern Fujian from the Perspective of the Theory of Affordances

(Abstract)

 

Zhehong Hong

 

With the advancement of urbanization and other modernization processes, ancestor sacrifice is facing challenges in its material form, function and meaning production. Based on the perspective of the material turn of religion, this paper introduces the theory of affordances to investigate the practice of rebuilding the sacrificial space of a demolished township in southern Fujian. In the process of collective demolition and resettlement, the villagers of Shifeng Town have experienced a drastic transformation from rural life to urban life, and the sacrificial activities in the family have undergone varying degrees of variation in the new living environment. This variation is closely related to the change of the affordance of material space. Traditional residences and modern residences participate in the formation of different forms of sacrificial activities with different spatial affordances. The case of the reconstruction of ancestral houses by the villagers in Gulang Village shows that while the actors are limited and guided by the spatial affordance, they can still adjust the performance autonomously, and that this adjustment is based on the affordance of a larger space and takes it as the limit. At the same time, the specific culture is the background of the new affordance. When the adjustment of spatial affordance cannot fully meet the need of the embedding of traditional sacrificial activities into modern space, new symbols and interpretations are called to act as intermediaries. The process of reconstructing ancestral houses in modern residential space is also a process of cracks in “abstract space” and the appearance of “differential space” in the sense of Lefebvre. This is helpful for us to reflect on the neglect of the internal relationship between material space and ethical life in the standardization practice of collective demolition and resettlement in recent years.