Göran Aijmer and Virgil K. Y. Ho: “They Break their Arms and They Break their Brains.” The Enigma of Village Brawls in Southern China
Ethnographic field notes from south-eastern China, taken in the period of vanishing imperial rule and the early republic, describe a lunar New Year custom in which village people assemble to form sides that started fighting, including pelting one another with stones. It is suggested that these dramatic New Year sessions expressed contradictory features characterizing southern Chinese culture. Momentary explicit and brutal antagonism publicly displayed was an outcome of conflicting cultural tenets relating to the affinity between bride-givers and bride-takers. In terms of cultural semantics such relationships were understood as ambiguous, influencing, in an ambivalent way, the construction of social continuity into the future.
[South China, violence, affinal relations, demons, cultural semantics]
