Author(s)

Han Zhang, Jing Luo and Jing Yang

Corresponding Author

Jing Luo

Abstract

Reciprocity, as one of the basic characteristics of human society, plays a connecting role in social life. Meanwhile, the indispensable events happen every day in villages. Taken the ethnography as research methods, this article aims at exploring the forms, characters and essence of reciprocal exchange behaviors in a village events field. The findings show that the exchange encompass in multi-layers covering labor, material, skill, emotion and so on, reflecting in the performance during festival activities in the villages. Actually, this reciprocal exchange behaviors stand for cultural identities of villagers towards their self-emotions and social orders, which are mainly embodied in trivial daily life, and gradually form an agreed-upon, customary reciprocal exchange rules, namely cultural orders, identified and adhered by the villagers for a long time. In the field of festival activities, the cycle of reciprocal exchange behaviors repeated, which constitutes not only a good operation of the village orders and cultural identity but also continues to evolve in the cultural changes of the festival activities.

Keywords

Village Festival Activities; Reciprocal Exchange; Orders; Cultural Identity