An examination of communication mechanism of ancestral hall sacrifice rituals in rural southern China

Ancestral hall sacrifice ritual refers to actions performed by lineage members to worship their ancestors in the ancestral hall, a common architectural form in rural southern China. This paper first reviews the rise and growth of ancestral halls during the Song and Ming dynasties, and then examines the mediality of ancestral halls and the transmissibility of ancestral hall sacrifice rituals from the perspective of communication studies. To be more specific, this paper explores the communication mechanism of ancestral halls and sacrifice rituals by conducting fieldwork in the rural areas of Luoyuan County in Fujian Province. The obvious findings to emerge from the study are as follows: firstly, the ancestral hall, housing the portraits, relics, and tablets of ancestors, serves as a medium that facilitates communication between the living (lineage members) and the dead (ancestors); secondly, the lineage head, as the "representative" of ancestors, plays a dominant role in the rituals and gains the communication power to connect the living and the dead; finally, the ritual symbols composed of tributes, blessing words (zhu ci), and prayers (dao wen), constitute the embodied content of communication, which engages lineage members in the ritual performance. Through this process, each member internalizes the moral standards, behavioral norms, and shared emotions of the lineage, contributing to the establishment of the lineage order. The media facilities in the ancestral hall, together with the lineage head as the "representative" of ancestors and the ritual symbols, make up the "communicable ancestral phenomenon", which paves the way for the ritual communication of ancestral hall sacrifice.