New Year Celebrations in Central China in Late Imperial Times

　　This study, which has been conducted in the spirit of a symbologically inclined anthropology, explores one of the major manifestations of Chinese popular tradition─the celebration of the New Year in a lunar calendar of very ancient origins. Focus here is on the various New Year customs of Central China, the area of the extended lake-land in the mid-Yangzi Valley, in late imperial times. A multitude of folk practices are analyzed within a holistic perspective on Chinese traditional society and the result is a new picture of a world of the past in which the social rhetorics of gender, lineage continuity and ancestry are challenged by ritual manifestations of iconic symbolism.

作者簡介
　　Goran Aijmer is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and is currently associated with the Gothenburg Research Institute there. His research interests are wide, mostly on symbolic expression and articulation in fields like politics, economics, art and religion in the southern parts of China, and also Melanesia, Southeast Asia and Europe. He has worked in many universities, more recently in the Australian National University, Canberra, the Ecole des hautes ?mudes en sciences sociales, Paris, and the University of East Anglia, Norwich. His current interest is in the formation of ”traditions” in China and Europe.