Paper short abstract:

The Guan Suo Opera of the Han in Yangzong constitutes a case in point to understand China’s fundamentally multi-religious “popular religion”. This paper shall highlight the social implications of this masked ritual, namely the way in which it expresses the–apparently paradoxical–local Han identity.

Paper long abstract:

"Chinese popular religion" is fundamentally mutli-religious and so diverse from North to South that specialists still wonder whether China has one popular religion or several. The Guan Suo Opera's ritual of the Yangzong Han in Yunnan province proves relevant for the study of such practice: on the one hand, it involves altogether Buddhist and Taoist deities, exorcism, military as well as cosmological rites. On the other hand, the specificity of the Han of Yangzong is framed by an ongoing tension between two contrasting points of view: they appear both as one local ethnic minority among others, and, notably by means of ritualized theatrical representations, as the legitimate representatives of the national majority.

Through an anthropological analysis combined with a historical perspective on the origin of this ritual practice, I shall argue that the Guan Suo Opera constitutes a ritual way to resolve the ambivalence of the local Han identity. By re-playing the history of the crucial Three Kingdoms period (220-280) and acting out the hero's quest for his father, the Yangzong people establish the Guan Suo Opera as a local emblem. Paradoxically, it is by emphasizing their local specificity in this way that they lay claim to an overarching Han identity.

This case study shall thus make clear that what is at stake in such multi-religious rituals is not just a hazardous combination resulting from a peculiar history, but rather a social construct though which a local community can identify itself and relate to englobing entities at larger scales.