Territory Identity and Ritual Life of Religious Spaces in Urbanized Communities: A Case Study of Jiangsu

Abstract

The rapid urbanization in China has had a profound impact on religious practices of rural communities, but few study has explored the relevant dynamics. This study provides an overview of urbanization’s impact on rural religious spaces, and compares the changes of religious spaces before and after urbanization. It aims at improving the understanding of religion in urbanized communities. Phenomenological methods were employed to analyze our transcriptions of 16 interviews which were conducted in the religious spaces of 11 urbanized communities in Jiangsu, China. We also investigated the worship circle mentioned by the participants through field surveys and map analysis. Based on these, four similar themes were sorted out, namely, worship circle and environment, aging and feminizing agents, ritual and secular life, as well as religious well-being. And the results showed that: (1) passive change of worship circles would bring new sense of belonging and identity to elderly residents; (2) the new religious spaces contained a lot of local knowledge and traditional characteristics, which were evolving continuously with sites sacredness maintenance and secularization function expansion; (3) female agents were of great importance to religious spaces preservation.