Interethnic Relations and Shared Cultural Idioms: A Case Study of the Xiu Gu Gu Festival in Mainland China and Overseas

By using distinct epistemological frameworks, the instrumentalist, transactionalist and constructionist theories of ethnicity emphasize the analysis of inter-group relations. They neglect however the conflation of ideas and values structuring these relations, and notably the idioms of shared cultural meanings which underlie the cooperation and/or competition between interacting groups. The present paper explores this kind of process through a case study of the xiu gu gu ("refining of the orphaned bones"), a festival that the Teochiu of Chaozhou, in northeast Guangdong province, perform periodically. The celebration of this festival in Chaozhou is compared to versions resulting from its adaptation in the sharply contrasted Malay Muslim and Thai Buddhist contexts. In the latter case, close conceptions about malevolent death have led to a fascinating interethnic cooperation, with most of the unfortunate dead whose bones are "refined" during the Teochiu festival being Thai.