Temporalités ()
« Toutes les dates du 12e mois lunaire et du 1er mois lunaire sont des jours fastes »
Abstract
Marriage is one of the most important rites of the life cycle in Chinese society. The choice of the wedding date is rarely made lightly, on the contrary, it is carefully carried out by following specific processes in order to find a day that is considered auspicious. Based on an ethnographic survey carried out between 2013 and 2016 in the village of Zhang in Henan Province and in a company specialized in wedding organization –“Eternal Love” Aijiujiu 爱久久-, this paper proposes an analysis of the temporalities of marriage in contemporary rural areas, focusing on the study of the seasonality of marriage and the choice of the wedding date. Concerning the seasonality of marriage, the inhabitants of Zhang must take into account the calendar of non-agricultural economic activities of migrant workers and find a compromise with the peasant temporality punctuated by agrarian tasks. As for the choice of the wedding date, they systematically call upon the almanac in order to harmonize the personal life trajectory and the cosmological order. This study demonstrates the modifications and readjustments adopted by the villagers to cope with the change in the rhythm of life resulting from the social, economic and political transformations in post-Maoist China: they seek to be part of the process of modernization and urbanization of Chinese society while at the same time wanting to respect the cosmological ideology in the organization of family and social life.
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