Category Archives: Rituals, festivals, holidays

Sweeping Ritual – Chinese New Year

Age: 21

Collection Date: 03/26/2026

Context:

During an in-class fieldwork activity, my informant, “R,” told me about a ritual tradition his family practices. The ritual is one of many that his family practices during the Chinese New Year season.

Text:

R: During the Chinese New Year, it’s a very cultural and ritual-heavy period of the year. One of the things that we’ll do, and that a lot of the families will do, is you’ll sweep your house, and then you’ll sweep the things out the front door. So you’re basically sweeping out like, you know, the bad spirits or, you know, all the bad luck. You’re getting that out of your house.. So you’re kind of like cleansing the place. So, like, all the bad luck, all the evil kind of goes out the door, you know. 
It’s kind of like putting a physical touch on a spiritual belief.

Interviewer: Yeah

Interviewer: Yeah. Is that like more of like a, is it a, like a metaphorical thing or are you like actually sweeping out like dust and like cleaning as well? Like, is it kind of like dual purpose?

R: Yeah, it’s definitely dual purpose. Yeah, like Chinese New Year, you’re definitely cleaning the house, you know, putting up like decorations and stuff like this. 
You put out like little clementines and stuff, but. Yeah, you’re definitely sweeping like actual dust out. But with that, you know, you’re sweeping out the evil spirits and all that. There’s more behind it than just like simply cleaning.

Interviewer: So there’s more meaning behind it then just simply cleaning.

R: Double entendre. Exactly.

Interviewer: Is that something that you’d be doing, like your parents would be doing or like the the whole family’s getting involved? What’s that look like?

R: I wouldn’t say that. I mean, I’ve never swept, but like, obviously.

Interviewer: Could you vacuum? 


R: No, like, I’d be cleaning around the house, but it’s my mom that’s sweeping mainly.. But, like, you know, we all help out. It’s definitely, like, a big, big family time. Like you want to help out. You want to spend time with your family. So definitely, yeah. 


Analysis:

The ritual seems to be a form of imitative magic in which the performer performs a physical action that has an “intangible” effect on the spiritual world. The idea, then, is that the change made in the spiritual world would positively impact the real world. The act is also representative. So it would seem to be homeopathic; the performer is literally sweeping the dirt out while also having a profound spiritual effect. This suggests that their culture may view dirt and dust in the house as impurities that do not belong and, like evil spirits, should be dealt with to prevent disorder.

The use of a broom is also interesting. I didn’t get to ask whether it was a special broom, but brooms are seen as having magical elements in English and American culture as well. I’m thinking about the witches’ broomstick, a magical and important element we associate with Halloween. Even in our culture, brooms are symbolic of magic and the spiritual world. But perhaps in Western culture, witches’ association with brooms has more to do with gender norms. Brooms symbolize cleansing and purity, and in most cultures, cleanliness is next to godliness. It seems then that the same idea is kept in Chinese folklore. A clean house has no crevices for demons to hide.

The ritual also functions as a way for families to bond. The ritual and cleaning ceremony bring them close together to achieve a common goal. These are also traditions that are passed down from generation to generation, so all ages are involved and can relate. Older generations might find this a great opportunity to connect with their kids and share some identity. It also seems to help offer some agency over the uncontrollable. My informant explained that it might help prevent bad luck and evil spirits, or smooth out the uncontrollable elements we face in our daily lives.

Based on what I collected, men, women, and children can participate in the ritual. So it is all inclusive and reflects the culture’s view on women and gender roles. Perhaps, this wasn’t always so, but we learn that customs change and adapt to time. The tradition itself has been passed down; my informant views the memory positively. But, it likely isn’t the same ritual his grandparents performed. That highlights the idea that folklore is multifaceted and varied. No two rituals are completely alike, even within the same family.

Chinese New Year Tradition of New Clothes

Age: 19

Text:

“One tradition we have during Chinese New Year is that it is necessary to wear new clothes from top to bottom. So like inner clothes, pajama, and new bed sets, new slippers, new socks, and new everything. 
And then, we have to all clean our room and house by ourselves, since we can’t get housekeepers to do it for us, so it’s necessary to do it by ourselves. Then, at 12 o’clock midnight, you have to eat dumplings.

Context:

The Chinese New Year is celebrated in China for the first two weeks in the Chinese Calendar. Each day is filled with various cultural and familial traditions. The informant shared her family tradition for the first day of the Chinese New Year.

Analysis:

This tradition can be understood through both symbolic and social frameworks in Cultural Anthropology. Wearing new clothes during the Chinese New Year reflects ideas of renewal and transformation. This aligns with what Arnold van Gennep describes as rites of passage, marking a transition into a new cycle. Cleaning the house oneself reinforces responsibility and participation in maintaining social harmony, which reflects Confucian values of family duty. Finally, eating dumplings together at midnight could bring the family into a shared moment that feels special and unifying. This practice allows everyone to mark the transition into the new year collectively, which reinforces a sense of togetherness and connection.

Drum Ritual at School Before Summer Break

Text:

“Every single year before summer break, there is a countdown, and our principal bangs on a big Chinese drum to signify the start of summer. Before that happens, we also sing four different songs: our school song, two songs about our school symbol, which is the tiger, and Sweet Caroline, which serves as our school’s theme song.”

Context:

This text was collected from a female student who attended an international school in China. She described this end-of-year ritual casually. The ceremony takes place at the close of every school year and follows a fixed structure: four songs are sung collectively — the school song, two tiger-themed songs representing the school mascot, and Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” — ending in a principal-led countdown accompanied by the striking of a large Chinese drum. The ritual is notably interesting in its cultural composition, merging distinctly American popular culture with traditional Chinese instruments. This reflects the school’s broader institutional identity as an American-style international school operating within China: an institution that consciously positions itself between two cultural worlds. The fixed, repeated structure of the ceremony — the same songs, the same drum, the same countdown every year — gives it the quality of a calendrical ritual marking the boundary between the school year and summer.

Analysis:

This piece is a good example of school lore functioning simultaneously as institutional ritual and political statement. Unlike the horizontal, student-generated traditions typical of school folklore, this ceremony is explicitly top-down, led by the principal and embedded in the school’s official calendar. Van Gennep’s rites of passage framework applies clearly here: the countdown and drum strike function as a formal separation ritual, marking the threshold between the school year and summer and releasing students from their institutional identity. The hybrid cultural symbolism of the ceremony is particularly significant. The Chinese drum and the American pop music “Sweet Caroline” are both involved in the ritual, reflecting what the course identifies as the political work institutions do through folk and folkloric symbols — the school is communicating its identity as simultaneously American and Chinese. In other words, cultural symbols are intentionally selected and staged to construct an institutional identity. The tiger songs further reinforce a shared group identity through esoteric shared symbolism, creating what Turner would call communitas, which is a collective sense of belonging produced through the shared experience of an annual liminal ritual.




Chinese Funeral Ritual

Text:

“When my family members pass away, we have a funeral ritual. When my grandmother passed away, the coffin was first placed on the ground floor of the apartment building. Before carrying her to the funeral parlor, my father had to break a porcelain bowl on the floor and say something he wanted to say to her — usually something short, like ‘may you go peacefully.’ Then the coffin was carried to the funeral parlor.”

Context:

This text was collected from a Chinese international student from Beijing. She recounted the ritual from personal memory, having witnessed it during her grandmother’s funeral. The practice involves two distinct symbolic acts performed before the deceased is transported to the funeral parlor: the placement of the coffin on the ground floor of the family’s apartment building, and the breaking of a porcelain bowl by the closest male family member — in this case, her father — accompanied by a brief farewell address to the deceased. The phrase her father used, “一路走好” (yī lù zǒu hǎo), translates roughly to “may you go peacefully” or “have a safe journey,” a common Chinese expression of farewell to the dead. The informant presented the ritual as standard family practice rather than something unique to her household, suggesting it reflects broader Beijing or northern Chinese funeral customs transmitted through family participation rather than any formal or institutional instruction.

Analysis:

This piece is a customary ritual operating at the intersection of material culture and folk belief, and it demonstrates Van Gennep’s rites of passage framework. The funeral ritual stages the deceased’s transition out of the living world through two carefully sequenced symbolic acts. The breaking of the porcelain bowl follows the logic of sympathetic magic, more specifically the contagious variety, where the destruction of a physical object in the shared space of the living enacts a spiritual severance, which could formally close the bond between the deceased and the household. The ground floor placement of the coffin before departure further emphasizes this threshold symbolism, positioning the body literally between the domestic space of the living and the outside world before the final transition to the funeral parlor. The father’s spoken farewell, “may you go peacefully,” functions as folk speech with ritual authority, a fixed phrase whose repetition across generations gives it vernacular power.




Chinese New Year Tradition of Family Photos

Text:

Our family’s tradition is that on the first day of Chinese New Year, before dinner, everyone in the family gets dressed up and we take a family photo together. The clothes have to be all new. The tradition started when I was born. At first, my mother wanted everyone to wear red, but over time it relaxed into everyone just wearing whatever they like. So it’s pretty chill now.

Context:

This text was collected from a female Chinese international student from Beijing, who shared it during my interview with her. The practice she describes is a family-specific ritual that takes place on the first day of the Chinese New Year: every family member dresses in brand new clothing and gathers for a collective photograph before the New Year dinner. The tradition was initiated by her mother at the time of the informant’s birth, making it roughly her age and giving it a personal origin she can trace. Originally, the tradition carried a stricter dress code — all red, a color symbolizing luck and prosperity in Chinese culture — but over time, this requirement loosened, and family members now wear new clothes of any color.

Analysis:

This piece exemplifies family lore. The requirement that clothing be entirely new engages the broader Chinese New Year folk belief that newness at the year’s start invites prosperity and signals a clean break from the past, connecting the family ritual to a wider system of folk belief around lucky beginnings. The gradual relaxation of the red dress code is an illustration of multiplicity and variation: the tradition’s core structure remains intact while its specific details shift to accommodate the family’s changing preferences, demonstrating folklore as being simultaneously conservative and dynamic. The mother’s role as the tradition’s originator and enforcer reflects how family folklore is often transmitted through a single authoritative figure whose preferences shape the group’s collective practice. The annual photograph also functions as a form of material culture, producing a tangible archive of the family’s shared identity over time. The timing (before dinner, on the first day of the New Year) gives the ritual the quality of a calendrical rite of passage, formally opening the New Year within the intimate frame of family rather than public celebration.