From the establishment of the Ming to the fall of the Qing (1368--1911), the social and cultural scene of the Chinese countryside was greatly transformed. Lineages became the dominant social organization in many areas. Local temples became a familiar part of the rural landscape. Local culture was increasingly exposed to the influence of regional culture and gentry culture with the proliferation of market towns, the development of the printing industry and the rise of literacy. By investigating the history of ritual specialists and their rituals in a sub-county area in southeast China, this thesis shows how these social and cultural transformations took place and how the local population experienced them. Lisheng or masters of ceremonies, the focus of this thesis, played and still play an important role in the local social and symbolic life. Either along with or in the absence of other ritual specialists, they guided the laity through ritual procedures to communicate with ancestors, gods, and the dead. These rituals, and also the related liturgical texts, were the outcome of social and cultural transformations in the late imperial period. Through a detailed discussion of the history of the three important local institutions that were closely related to lisheng and their rituals, namely, lineages, community compacts, and temple networks, the thesis shows the limitations of the elitist interpretation of late imperial cultural transformations. Cultural integration and gentrification were without doubt important aspects of these processes. However, both may have oversimplified the complexity of the processes and exaggerate the influence of high culture. Cultural hybridization, the process in which elements from different cultural traditions were synthesized into a new, constantly changing cultural mosaic, provides a multipolar, interactional, and thus more complex approach to our understanding of cultural processes in late imperial China.

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