Society in Six Days: Hair, Wool, Offerings, and Gift Exchange During the New Year as Expressions of Social Relations for Prosperity

Abstract

New Year celebrations in East Tibet are characterised by ritualised exchange that marks and (re)establishes social relations and is expressed through material objects—be it offerings to deities, at weddings, during visits, on birthdays of the elderly and the youngest, and at children’s first hair-cutting ceremonies. This exchange concerns both humans and non-humans, including (ancestor) territorial deities, in a temporal sequence of hierarchy that reflects the importance ascribed to the different relations concerned. Apart from strengthening the existing and creating new social bonds, the exchange has the important purpose of acquiring particular forces of life for prosperity and fecundity in the coming year and the future in general. It also serves as a means of time-counting, especially for the support of young and old lives. The participation in these interactions is both individual and communal and concerns both monastics and laypeople, who can act separately or together. Most of the acts revolve around the household, patrilineage, and domestic space. The exchange extends to handling human and animal body parts, namely hair and wool, that epitomise the sought forces of life. The exchange follows the former traditional economic system, including tax obligations to Buddhist monasteries, that reflects the segmentary organisation of the society. Ongoing changes of modernisation and liberal market economy orchestrated by the PRC state have not interrupted the discussed traditions, as the traditional social structure, modes of livelihood, and spatiality still somewhat endure. These interactions of ancestral, patrilineal, affinal, friendship, and residence relations and the wished-for wellbeing convey a total society and are unthinkable without materiality and certain qualities attributed to the offered, given, handled, and altered objects.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Religions, 2026 · DOI ↗