Author(s): WANG, Z., Institution: BEIJING SPORT UNIVERSITY, Country: CHINA, Abstract-ID: 1618

Introduction: Basketball, often coded as an embodied practice aligned with modernity and educational aims, is not intrinsically compatible with the cultural logic of folk religious rituals. Yet in rural southeast China, the stable articulation of ritual performance and basketball events produces a locally workable order in which tradition and modern sport coexist. This study asks how folk religious rituals incorporate modern sport, how basketball undergoes functional translation and symbolic re-coding within ritual structures, and how such embodied practice shapes and consolidates rural identity and communal boundaries.
Methods: Using basketball events embedded in the Pudu ritual in rural southeast China as a case, this study employs a qualitative design combining documentary analysis, ethnographic fieldwork, and in-depth interviews. Drawing on ritual theory and community theory, the analysis examines (a) the ritual's symbolic system, spatiotemporal organization, and action scripts, and (b) the interactional order, affective mobilization, and processes of identity classification generated through embodied participation.
Results: (1) Folk religious rituals possess an endogenous capacity to absorb external cultural forms. Once incorporated into the broader ritual structure, basketball ceases to be merely entertainment or athletic competition and becomes an organized component mobilized by local order to perform affective bonding, social interaction, normative transmission, and symbolic integration. (2) Basketball events provide a shared embodied arena for villagers and return migrants. Through playing, watching, and cheering, participants translate local knowledge into collective experience, strengthening attachment to the village community. (3) In the ritual context, the event produces an interactional mechanism that combines competition and solidarity: competitiveness generates tension and visibility, while ritualization confers legitimacy and continuity, together facilitating the sedimentation of collective memory and the reproduction of cultural identity.
Discussion: This study re-situates basketball events within ritual structures and local social relations, demonstrating that basketball is not a unidirectional sign of modernity but can be re-coded, within a folk religious framework, as a technology of community integration. Rather than treating rural sport as a mere provision of public culture or a governance instrument, the study highlights the mediating role of embodied practice: communities are not simply "declared" but continuously "made" through repeated ritualized interaction. Practically, the coupling of rural sport with traditional ritual is not merely an improvised mixture, but a locally rational mode of order-making—one that can enhance cohesion and normativity while also generating new tensions around symbolic authority, boundary-making, and resource distribution.