关键词: 身体地理学, 身体, 节庆, 展演空间, 凝视, 眼动仪

Abstract:

"Dragging the Gods" (tuo shen in Chinese) is a form of traditional religious festival in Shangshe Village, Chenghai District, Shantou City, which has been endowed with apparent features of bodily expressions and thus gained much attention from the public. Following interest in this empirical case, this paper adopts multifaceted methods of visual analysis, pictorial analysis, eye movement analysis and qualitative analysis to investigate the spatial practice in the bodily expression in such festivals. The empirical evidence shows that, in such religious activities, the embodied practice and experience to significant extent have played influential roles in maintaining the time-space features of these religious festivals. In so doing, the human body has become the most minimum scale for meaning-making, in particular in the process of the practice of religious rites. Specifically, the emotional process of subjective feelings and shares in such traditional festivals have greatly contributed to the construction of place togetherness and identity; while the lasting and physical body engagement can be considered as the most crucial component that inoculates the vitality and vigor for maintaining and reproducing such spatial practices and religious festivals. Focusing on pictorial analysis, eye movement analysis, visual analysis and qualitative analysis of data collected from local residents, in particular their hotpots of eye movements and their changes of pupil sizes, this paper directly and effectively assesses their emotional practice and experience in the spatial behaviors of "Dragging the Gods". The result strongly suggests that, both inside and outside the performative space, there is significant distinction between the live audiences and the outside "gazers" from the perspective of the embodied sense, which, to a great extent, demonstrates the spatial heterogeneity of the human body. This research can be read as an expansion of the geography of human body, particularly from the lens of emotional geography, as well as a contribution to the development of new research methods in the subject of human geography.

Key words: body geography, body, festival, performing space, gaze, eye tracker