Ritual Communication in Practice: Identifying the Key Ritual Elements of the Majie Quyi Fair

This study examines the key ritual elements embedded in the communication practices of the Majie Quyi Fair. Existing studies of folk performance events and intangible cultural heritage have generated rich insights into artistic forms, historical origins, cultural symbolism, and preservation strategies, yet have paid comparatively little attention to communication as a constitutive process that sustains such events over time. Drawing on James W. Carey’s ritual view of communication, this study approaches the Majie Quyi Fair as a ritualised communicative event. It analyses its communication practices through four interrelated dimensions: ritual participants, ritual symbols, ritual field, and ritual order. Methodologically, the study relies primarily on participant observation, supplemented by informal conversations in the field. The findings show that the Majie Quyi Fair is not merely a folk performance gathering but a recurring communicative event sustained by multi-layered participation, symbolic expression, spatial organisation, and tacit order. More broadly, the study suggests that ritual communication is not confined to highly institutionalised ceremonies or media events, but also takes shape within vernacular, distributed, and periodically repeated collective practices. In doing so, the article shifts the analytical focus from folk performance as cultural content to folk gatherings as a communicative process. It offers an empirically grounded approach to understanding how cultural continuity is maintained through communication practices in folk cultural events.