When Rituals Fail to Coordinate: Legalizing Efficacy in Late Imperial Southern Shanxi Steles

Drawing on late imperial steles from southern Shanxi, this study examines a form of ritual failure that emerged when the infrastructural and organizational conditions sustaining ritual life broke down. The inscriptions record recurring disruptions, including failures to enforce festival calendars and service obligations, disputes over offerings and exactions, and the appropriation of temple property, which generated missed or failed rites. This article argues that ritual efficacy depended less on divine responsiveness than on the functioning of coordination mechanisms that allowed ritual to operate across communities. Local ritual was experienced as effective not through greater splendor, but through stable, low-friction routines grounded in predictable rules, manageable costs, clear resource boundaries, and workable inter-community coordination. When these conditions collapsed, officials and local elites intervened, claiming to bring ritual back under governance through regulation and documentation, thereby reorganizing local authority in the name of repairing efficacy. Ritual failure thus provides a window onto local power dynamics.