The Mysterious Dead and the Generation of Life:——John K. Shryock’s Anqing Ethnography Revisited

This essay explores a selection of John K. Shryock’s field data from a hundred years ago, from the province of Anhui. Focus is on the ceremonialism of ancestry and the cultural semantics of ancestor worship. The account tries to demonstrate how certain phases of such rituals connect with the construction of continuity in social life, either through the cultural idiom of the cultivation of rice, or the idiom of procreation of children. The liturgies and paraphernalia employed show symbolic complexities, the understanding of which may lead us to new insights into the culture of southern China

Ancestors on high: musings on an east Chinese case

The focus of this article is on the conventions of ancestor worship in the province of Jiangsu, directing light on certain ethnographic data that do not accord with the general, synthesized sociological picture established for southern China. Exploring Myron L. Cohen's 1990 field data, together with what is known from elsewhere in the province, the tentative discussion in this article concerns the nature of ancestry and the construction of social continuity in a local society with its roots in rice-farming. Here ancestor worship as a cultural grammar takes the form of a pragmatic variation, the search for blessings (continuity) being strongly contrasted with the avoidance of implied malevolence (discontinuity). It is further suggested that ancestry and divinity are interacting iconic forces in the stream of social life

The enigmatic clans of the Palaung: kinship clusters and continuity in Upper Burma

This essay tries to bring some clarity to the notion of ‘clan' as employed by early British ethnographers and administrators of Upper Burma, especially with regard to the Palaung population of the Shan States. Several aspects of the ethnographic records of a hundred years ago are examined and discussed. It is suggested that in terms of positivist sociological morphology the actual inconsistent social formations existing at that time remain very elusive. It is suggested that they may be better understood as being formed in processes in which a common, ‘inward-looking', cultural template as to social continuity was, when socially realized, influenced pragmatically by varying discourses and changing realities. The social clusters that resulted showed significant diversity, while still modally honouring the template

The Mystery as a Symbolic Idiom — A Buddhist Temple in South China

This essay explores a southern Chinese Buddhist temple as an assembly of symbolic spaces and of objects distributed over these spaces. The symbolic construction is regulated by explicit rules as to distinctions and directions. The objects fill the spaces with a Buddhist story line by clustering elements of Buddhist creeds that are largely unknown to worshippers. These objects have been provided with an artistic form. Taken together, beautiful things and the design of the halls form an aesthetic iconic vision which carries a nebulous moral message. In the temple, exclusive discourse is converted into inclusive iconic displays, theological speculations into demotic transcendental experiences