For Gods, Ghosts and Ancestors
For Gods, Ghosts and Ancestors

Author: Janet Lee Scott

Publisher: Hong Kong University Press

Published: 2007-05-01

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 9789622098275

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Offerings of various kinds – food, incense, paper money and figures – have been central to Chinese culture for millennia, and as a public, visual display of spiritual belief, they are still evident today in China and in Chinatowns around the world. Using Hong Kong as a case study, Janet Scott looks at paper offerings from every conceivable angle – how they are made, sold, and used. Her comprehensive investigation touches on virtually every aspect of Chinese popular religion as it explores the many forms of these intricate objects, their manufacture, their significance, and their importance in rituals to honor gods, care for ancestors, and contend with ghosts. Throughout For Gods, Ghosts and Ancestors, paper offerings are presented as a vibrant and living tradition expressing worshippers' respect and gratitude for the gods, as well as love and concern for departed family members. Ranging from fake paper money to paper furniture, servant dolls, cigarettes, and toiletries – all multihued and artfully constructed – paper offerings are intended to provide for the needs of those in the spirit world. Readers are introduced to the variety of paper offerings and their uses in worship, in assisting worshippers with personal difficulties, and in rituals directed to gods, ghosts, and ancestors. We learn of the manufacture and sale of paper goods, life in paper shops, the training of those who make paper offerings, and the symbolic and artistic dimensions of the objects. Finally, the book considers the survival of this traditional craft, the importance of flexibility and innovation, and the role of compassion and filial piety in the use of paper offerings.

The Last Heathen
The Last Heathen

Author: Charles Montgomery

Publisher: D & M Publishers

Published: 2009-09-01

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 192681231X

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In 1892, the Bishop of Tasmania set sail for Melanesia with the intent of rescuing islanders from lives of fear, black magic and cannibalism. Over 100 years later, his great grandson, Charles Montgomery, followed the bishop’s route through the South Pacific, seeking out the spirits and myths his missionary forebear had sought to destroy. Montgomery explored remote shores where gospel and empire never took hold. He rubbed shoulders with barefoot preachers, witch doctors and gun-toting rebels, only to discover that the pagan spirits were more tenacious than the missionaries had imagined. Melanesians had stirred Jesus and Mary into an already spicy broth of ancestor worship, ghosts, shark gods and magic. Through confrontations with a bizarre cast of characters—the randy ethnographer, the soft-talking assassin, the leper prophet—the journey becomes a debate on the nature of magic, myth and faith, and a metaphor for the transforming power of story. The Last Heathen marks the debut of an exciting young writer who charts his adventures with passion, insight and grace.

The Anthropology of Religion, Charisma and Ghosts
The Anthropology of Religion, Charisma and Ghosts

Author: Stephen Feuchtwang

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2010-06-29

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 3110223562

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It has been said that Chinese government was, until the republican period, government through li. Li is the untranslatable word covering appropriate conduct toward others, from the guest rituals of imperial diplomacy to the hospitality offered to guests in the homes of ordinary people. It also covers the centring of self in relation to the flows and objects in a landscape or a built environment, including the world beyond the spans of human and other lives. It is prevalent under the republican regimes of China and Taiwan in the forming and maintaining of personal relations, in the respect for ancestors, and especially in the continuing rituals of address to gods, of command to demons, and of charity to neglected souls. The concept of ‛religion’ does not grasp this, neither does the concept of ‛ritual’, yet li undoubtedly refers to a figuration of a universe and of place in the world as encompassing as any body of rite and magic or of any religion. Through studies of Chinese gods and ghosts this book challenges theories of religion based on a supreme god and that god’s prophets, as well as those like Hinduism based on mythical figures from epics, and offers another conception of humanity and the world, distinct from that conveyed by the rituals of other classical anthropological theories.

African Religions
African Religions

Author: Jacob K. Olupona

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 0199790582

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This book connects traditional religions to the thriving religious activity in Africa today.

The Sinister Way
The Sinister Way

Author: Richard von Glahn

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2004-04-20

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 0520928776

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The most striking feature of Wutong, the preeminent God of Wealth in late imperial China, was the deity's diabolical character. Wutong was perceived not as a heroic figure or paragon of noble qualities but rather as an embodiment of humanity's basest vices, greed and lust, a maleficent demon who preyed on the weak and vulnerable. In The Sinister Way, Richard von Glahn examines the emergence and evolution of the Wutong cult within the larger framework of the historical development of Chinese popular or vernacular religion—as opposed to institutional religions such as Buddhism or Daoism. Von Glahn's study, spanning three millennia, gives due recognition to the morally ambivalent and demonic aspects of divine power within the common Chinese religious culture.

Way and Byway
Way and Byway

Author: Robert P. Hymes

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 9780520207585

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"Only Robert Hymes could have produced such a vivid, fascinating portrait of a Taoist mountain, with its immortals, its clergy, and its devotees. Extensive translations of poetry, ghost stories, and canonical sources make it possible for the first time to glimpse the richness of life in a Taoist community in the distant past."--Valerie Hansen, author of The Open Empire: A History of China to 1600

Gods, Ghosts, and Gangsters
Gods, Ghosts, and Gangsters

Author: Avron Boretz

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2010-10-31

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0824860713

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Demon warrior puppets, sword-wielding Taoist priests, spirit mediums lacerating their bodies with spikes and blades—these are among the most dramatic images in Chinese religion. Usually linked to the propitiation of plague gods and the worship of popular military deities, such ritual practices have an obvious but previously unexamined kinship with the traditional Chinese martial arts. The long and durable history of martial arts iconography and ritual in Chinese religion suggests something far deeper than mere historical coincidence. Avron Boretz argues that martial arts gestures and movements are so deeply embedded in the ritual repertoire in part because they iconify masculine qualities of violence, aggressivity, and physical prowess, the implicit core of Chinese patriliny and patriarchy. At the same time, for actors and audience alike, martial arts gestures evoke the mythos of the jianghu, a shadowy, often violent realm of vagabonds, outlaws, and masters of martial and magic arts. Through the direct bodily practice of martial arts movement and creative rendering of jianghu narratives, martial ritual practitioners are able to identify and represent themselves, however briefly and incompletely, as men of prowess, a reward otherwise denied those confined to the lower limits of this deeply patriarchal society. Based on fieldwork in China and Taiwan spanning nearly two decades, Gods, Ghosts, and Gangsters offers a thorough and original account of violent ritual and ritual violence in Chinese religion and society. Close-up, sensitive portrayals and the voices of ritual actors themselves—mostly working-class men, many of them members of sworn brotherhoods and gangs—convincingly link martial ritual practice to the lives and desires of men on the margins of Chinese society. This work is a significant contribution to the study of Chinese ritual and religion, the history and sociology of Chinese underworld, the history and anthropology of the martial arts, and the anthropology of masculinity.

The Return of the Dead
The Return of the Dead

Author: Claude Lecouteux

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2009-07-24

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 1594776830

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How the ghost stories of pagan times reveal the seamless union existing between the world of the living and the afterlife • Demonstrates how Medieval Christianity transformed the more corporeal ghost encountered in pagan cultures with the disembodied form known today • Explains how the returning dead were once viewed as either troublemakers or guarantors of the social order The impermeable border the modern world sees existing between the world of the living and the afterlife was not visible to our ancestors. The dead could--and did--cross back and forth at will. The pagan mind had no fear of death, but some of the dead were definitely to be dreaded: those who failed to go peacefully into the afterlife but remained on this side in order to right a wrong that had befallen them personally or to ensure that the law promoted by the ancestors was being respected. But these dead individuals were a far cry from the amorphous ectoplasm that is featured in modern ghost stories. These earlier visitors from beyond the grave--known as revenants--slept, ate, and fought like men, even when, like Klaufi of the Svarfdaela Saga, they carried their heads in their arms. Revenants were part of the ancestor worship prevalent in the pagan world and still practiced in indigenous cultures such as the Fang and Kota of equatorial Africa, among others. The Church, eager to supplant this familial faith with its own, engineered the transformation of the corporeal revenant into the disembodied ghost of modern times, which could then be easily discounted as a figment of the imagination or the work of the devil. The sanctified grounds of the church cemetery replaced the burial mounds on the family farm, where the ancestors remained as an integral part of the living community. This exile to the formal graveyard, ironically enough, has contributed to the great loss of the sacred that characterizes the modern world.

Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society
Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society

Author: Arthur P. Wolf

Publisher:

Published: 1999-05

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 9780804738026

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This volume examines aspects of religion and ritual in China. Various topics are covered including the sociology of Chinese religion, religion and ritual in Lukang, religious organization in the history of a Taiwanese town, and village alliance temples in Hong Kong.