Burning Money: The Material Spirit of the Chinese Lifeworld

摘要

This is a work of mature reflection and substantial scholarship, a significant contribution not simply to the study of an aspect of contemporary Chinese funerary practice but also - as the title indicates - to the understanding of some less easily graspable aspects of what it might mean to be Chinese. Some data from speakers of Vietnamese are also incorporated here, but the burning of money is by and large something that many Chinese do, while other contiguous cultures with similar concerns about the unseen world, such as Mongols or Japanese, do not. Those interested in a simple introduction to the burning of paper money might perhaps be advised to go initially to a work such as Roderick Cave's Chinese Paper Offerings (Oxford University Press, 1998), since although the reader of the work under review may tap into a very rich seam of ethnographic observation, this is frequently embedded in an equally rich discourse that moves well beyond a description of immediate phenomena to discuss much broader issues.