Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Aijmer, Göran

Titel

LANDSCAPE AND MINDSCAPE IN SOUTHEASTERN CHINA THE MANAGEMENT OF DEATH IN A MOUNTAIN COMMUNITY

Ist Teil von

• Journal of ritual studies, 2007-01, Vol.21 (2), p.32-45

Ort / Verlag

Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh

Erscheinungsjahr

2007

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This article is an account of the interaction of men—living or dead—with their surrounding landscape. The ethnographic corpus is drawn from some Hakka-speaking communities in southeastern China. The study describes relations between the landscape, the graves of the dead, and fengshui geomancy and is thus connected with issues of the dead, fertility and the cosmos. Life force flows from an individual death into a cosmic redistribution of the person, which results in the enhancement of fertility and ultimately the incorporation of the dead person into the collective domain of the ancestors. The landscape is seen as a symbolic idiom providing a system of meanings in which no one element can be understood in isolation. This idiom is used to handle existential problems—relations of the living with the dead, the movement of the deceased from known relative to anonymous ancestor, and how death relates to rebirth and regeneration.