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

Abstract

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.