Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Burning Money: The Material Spirit of the Chinese Lifeworld . C. Fred Blake . Honolulu : University of Hawai'i Press , 2011. x + 278 pp. $52.00. ISBN 978-0-8248-3532-3
Book Reviews
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.
Even so, all students of contemporary Chinese life would do well to read this whole book carefully and critically, rather than pillage it for its up-to-the minute observations about what paper goods are burned and how. The Introduction (pp. 1-8) announces the author's theoretical perspectives, glossing in...