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Chinese American Death Rituals: Respecting the Ancestors. Edited by Sue Fawn Chung and Priscilla Wegars. (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2005. Pp. ? + 308, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, illustrations, figures, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $88.00 cloth, $36.95 paper)
After two decades of sporadic efforts from different disciplinary perspectives, studies of Chinese American rituals are at last well represented here. Chinese American Death Rituab, a broad survey covering a wide range of history and geography from largely archaeological and historical perspectives, is meant to help break down stereotypes that Americans have about their Chinese American neighbors. For this fact alone, the present volume, well-designed and well-illustrated (though the bibliography is a few years behind), is worth cheering.
It must be noted, however, that the introduction seems a broad historical mosaic presented at the cost of both clarity and scholarly accuracy. It is misleading to state that Chinese funerary practices "fascinated nineteenth-century English anthropologists" (3), because not only does Western interest in Chinese funerals predate the nineteenth century, but the English anthropologists played a much lesser role in Sinology - the study of Chinese culture - than did missionaries from other countries before and during the nineteenth century. The identity of J. J. M. de Groot, mentioned early and without explanation (3), will doubtless be a mystery to the uninitiated (he was a Dutch Sinologist who lived from 1854 to 1921 [Honey 2001:xiii]). In describing the practice of seeking a geomancer, or fengshui expert, it is not correct to use the...