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76 c h a p t e r 4 Liturgy Of all the objects in the world that invoke reverie, a flame calls forth images more readily than any other. It compels us to imagine; when one dreams before a flame, what is perceived is nothing compared to what is imagined. —Gaston Bachelard, The Flame of a Candle Asked why they burn paper money, people say it’s what they’ve learned to do from the old folks; it’s an obligation; they desire a blessing of good fortune; they are afraid not to; it’s just a gesture of respect; it’s superstition; and so on. These individual reflections may be studied as social facts, but they do not explain the custom. Explanations require a structure of relevance that transcends the reflections of individual participants, that frames the custom as a social, psychological, cultural, historical, biological, or existential phenomenon , or some combination of these. Emile Durkheim (1938), for example, focused on how customs maintain the sense of social order. In the case of the paper money custom, the relevant question would be, how does burning paper money for ancestors and other spirits mirror the structure of social relations among groups of the living? The answer, in this case, requires no great leap of analytical insight. As Edward Tylor pointed out in 1871, the principles of “manes-worship . . . are not difficult to understand, for they plainly keep up the social relations of the living world” ([1871] 1958: 2:199). In China, “keeping up the social relations of the living world” entails communicating with and sharing the provisions with which a family sustains its members in perpetuity. Tylor and Durkheim were both interested in elementary structures of religion; for Durkheim (1915) the elementary structure was the liturgy 77 societal formation of a collective conscience. For Tylor it was an evolutionary expression of the human psyche. Over the next half century, the idea of a structure that transcends individual consciousnesses was refined in theories of structuralism, which answers the question “Why burn paper money?” by telling us “how the custom thinks.” “How the custom thinks” is the peculiar way that structuralism (especially its most ardent pioneer, Claude Lévi-Strauss 1970) phrases the absence of individual agency from its analysis of a system of signs.1 The system of signs codifies cultural order that is manifest in particular domains of culture (e.g., kinship, myth, fashion) or, at the highest level of abstraction, the human intellect itself (Lévi-Strauss 1966). In this chapter, I am interested in a particular domain of cultural order in a particular culture, namely the liturgical order of the common ritual service familiar to most Chinese. The system of signs that underlies this liturgical order constitutes what I take to be its canonical order. I am using Roy Rappaport’s concept of canon (1999:224): “the punctiliously recurring and therefore apparently unchanging spine of liturgical order.” It follows that the canonical “spine” of a liturgical order is synonymous with its system of signs. Both canonical order and the system of signs that underlies a liturgical order exhibits that which gives the performance , in its variations (including all the varieties of paper money), the necessary sense of stability and tradition. Paper money is one of the integral signs in the system of signs that underlies the common ritual service. I think it can be shown that the canonical order of the common ritual service provides a cosmology that is comparable in its sophistication to, though different in content from, the Genesiac canon of Judeo-Christian and Islamic religions. The common ritual service (yíshì) enables people in the real world to communicate with spirits in the netherworld (yīnjiān) or yīn-world. There are different kinds of ritual services. Foremost is the funeral (zànglĭ), which is aimed at helping the deceased pass through a hellish purgatory (an earth prison [dìyù] or earth bureau [dìfŭ]) where the carnal body is rived and the soul etherealized so that it can take up its abode in the yīn-world. The process of riving the body is graphically moralized in popular Buddhism and Taoism , not to mention Hellenism. Second is the memorial service and sacrifice (jìlĭ), which seeks to communicate with the departed souls and increasingly etherealized spirits that reside in the yīn-world. In general the ritual service creates a sacred space that is architectonically mobile and independent of geography. It can be...

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