Upon Meeting the Ancestors: the Hmong Funeral Ritual in Asia and Australia
Author(s):
Falk, Catherine
Format:
Journal article
Citation:
Hmong Studies Journal, Volume 1, Issue 1 (1996). pp. 15-Jan.
Language:
English
Abstract:
Perhaps because of the universality of death, subtleties of specific cultural configurations in deathways have sometimes been obscured in attempts to compare other perceived universals, such as demonstrations of grief, and the symbolism and socio-politics of deathways. On the one hand, archaeological reconstructions of death rites have given us insight into long term sequences of cultural change, while on the other, ethnographic research has provided accounts of living traditions, even if they capture those traditions at the particular moment of the social anthropologist's relatively brief encounter with another culture. This paper will describe how the text affects its own telling at a specific moment in the death rites of the Hmong people, drawing chronologically on seven accounts dating from the 1890s to 1992 and ranging geographically from southern China to Thailand, Laos and Australia.