Chinese Funerals and Chinese Ethnicity in Chiang Mai, Thailand

Theravādizing Ghost Festival in Taiwan

“…(Tobias 1977, 323) In Buddhist temples, the Ghost Festival is performed without the offering of meat and alcohol and the burning of effigies and mock money. More importantly is that the Ghost Festival mentioned in Tobias (1977, 323), as well as other Chinese religious rituals in Thailand (Formoso 1996;Hill 1992) serve to maintain ThaiChinese ethnic boundary and, unlike the Ghost Festival studied in this paper, show no sign of deliberated Theravādaization.…”

Entertaining “Chineseness”: Chinese Singing Clubs in Contemporary Bangkok

“…The ritual-like performance, the use of Mandarin, and the singing of Chinese songs from a bygone era create what Charles Keil calls ''grooving on participation'' [Keil and Feld 1994: 151] and a culturally-sanctioned performance that resists reduction to simple structural frames of feeling or experience [Qureshi 2000]. Like all forms of diasporic Chinese cultural practice -ancestral worship, speaking Chinese, celebrating Chinese festivals, adhering to Chinese customs, eating Chinese food, speaking dialects -singing Mandarin songs is an audible, visible, and sensual aspect of the yearning of Thai-Chinese to construct themselves because they are Chinese and as dynamic but integral subjects within the Thai nationalism and its modernization project [Formoso 1996, Hill 1992. Singing Mandarin songs in clubs is just one of several authenticating strategies that appeal to certain groups within the Thai-Chinese population.…”

The Grave Preferences of Mourides in Senegal: Migration, Belonging, and Rootedness

“…The literature shows that, in many places, funerals are fundamental to this anchoring of identities into territory (Smith 2004;Petit 2005;Nyamnjoh 2013;Jua 2005;Park 1995;Hill 1992). First, burial in one's "place of origin" portrayed as a physical space where multiple generations of one's ancestors were born, lived, and are buried, returns the dead into the protective fold of his or her family and a specific piece of the earth from which he or she hailed.…”