Powers of the Dead: Struggles Over Paper Money Burning in Urban China

Powers of the Dead: Struggles over practice money burning as an offering to gods, Paper Money Burning in Urban ancestors and ghosts in commemorative ritu- China als, believing that money is as important for the dead as it is for the living. Blake (2011) ex- plains that, over the past millennium in China Mingyuan Zhang and beyond, people have been replicating their material world in paper for their deceased fam- Introduction ily members. He has found that in many Chi- During a recent visit to my hometown city nese cities, replica paper money that goes up in Northeastern Mainland China after living in in smoke every year is worth of tens of mil- Canada for two years, my parents took me to lions of yuan (Chinese currency). Debates over sweep my grandparents’ gravesite. On the the issue of burning paper money for the dead, days of traditional Chinese festivals such as especially in urban settings, have gradually en- Qingming Festival, also known as the Tomb- tered into contemporary Chinese public dis- sweeping Day, and Zhongyuan Festival, also course. Many municipal governments have known as the Dead Spirit Day, my parents moved to ban paper money burning in the city. would usually pay a visit to the cemetery on According to the authorities, such regulations the outskirts of the city where their parents have been implemented in order to promote a were buried. During the visit, they would set more “civilized” funeral and interment proce- replica paper money on fire at the cemetery, an dure instead of “old-fashioned,” “feudal,” and act which serves to represent sending money “superstitious” rituals. Supporters of such reg- to the other world – the world where the dead ulations contend that paper money burning is live. There are various kinds of replica paper “backward,” “unscientific,” “unenlightened,” money for such rituals. The most common and environmentally detrimental, and there- kind is usually in the color of yellow and is fore it is incompatible with “modern,” “civi- sold at a price of approximately one or two dol- lized,” and “clean” urban space. lars per pile. It is made from cheap and thin paper, which makes it convenient to burn. While objections to paper money burning Other kinds of replica money may look similar represent the re-assertion of modernist dreams to real currency in color and pattern; however, based on the presumed “necessary” gaps they are all produced from low-quality paper between past and present, dead and living, and very easy to distinguish from real money. traditional and modern, superstition and When actually visiting the cemetery is not pos- science, the continuation of such traditional sible due to distance and time constraints, an practice in urban China (regardless of the alternative practice is to burn paper money at a prohibitive regulations from government crossroads closer to home. Such scenes are authorities) challenges the modernist common in cities during the two traditional dichotomies and reveals entanglements among festivals when Chinese people commemorate different actors presumed to be separate. In the dead: dozens of small groups of people this paper, I intend to argue firstly that the gather at street intersections, burning paper practice of burning paper money reflects a money into ashes; right beside high-rise apart- Chinese cosmology that is not based on a ment buildings, parks and busy traffic. dichotomy between the living and the dead; as practitioners of money burning insist, the dead Burning paper money is a practice shared can be mobilized to exert influential power by people in many parts of Asia. For example, over the living. Secondly, I will argue that the according to Kwon (2007), the Vietnamese paper money that people used to and continue 1 to burn plays an active, mediating role between lieve in cultural relativism, we should also be- the living and the dead; this money is itself an lieve in natural relativism. As Latour actor and participant in people’s social, (1993:106) argues, “we construct both our hu- cultural and economic life. Finally, I will argue man collectives and the nonhumans that sur- that the conflict between government policy round them. In constituting their collectives, and traditional practice demonstrates that some mobilize ancestors, lions, fixed stars, and efforts to mobilize modern dichotomies have the coagulated blood of sacrifice; in construct- failed to account for or disentangle the ing ours, we mobilize genetics, zoology, cos- complex networks relevant to this practice – mology and hematology”. networks that connect the living and the dead, the human and the spirit, the object and the Building on Latour’s concept of natural subject, as well as nature, culture and super- relativism, Escobar (1999) further elaborates nature. upon the relationship between nature, culture and local knowledge by emphasizing that the Theoretical Traces: Nature-Culture and Mul- cultural models of many societies do not rely tinaturalism on a nature-culture dichotomy. The fact that In the previous section, I introduced how other societies represent the relation between struggles over burning paper money suggest their human and biological worlds differently the gap that the vanguards of modernity try to from the Western world, since the living, insert in between nature and culture. In this nonliving and supernatural beings do not con- section, I will review some key theoretical ar- stitute distinct and separate domains, further guments that emphasize the entanglement of challenges the dichotomy (Escobar 1999:8). In nature and culture and attempt to bridge this other words, local knowledge in “other” soci- supposed gap. eties draws relationships and mobilizes actors in different and interrelated domains of the liv- According to Bruno Latour (1993), the no- ing, the dead, the object, the beast, the environ- tion of culture is an artifact created by exclud- ment, the landscape, and the supernatural, ra- ing nature. The Western way of dividing nature ther than categorizing them into rigid Western and culture as two separate regimes cannot re- models of nature and culture. flect reality since the two have always been in- tertwined in networks. However, Western For instance, according to Chinese writer knowledge--based on the separation of objec- Jiang Rong (2008), the nomadic Chinese- tive, scientifically knowable nature on the one Mongolian people have developed their hand, and subjective, constructivist culture on knowledge through many generations of en- the other--still problematically assumes that gagement with the ecosystem of the prairie, the separation itself is the key distinction be- which includes the wolf pack, the herds, the tween “the modern us” and “the pre-modern weather, the spirit of the dead and the sky. An- other.” As such, the only entity that guarantees other example can be found in Tsing’s (2005) a symmetrical anthropology is what Latour narratives about the forests in Indonesia. The calls the “nature-culture.” Further developing local inhabitants of the forest form their this idea, Latour challenges the inconsistency knowledge of subsistence in relation to domes- between a universalized nature and many di- ticated and wild plants and animals. In another verse and relativistic forms of culture. Instead, case provided by de la Cadena (2010), indige- a more appropriate approach should be com- nous groups in Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador see paring nature-culture as a whole, and if we be- their community as more than just a territory where a group of people live, but as a dynamic 2 space where earth-beings such as humans, Taking such a theoretical approach to an- plants, animals, mountains, and rivers co-exist other level, Viveiros de Castro (1998) develops and interact, as another socio-natural world to the concept of perspectivism from numerous which human beings and other-than-human references in Amazonian ethnographies about beings belong. The Aymara people in Bolivia the way humans, animals, gods, spirits, plants, have successfully incorporated ceremony that the living and the dead are entangled entity and summoned the landscape and practices of liba- transformable to each other. Drawing upon tions to the earth into political events and con- Viveiro de Castro, Hage (2012) argues that versations (de la Cadena 2010:337). I bring up concepts of perspectivism and multinaturalism these examples with no intention of essential- suggest that different perspectives emerge izing the identities of indigenous groups, or by from the ways in which different bodies con- supporting the stereotype that indigenous peo- stitute different modes of relating to, inhabit- ple are those who have a closer relationship to ing and being enmeshed in their environment. nature and/or have a static culture that has Such multiplicity of bodily engagements in gone uninfluenced by the outside world. On turn produces a multiplicity of realities or na- the contrary, according to these authors, these tures. In other words, instead of understanding groups are actively engaged with capitalist different cultures as multiple interpretations economy and political struggles. These exam- and representations of one universal nature, ples prove that nature-culture entanglement multinaturalism alludes to the existence of rad- has always been a part of the presumed “mod- ically different natures and realities based on ern” society that apparently bases itself on the how different actors engage with nature. dichotomy between nature and culture. It is also worth mentioning that the nature-culture The theoretical approaches I discussed entanglement does not only exist in the non- above are significant for a profound under- Western world. In Degnen’s research about standing of the struggles over the practice of British gardening, she discovers that for many paper money burning in China. Burning paper British gardeners, plants are perceived as peo- money represents a common and prevalent un- ple who can exhibit intentionality and sen- derstanding of the connections between the tience, as babies who have likes, dislikes and living world and the dead world.

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