A Study of Death-Related Practices and Talks in a Chinese Muslim Village

Space of mortality: a study of death-related practices and talks in a Chinese Muslim village

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Yuanhao Zhao, Ph.D. Graduate Program in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

The Ohio State University

2017

Dissertation Committee:

Sabra J. Webber, Advisor

Dorothy Noyes

Mark Bender

Morgan Liu

Yuanhao Zhao

2017

Abstract

Because of the strong emotions and sudden ruptures caused by death in a community, expressive culture relating to death offers special contexts to study ethnic culture, social structures, and inequality. This dissertation analyzes death-related folklore, specifically, talks and practices about death, the deceased, funerals, and lethal supernatural powers in an ethnic Hui (Chinese Muslim) village in China.

Analysis is based on my ethnographic fieldwork conducted from Summer 2014 to

Summer 2015 in a Hui village located in Shandong Province. Using a folkloristic approach, I conduct qualitative study by analyzing folk narratives and beliefs in their spatiotemporal specificities. I interpret “death” as a power that produces specific social spaces shaping how different social agents interact. I argue that death related genres of expressive culture form social spaces where different social norm and hierarchies are highlighted and become susceptible to challenges. In these spaces, tensions between social groups are more open to discussion, and various social actors are mobilized to interact in order to confirm or contest, stabilize or liquidize certain social structure, be it of a family, a neighborhood, a community, a religious institute, or an ethnic group.

The dissertation is divided into four chapters plus an introduction and a conclusion. Chapter 1 contextualizes one man’s death in the village. Each aspect of this man’s death is used to lead a discussion of one relevant methodological or theoretical concern. Chapter 2 discusses two funerals during which conflicts arise. I focus on intensive negotiations between mosque clergies and families of the deceased,

ii arguing that conflict helps disclose tensions between the religious and mundane and consequently unsettles religious hierarchies. Chapter 3 addresses laymen’s critiques of religious men and even of the “symbol of Islam,” the village mosque. I suggest that religious space for many laymen in the village is most clearly manifest during death rituals and thus harsh critiques of mosque clergies tend to emerge during those moments. In Chapter 4 I look at how villagers relate lethal supernatural powers to the village landscape, to come to terms with death, and negotiate with, question or challenge death and even God. I conclude the dissertation by restoring

“everydayness” to death, observing that although death ruptures social life and disturbs the everyday routine, it is also a resource for people to address social problems and sustain the vitality and stream of everyday life.

iii Dedication

Dedicated to my Mother and Father

iv Acknowledgements

During dissertation writing and years of study, many names shine like stars in the nightly sky to lighten my way in the darkness in my heart and mind.

My gratefulness firstly goes to my supervisor Professor Sabra Webber. Professor

Webber is the person who led me into the world of folklore study six years ago in

2010, when I firstly stepped onto the land of the United States. She has been supportive not only academically but also emotionally. I recall, and still expect enjoyable conversations with her on research as well as everyday life.

I am grateful to my committee members, Professor Dorothy Noyes, Professor

Mark Bender, and Professor Morgan Liu too.

Professor Noyes is highly responsive. Her suggestions and comments on my chapter drafts contain theory application, methodology, structure and more. I learn from her not only how to revise my dissertation, but also valuable lessons of how to be a responsible and ethical scholar.

Professor Bender gave precious suggestions on theories to read and writing styles.

He never hesitates to show interest in my thoughts and plans, and helps me to realize them. The time and attention that he spends on me equal that he has on students in his own department.

Professor Liu can be fearful sometimes as he makes detailed comments on the theoretical frame and structure of my dissertation. But I know working with him can improve my writing and help me gain new and alternative perspectives toward my own research. As the one in charge of graduate education in my department, Professor

v Liu also cares about my progress in general and endeavors to resolve problems that I encounter along my years as a graduate student.

Professor Margaret Mills is also an important person in my life as a student in The

Ohio State University and a folklorist. She encourages me to express my ideas and is always interested in my work. After her retirement, I would still send my dissertation chapters and other articles to her for advice. During her brief visit to The Ohio State

University in March 2016, she generously spent more than two hours discussing my chapters with me.

Without my training with Professor Merrill Kaplan, Professor Amy Shuman and

Professor Katherine Borland, this dissertation cannot be accomplished.

Professor Kevin van Bladel, our department chair has been supportive too. He is always willing to listen and understands my anxiety.

My gratitude goes to my friends, who cared about my mental and physical wellbeing during my dissertation writing, an all-consuming task that exhausts patience and energy.

My long time friend Zhang Dongbo of Boston College has been supporting me emotionally by his sporadic calls. I enjoy our intellectual and trivial conversations alike.

Probably Zhang Liao, Ph.D. student of History of Michigan State University, is the one to whom I talk the most, about my research, life, and happenings on both sides of the Pacific Ocean. I am thankful to have a friend who shares opinions in various political and intellectual issues, and has many concerns and anxieties in common with me.

vi In Columbus, My folklorist friends and colleagues Cassie Patterson and Puja

Wells offered me valuable opportunities to seek professional development during my dissertation writing.

My friends in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures: David

Bond, Shahreena Shahrani and her husband Paul, Ehsan Estri and his wife Afsane all encouraged me to keep up with my work and consoled me using good humor, delicious food, and most importantly, caring words.

My friends in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures: Mario De

Grandis, Jia Junqing, Li Cong and Mu Bing, my friend in Oberlin Collage Zhang Xin, my friend in the Department of History of Art Yin Yanfei and her partner Zhuang regularly checked on me and spent time with me. I owe them a lot for many heartwarming moments.

Allen Tuazon is a name that should be mentioned too. Allen was my department colleague and friend. He used to stop by my apartment to invite me for a dinner or spoil me with a box of Chocolate Grahams, making fun of my English nickname:

Graham. This loving soul however left us during my year of fieldwork, where I also observed other departures from This World. Without this experience, my dissertation would not have been the same.

Although I only met Julian Halliday for limited times, he still generously offers to format and grammar-check my dissertation for me and demonstrates interest in my research. His support and care tell me that he is a gentleman with a warm and big heart. His cats are soothing too.

vii Our Arabic program coordinator Mr. Hisam Elaqad and my colleagues in the department, Marite Labaki and Geri Atanassova also considerately shared teaching materials with me so that I could have more time for dissertation writing.

Justin Acome, our department coordinator managed to assist me in many graduation related administrative issues such as arranging room for defense and preparing paperwork.

My collaborators, living or deceased, in my communities of fieldwork should receive the most respect and thanks. This is a dissertation written for them and by them too. Their life stories nourished my ethnographic fieldwork as well as my mind as a folklorist and a human being. Many of their names cannot be disclosed, but they are still mentioned in my chapters: everyone with a pseudonym, but a real soul.

The Mershon Center for International Security Studies and Center for Folklore

Studies at The Ohio State University generously funded my fieldwork from 2014 to

2015. The Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures offered me teaching positions through my years as a doctoral student. The Louise Loh Memorial

Scholarship funded my fieldwork and follow-up visits to the village of my fieldwork in 2016. Without the resources they provided, I could not have managed to collect the attractive narratives presented in this dissertation.

Finally, I want to express my love to my dear mother and father who most of the time have been far away from me with the Pacific Ocean in between, but always available for me on video chat applications whenever I need their practical suggestions or emotional support. All the long conversations or their silent late night company online in addition to my time with them back home for vacations and

viii fieldwork are treasurable memories that are incorporated in my treatment of friends and mentors, and give me courage when facing difficulties in my writing and teaching.

ix Vitae

Education:

 2017 Ph.D. The Ohio State University Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures Interdisciplinary Specialty – Folklore Dissertation: Space of mortality: a study of death- related practices and talks in a Chinese Muslim village Advisor: Sabra Webber  2012 M.A. The Ohio State University Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures  2010 M.A. University of International Business and Economics (Beijing, China) Arabic Language and Literature  2009 Exchange Program Faculty of Arts, Cairo University (Cairo, Egypt)  2007 B.A. University of International Business and Economics Arabic Language

Field of Study:

 Near Eastern Languages and Cultures  Folklore

x Table of Contents Abstract ...... ii Dedication ...... iv Acknowledgements ...... v Vitae ...... x Introduction ...... 1 Chapter One: Starting From One Man’s Death ...... 24 Chapter Two: Conflicting Funerals. Who Goes First? ...... 58 Chapter Three: Past Funerals and Current Relations ...... 99 Chapter Four: Space of Death and Imagined Landscapes ...... 154 Conclusion ...... 194 References ...... 202 Appendix: A Partial and Brief Description of Ms. Ha’s Funeral ...... 212

xi Introduction

This dissertation takes death related practices and talks into its multi-layered and multifaceted contexts in a Chinese “Hui” Muslim village in the Shandong Province. 1

I first consider, why the focus on Hui, and why on death?

Justification of this Research

Hui are among the fifty-five ethnic minorities and ten Muslim minorities officially recognized by the Chinese government during its ethnic categorization (minzu shibie in Chinese) in the 1950s after the establishment of the New China. The Hui are governmentally defined as Muslims. But in fact, they vary in their “Muslim” practices. Scholars studying Chinese minorities have approached and questioned this categorization both by focusing on the Hui’s quotidian practices and small narratives, and the logics applied by the practitioners of ethnic categorization (see for instances

Gladney 1991, Mullaney 2011).

Hui people are disbursed in China and thus are the minority and the Muslims that most majority, “Han” people encounter day to day. Although Hui are claimed to be

“familiar strangers” (Lipman 1997) or “incompatible” with Chinese society (Israeli

1977), they have managed to co-exist with their Han neighbors for more than a thousand years in China. In our time when Islamphobia is rampant in social media in both China and the United States, to study the Hui in particular cultural contexts

1 To protect my collaborators’ credentials, I decide not to reveal the name of the village nor the municipality it is affiliated with. Because there are not many Hui villages near that city, and I have provided the village’s population and administrative structure, to further disclose any information of the village and the municipality will help to locate the village and mark my collaborators.

1 contributes to understanding the art of Muslims and non-Muslim sharing long term citizenship and the process by which such subaltern communities interact with their hosting societies. Although Hui have a default religion: Islam, they live among the

Han and elements of the latter’s vernacular religion also enter Hui’s symbolic system of perceiving the world—and perhaps vice-versa. This makes the Hui a source for understanding the interaction between vernacular and institutional religions as well.

Scholars of the humanities, including anthropologists and folklorists are aware that for any particular group of people “[t]here has never been a human

‘substantiality’, be it of a sociological, psychic, psychosociological, ideological, economic or political nature” (Lefebvre 2014, 428). Therefore, discovering Hui substantiality is not a goal of this dissertation; my study of the people is actually the study of their performances. This dissertation acknowledges that any group–ethnic group included–only emerges from ephemeral and contingent performances (Noyes

1995, 452). And of course, a group, whether ethnic, a community, neighborhood, or even a family, does not only emerge, but also disappear, separates and hierarchizes through performances. This division and hierarchization will be my focus in this dissertation.

I have chosen in this dissertation to address practices and talks related to death.

Due to the strong emotions and sudden ruptures caused by death in a community, death-related expressive culture elicits observable social and cultural collision and conflict within the community in question (here the village of my fieldwork), hence offers contexts for the study of shifts in ethnic culture, social structures and inequality. Contextualized in my village of fieldwork, although weddings, birth

2 celebration and other rites of passage and festivals can also be emotional events, death related events are different from them in that “death” suggests more breaking, as many social relations vanish with the demise of an individual. 2 Death-related practices and talks thus can become a space where tensions and ruptures are brought on the table, and social relations are re-negotiated. For instance, a funeral is generally expected to be an occasion where family members, friends and neighbors gather, mourn their loss, and support one another in a hard time: and it is indeed the case in many funerals that I attended. However, my fieldwork also shows that people challenge and question social norms and existing relations in funerals.

This research engages with critical theories about space and everyday life (for instances Henri Lefebvre 1991, 2014 and Michele de Certeau 1988), folklore studies,

Chinese ethnic studies, Islamic studies, and ethnographical methodology. I will offer a brief literature review below mainly on studies of Muslims in China and the anthropological or folkloristic study of death, in order to trace where my debts and contribution to these fields might be traced.

Studies on Muslims in China

Scholars have documented and analyzed Muslim minorities’/immigrants’ everyday life in East Asia. Maris Gillette (2000) answers the question of how Hui

2 This is not to deny that other rites can also suggest breaking. For instance, wedding in many cultures also resembles funeral in that the bride normally leaves her family to join a new one (Danforth 2004), but this layer of meaning is not quite visible in my village of fieldwork. The reason may be that marriage very often happens between Hui communities that are close to one another, and even for those who marry their sons and daughters farther, they can still see one another quite often. Not to mention that once a new baby is born, grandparents are always summoned to take care of it, or it is sent to the grandparents to be taken care of. The connection between nuclear families and their extended families are in general strong in my village of fieldwork. Of course, again, this should not rule out the many exceptions that happen for various reasons such as poverty, unequal treatment of children, and so forth.

3 identify themselves in the city of Xi’an in the context of “modernity.” She cites examples of how Hui individuals’ chose to embrace “modernity” in their quotidian life to express themselves differently from their Han neighbors, to refuse to convert to the collective expression encouraged by consumerism and the socialist state.

Similarly on identification, Dru Gladney (1991) scrutinizes Hui people’s lives in four communities in China and demonstrates how they express their Huiness and how ethnic groups bargain with power holders by artfully applying ethnic politics.

Matthew Erie (2016) looks at the Hui in Linxia from the perspective of law and gifting, and analyzes how Hui negotiate their understanding of Islamic law in a society dominated by majority “Han” and post-socialist ideology. Ha Guangtian (Ha

2017) discusses how rural Hui women adopt different colors and styles of hats (as hijabs) as symbols of the life they experience and desire. Historian Rian Thum (2014) and anthropologist Jay Dautcher (2009) study another Muslim minority, the Uighur.

Of interest to my work, Thum analyzes Uighur rituals and liminal experience at shrines and the connection between landscape, spirituality and the past in Chapter 3 of his book. Dautcher offers a detailed and attractive description of social life in Uighur mehelles (traditional residential neighborhoods) focusing on market activities, social gatherings, religious life and so forth.

Scholars also analyze Muslims in China from other perspectives, such as violent conflicts between Muslim minorities and majority Chinese (Lipman 1990, 1997), ethics and politics (Henning 2009). Sociologist Zang Xiaowei (Zang 2007) argues for an inner-ethnic stratification of Hui’s “modernity” in an urban setting in Lanzhou city

4 by comparing Hui and Han behaviors in neighborhood interaction, solidarity, network mobilization, mate selection and so forth.

Studies on Death and Dying

Folkloric and anthropologic writings cover many aspects of death, its meanings and rituals in various social contexts. For instance Robert Hertz (1960) in his sociological/anthropological writing studied how double burial rituals in Indonesia alter the social status of the deceased as well as the relationship between the living and the dead. Elizabeth Hallam and Jenny Hockey (2001) study how material culture in contemporary Western societies changes the way of mourning and how objects gain their own agency in memorizing the deceased. James Green’s study of American people’s activities before death helps us to understand how death offers sites for different imaginations of “good” or “bad” deaths conflict and converge in a complex frame that caters to modernity, religion, diseases and social changes (2008). Ray

Cashman’s (2006) writing about Irish wake offers a picture of intensified social life and temporal and long-term social status transformation of both the deceased and the living in such social events. Katherine Verdery (1999) studies how in East Europe death related rituals extend the political life of politicized corpses and ways these rituals confirm and challenge social and political changes. Scholars also study how humor, practical jokes and even pranks to help people cope with their strong emotions and sudden ruptures from the past (Narváez et al. in Narváez 2003). Supernatural powers such as ghosts are also on scholars’ radar of death related research. Studies include how narratives pertaining to ghosts and supernatural beings comment on

5 living people’s experiences and become social phenomena, and how stories about ghosts of the deceased or wraiths of the dying link landscape, religion, “worldview” and memories together to comment on real world issues (Iwasaka and Toelken 1994,

Foster 2015, Cashman 2016). Many other works also discuss how death rituals enable the living people to show respect to the dead and make sense of community, groupness, gender role and/or individual life (c.f. Bourke 1993, Outmany 2015). 3

There are also works addressing the relation between Islam/Muslims and death.

For instance Leor Halevi discusses Islamicization of Muslims’ death rituals and mourning customs in the early Middle Ages when “Muslims” were still a newly emerged social group (2007). Jane Smith and Yvonne Haddad try to “give as broad an overview as possible of the Islamic eschatological narrative, describing the understanding of the events beginning with the death of the individual and ending with habitation in the final abodes of recompense” (2002, xi) in their volume Islamic

Thoughts on Death. Thomas O’Shaughnessy (1969) studies images and connotations of death in the Quran thematically and traces influences Muhammad received from other traditions such as Christianity and Judaism. Hilma Granqvist (1965) documented Arab Muslims’ customs and verbal arts about death, mourning, preparation for death and death rituals in a village in Jordan in detail. I find many shared customs between the two “Muslim villages” i.e. Granqvists’ and my village of fieldwork.

3 For a more detailed introduction to anthropology of death, see also Antonius C. G. M. Robben (2004). Robben chooses to present various aspects of death, including conceptualization of death, mortuary rituals, mourning customs and so forth.

6 Specifically pertinent to my focus in this dissertation, i.e. the relation between death and space, in the book Deathscapes: Spaces for Death, Dying, Mourning and

Remembrance (ed. Avril Maddrell and James D. Sidaway 2010), scholars champion the idea of “deathscape,” which means spaces where death, dying, emotion brought by bereavement and memories about the deceased happen and unfold. Most of the chapters focus on the relationship between the living and dead, and address the identification of the deceased and their survivors, rather than discussing how death intensifies the connection between living people and renders social norms open and susceptible to questions and challenges. However, the pieces by Bel Deering and by

Penelope Davies both address activities in cemeteries that question the dominant social or political norms/discourse. These two articles highlight death and death related expressive cultures as sites for transgressing social boundaries and thus relate to similar observations in this dissertation wherein death-related enactments and participants’ discussions thereof are found to offer opportunities for various social

“actants” (Latour 1996) to question and challenge social norms and hierarchies. In some other researches, although the concept of “space” is not highlighted, scholars also addressed the relationship among the living people. For instance in Peter Metcalf and Richard Huntington’s Celebrations of Death, they discussed how death rituals for kings of the Berawan people of Malay facilitated opportunities for the living to either honor or contradict past leadership (1991, 6, 146-51).

Similarly, in the book Death, Memory, and Material Culture (Hallam and Hockey

2001), Hallam and Hockey analyze spaces for mourning and spatialized actions and

7 speeches as texts through the reading of which objects and human beings (living and dead) interact equally as social actors.

Part of my research concerns practices/talks in death rituals. Therefore theories defining rituals, such as the “social control theory,” “channeling of conflict theory,”

“repression theory” and “definition of reality theory” and the critiques of them are relevant (see Bell 1992). As Bell points out, “[n]o matter which definition of ritual is used, it is obvious that not every society or subgroup appeals to ritual activities in the same way and to the same degree” (ibid, 176). My dissertation follows this line of criticism too.

Of course, all the works briefly introduced here to a certain extent converse with one another, and what I mention are merely part of their foci, because to address any aspect or piece of death-related expressive culture means to address or at least allude to other aspects of a concept rich in meaning: death, which is natural and social, individual and communal at the same time.

Below I will offer a description of my village of fieldwork and a piece of ethnography to give concrete form to the discussion of “why Hui, why death” presented above, so that my readers can better understand my dissertation and appreciate my contribution to the field.

A Taste of the Village and this Research

I conducted fieldwork using a participant observational method among village people for one year from Summer 2014 to Summer 2015, with previous contacts and

8 personal relationships established before the fieldwork, and sporadic preliminary field visits paid to the village beginning in 2012.

The village is subordinate to the municipality of SW City has a population of six thousand, among which only four households are members of the “Han” majority.

The rest are all Hui. The village is divided into two parts, the West Village and the

East Village. But most people residing the two parts are relatives. My fieldwork mainly takes place in the West Village, which has around three thousand inhabitants.

Major crops cultivated here are wheat and corns. Early June, villagers dry and de- hull wheat grains in every piece of ground in the village, including the roads. Late

September to October, corn sticks are put out in the sunshine to dry. Young people help the old at this time of the year, but they normally work outside of the village in nearby factories or downtown. Many live outside of the village too.

When work in the field ceases, gatherings in the open air assume a central role in people’s, especially male villagers’ everyday social life in the village. I normally attend this sort of gatherings among middle aged and old men (roughly, 40s to 80s) in the afternoon from around 2:00 to 4:00 or 5:00 in the winter, and 2:00 to 6:00 or 7:00 in summer time, with prayers, normally Dhuhr and cAsr (in local terms Peshine and

Digar, both from Farsi names for the prayers) intersecting, and people coming and leaving for everyday errands such as picking up children/grandchildren and going to the market. Aged villagers can spend a whole day chatting outside except during meal breaks, despite cold and hot weathers. Young men are always busy at work, but they also stop by now and then, and they gather at places they work too, such as the marketplace. There are several spots of gathering in and around the village for various

9 purposes, for instance there are at least two for mahjong lovers to rally co-players to entertain themselves and also for a little gambling;4 there is one for people who keep chirping birds as pets to “walk the birds,” there are some for people of the neighborhood to have a short or long chat. These gatherings easily host 3 to 7 people and the number could reach to more than 10, all from different parts of the village and of diverse occupations.

There are two mosques in the village. I frequent the West Mosque, which has four clergies, or “akhonds.”5 Among them there is one Imam, who is of the highest rank and leads prayers, two akhonds of lower rank, and one Fourth Master of the lowest rank.6 The retired Imam also stays in the mosque to help with bookkeeping. Akhonds do not have salaries, three of them have fields in the village, but still need villagers’ cash gift to maintain a decent life.

These aforementioned places and people will be recurrently referred to in my chapters that come later. At this moment I will only offer a short excerpt from my field notes.

February 10, 2015, after Jumca prayer in my village of fieldwork, I wandered around the mosque talking to people. Then, around 3:30 in the afternoon, at a street corner between the mosque and village administration building, I joined a group of

4 According to some of my collaborators, stakes could be high and fights are not rare. I know some mahjong players but never attended their gatherings to avoid unnecessary trouble. 5 “Akhond” is a term borrowed from Farsi to address a clergy working in a mosque, whose daily work includes reciting Qur’anic verses for lay Muslims who are not able to do so themselves, slaughtering animals according to Islamic law, funeral and other religious services. 6 According to some of my collaborators, traditional mosque system includes the Imam (rank one), the akhonds (rank two), the muezzin (rank three), the fourth master (rank four). Another version also includes a fifth rank, the “Fifth Master” or “Kungfu Master” who is in charge of protecting the mosque. Mr. Rud told me this. He himself is a kungfu teacher. The titles for the last two ranks are interesting as in Chinese both “Four” and “Mosque” could be pronounced as “si,” and “Five” and “Kungfu” are both pronounced as “wu.” So “Fourth Master” could mean “Mosque Master,” and “Fifth Master” could mean “Kungfu Master.”

10 old friends, who are all men in their sixties and seventies. They were talking about funerals.

“So they dumped the water [after washing the corpse] on the dung pile.” Mr. La said.

“Hahahaha…” All the other old men laughed. “There is no regulation for how to dispose of the water, so if you want to dump it, who can help?” Mr. Hes said.

“That’s why people in the city are not likeable.” Mr. Huq, a cow farmer, also said.

“You should dump it on clean sand [in the yard].” Mr. Sa educated me, “So that

[the spirits of] the deceased parents can accompany their offspring.”

…

“When I went to the mosque in Tai’an (a city in Shandong) I saw them washing the corpse. They simply run flowing water on it and do not use their hands.” Hes said.

“Also, they put the corpse down into the tomb using a soft way, [that means] they do not use the han tuo (a piece of hardboard on which the corpse lies, like a bier) but use three ropes tying on the corpse and stretch the ropes to put the corpse down in the tomb.” La added.

…

“The Fourth Master cannot wash the corpse right? Because he always slaughters animals so the spirits are afraid of him.” Nur said.

“The Fourth Master cannot, [you mean] you can?” Hes teased Nur, “the Fourth

Master earns 50 RMB for washing a corpse. Don’t you dare to undercut him?!” Huq laughed.

11 “So you carefully put your feet this and this way [to avoid standing across the corpse] when dragging it in the tomb.” Nur went on.

“That’s what you do when it is a woman [corpse].” Hes corrected him. … “For a man [corpse] you simply pull it [under your crotch].”

“So you ride on a man. Why you cannot ride on a woman?” Huq made an obscene comment. People laughed.

…

“After you arrive at the funeral, you xiang is served, you tiao and bean milk are served.” Hes said. You xiang is fried flat bread, it is only served in festivals and religious rituals. You tiao is fried dough stick, a daily food that is normally consumed as breakfast.

“You don’t sell and buy you xiang, even a little, you have to cook it at home.”

Hes went on.

“But the city people do that (buy and sell you xiang).” Nur said.

“That’s their choice.” Hes condemned the city people. … “… All the dead spirits will come to consume the aroma of you xiang, if you cook it at home.”

“… In the village all the neighbors will come, help, and watch. It is for fun (re nao) too.” Huq added.

Then everyone started to criticize city people and concluded that to cook you xiang at home is a way to “pass down the tradition.” Huq however also agreed that people adopt new ways of performing rituals according to changes in their environment. Then Sa diverted the topic to baby delivery, taking it as another

12 example to show the city people do not care one another, and change the way things used to be completed.

This short dialogue, lasting less than 20 minutes, reveals amazing richness. Many layers of the village society unfold from the discussion of a funeral. Death is a daily topic of the villagers. From this genre of expressive culture, a folklorist like me sees myriad issues together: there is daily landscape changed by supernatural power (water used to wash corpse dumped on sand in the yard), there are changing traditions in spatiotemporal specificities (dumping water, buying you xiang, Tai’an and local ways of putting corpses in tombs), there is the ridiculing of religious tasks (undercutting the

Fourth Master, “riding” a woman), there is the meeting between Islam and vernacular

Chinese folk beliefs (ghosts being afraid of the Fourth Master, ghosts coming home for the aroma of you xiang), there are social life/status of the deceased (cooking you xiang for them, different ways of treating female corpses), and most crucially, there are social relations among living people (making you xiang and invite neighbors, critique of akhonds and city people and so on).

And actually talking of funerals themselves forms a deviant way of knowledge activation, because the know-how that only akhonds have the right to “own” is in fact discussed, evaluated and even ridiculed by lay villagers. As I will demonstrate in later chapters, these sorts of chat sessions are a locus for criticizing the village religious hierarchy.

13 More important, we can see how “death” expands its territory from the household of the deceased to mosque, graveyard, and finally the street corner where this chat session took place. It also occupies people’s daily conversation and memories.

Finally, the topic was directed from funeral to birth, a turn that catches my attention every time I listen to the recording and read about this moment in my field notes. My interlocutors do not read Arnold van Gennep or Victor Turner, and they are not aware of rites of passage or liminality. Still, they link death to birth, two rites of the end and beginning of life, together. This connection enlightened me to recognize the “everydayness” of death, to perceive it in cyclic time and read it against the background of human beings’ everyday life and as an element of it.

My dissertation will cover most of the topics briefly mentioned above in a more detailed way. Its purpose is to analyze practices and talks pertaining to death through a folkloric perspective in order to argue for opportunities granted by death-related expressive culture to the folk for challenging and questioning social norms and hierarchies that they experience every day. Some concepts and terms should be clarified.

Concepts and Terminology

Firstly I will briefly define my objects of study, “practices” and “talks.” Actually these two categories of activities are not clearly separated, because talking is also a practice. I am using practices to address the more acted/visible part of my collaborators activities, and using the term “talks” to refer the verbal/audible part of my collaborators’ activities. Take funeral for instance, what my collaborators mention

14 about how a funeral should be processed and their stories about funerals are “talks,” while what they actually do before and during a funeral are “practices.”

Actually many of the “practices” that are discussed in this dissertation are observed in “rituals,” such as funerals. But I am not using the term ritual because firstly, it bears too many connotations thus requires constant definition and clarification. For instance, whether it is religious or secular, whether it is a category of activities that differ from other human activities or just an element that can exist in any activity, whether it is symbolic expression of social contractions or is an instrumental and practical way of addressing social conflicts (or both of these oppositions)… Secondly, ritual includes a variety of expressive cultures such as verbal arts, physical performances, material culture… and so forth, but my research only focuses on some of them. Thirdly, some practices discussed in this dissertation cannot be defined as belonging to “ritual” but are definitely related to death, thus the topic of my research. For instance in the chat session shared above, the old men mimicked akhonds’ moves of placing a female corpse in a tomb. These moves are not ritual because they were positioned in a different context where people reflect on, recall, question or ridicule ritual practices. But these moves are related to death because they are used in placing a corpse.

I refer to Catherine Bell’s definition of practice with its four features: “(1) situational; (2) strategic; (3) embedded in a misrecognition of what it is in fact doing; and (4) able to reproduce or reconfigure a vision of the order of power in the world, or

… ‘redemptive hegemony’ (1992, 81).”

15 The third and fourth features of practice require a brief explanation. For the third feature, I would argue that many practices discussed in my dissertation are actually with the “ends” of addressing social norms or inequalities, but they are more or less disguised by the “means:” that they are completed due to a sense of ritual and within a frame of ritual. For the fourth feature, my definition is not restricted by “redemptive hegemony” i.e. the reproduction of an existing social order, but also expands to the questioning or even deconstruction of orders.

Now I shall explain my use of “talks.” Actually this is not a local term used by my collaborators. There exists no equivalent English term that can deliver the layered meanings in the Chinese verb that my collaborators use for their “talking.” They use a verb “can shen,” literarily means “worshiping the god.” No one knows the origin of this term, but whenever a group of people gather and chat, they say they are

“worshiping the god.” This term does not only mean that they are talking to other people, but also indicate that they are spending their time leisurely, because, I suppose, “worshiping the god” is not an obligatory activity, rather, it frees people from their duties and works, the same thing that “talking” does.

I choose to use “talks” for two reasons. Firstly, this term gives the verbal statements that I collected from my collaborators a dialectic dimension. All the verbal performances (artful communications) that we will see in this dissertation are from conversations either between my collaborators and me, or among my collaborators.

Either way, these performances are results of “talks.” Secondly, talk is a rather general term that can include solo narratives, storytelling, conversation, verbal duel, and sometimes even verbal performances.

16 I also propose the concept of “Space of Death” in this dissertation, to refer to spaces created by death related practices and talks. As Trevor Barnes reminds us:

“Places are conceived not as hermetically sealed sites, static and self- contained, but porous, dynamic and open-ended, defined as much by their relationships with other places and spaces as by internal characteristics” (2006, 31).

Spaces are thus defined by relationships. Therefore, in the four chapters in my dissertation, as in the chat session cited above, a “space of death” is not rooted in the funeral venue or a series of ritual moments. Rather, it is the remnants of death rituals that are drawn upon subsequently over time and across literal, concrete spaces. The mosque, the construction debris and street corners where people gather to talk, the neighborhood, people’s conversations, narratives, personal memories… concrete or abstract spaces are all converted by the power of death to “spaces of death.” Village folk sharing specific death experiences or common interest in death talks/practices gather in or are gathered by different spaces of death, to artfully and powerfully reevaluate and challenge social norms and hierarchies, and address inequalities.

Talking about the power of death, death itself requires some definition. “Nothing

[is] inert,” claims Lefebvre (2004, 26, also 30). He means that every object (or event), even without willing agency, has its own rhythm of development. This is also what

Bruno Latour (1996) argued in his theory of “Actor Network.” He uses “actant” instead of “agent” to avoid an overwrought application of the term “agency,” which could suggest an arbitrary attribution of willingness to something that cannot generate willing itself. As for an actant, Latour reminds us, it can act on its own, or be granted actions, thus becomes a source of those actions (1996, 373). Besides, although many

17 deadly diseases can be treated, death itself cannot. No matter how much effort has been put into the control, avoidance and prediction of death, it stays an unpredictable visitor, an uncontrollable natural power. This also gives “death” a sort of autonomy, or an “actancy,” at least per my understanding.

The idea of actancy is also useful in analyzing my collaborators who have passed away, who should not be considered as willing agents, but still act in a way in living people’s social life.

My Contribution to the Field

In terms of theory, I conceptualize death as a powerful resource for space- production and socialization. When death happens or is simply mentioned, it creates intensified social experiences where many interactions between social actors are more foregrounded and thus more easily observed. Because death per se, death practices and talks about death and the deceased can be perceived as “nodes” or “nodal points,” the “hard, dense nucleuses of facts and ideas” (Lefebvre 2014, 569). By “nodes” I do not mean that death talks and practices are “essences” of the society or social problems that I try to address. Rather, I suggest that these “nodes” form spatiotemporal specificities that offer dense experience of problems in the community in question: in this dissertation the Hui village.

In my dissertation, I combine “space” and “death” together, and considers “death” itself as a power of space production, furthering the meaning of the term “deathscape” introduced above, to include a space related to or created by death. My use of “space of death” is more general: for instance if narratives about death happen in a site, I

18 consider this site to be linked to death and can become a space of death, even if no death or death rituals ever happened there and the deceased never left any trace in this area.

I also intend to argue against the taken for granted generalization of meanings in rituals. The idea of communitas, equality and collectivity (such as collective mourning) can be observed in many practices related to death, but when every individual’s gaining and losing are taken into consideration, the ritual cannot be said as a generalizable experience. In Chapters 1, 2 and 3, my critique of these ideas of communitas, equality and collectivity will be contextualized in talks about an individual’s death, funeral practices, and death rituals in general.

In terms of ethnography, my village of fieldwork offers rich and complex social phenomena to amuse any ethnographer. In it Chinese, Islamic and post-socialist ideologies join forces in creating a spatiotemporal morphology, and people holding different ideas interact in different ways. I therefore have the privilege of engaging with conversations on multiple levels (for instance state, municipality, village, group, individual), between multiple social actants (for instance between government-people, religious men-laymen, and also between my collaborator and myself), and on multiple subjects (for instance about religion, ethnicity, social changes, traditions). All these conversations inform my study and understanding of death, and actually most of them are reflected in a Space of Death. My research thus also addresses issues such as localization of Islam, expression of ethnicity in China, social inequality and so forth, against the background of death rituals and narratives pertinent to death and the deceased. My dissertation chooses to augment previous research by analyzing talks

19 and practices related to death, the deceased, funeral and lethal supernatural powers.

Although my village of fieldwork is Hui, the surrounding villages are all Han. I believe this special ecology nurtures a different expressive culture of the Hui, thus facilitates my secondary purpose in this dissertation of displaying culture exchange between Hui and a Han-dominant society. This point is manifest in Chapters 3 and 4, where readers can see social relations influenced by social changes, and dialogues between Islam and Chinese vernacular religion.

Although my village of fieldwork is a “Muslim” Hui village, readers will find out that it bears many traits that can be observed in many “Chinese,” Han villages.

Therefore, in many capacities, my dissertation does not only contribute to the study of vernacular Islam, it also contributes to the study of rural China.

For instance, I use my folkloric study to give alternative, vernacular explanations of broader social issues. My fieldwork in a particular village in China could be positioned against the background of an “accumulative society” where economic accumulation becomes “the central axis or back-bone of modern history” (Lefebvre

2014, 619). I argue that social relations that do not serve the ends of “accumulation” are still being reproduced in the village. These relations are often expressed and executed in death related folklore performances, and these performances cannot be simply explained away by Lefebvre’s “uneven development” between technology and everyday life (Lefebvre 2014, 609-10), or seen as a residual of a past or fossilized

“tradition” that can be salvaged, politicized, commercialized and so forth (an idea criticized by folklorists for a long time, see Noyes 2009).

20 Abstracts of Chapters

As mentioned at the beginning of this introduction, my purpose in this dissertation is to address ways the village folk challenge or question the social norms and hierarchies they experience every day using practice and talks related to death. These norms or hierarchies are myriad and exist simultaneously on various levels: between religious duties and mundane life, within a family, in a community, or even between

God and Human.

Chapter One discusses one man’s death. It looks at how one person’s death is appropriated in various contexts to serve different social concerns. I also discuss methodology, theories, and offer retrospective notes on ethnography by situating them in the context of this one man’s death in my village of fieldwork. My term of “Space of Death” and its implications for both mental and physical realms is also introduced in this chapter.

Chapter Two analyzes two conflicting funerals. This is a rare situation where a man and a woman passed away at almost the same time, and both families want the earlier funeral the next day. I focus on intensive negotiations between mosque clergies and families of the deceased in this Space of Death, arguing that this crisis helps disclose tensions and conflicts between religious life and mundane (or perhaps as it turns out not so “mundane”) tasks, and unsettles religious hierarchies and reveals hidden cracks within the mosque system.

Chapter Three extends the Space of Death to abstract spaces including talks and memories about past funerals. This chapter addresses laymen’s critiques of religious men and even the local symbol of Islam: the village mosque. I suggest that religious

21 space for many laymen in the village is folded into Space of Death, and as a result, harsh critiques on mosque clergies emerge in this space. These critiques also lead to more general concerns about Islam in the village, such as whether one should practice

Islam or not, and thus lead to divisions between villagers and disturb the village ecology including social norms.

In Chapter Four I look at how villagers relate lethal supernatural powers to the landscape that they experience every day. I argue that this landscape, a mixture of the imagined and the lived, contains many Spaces of Death that convert people’s everyday experience into supernatural events. By doing so, many of my collaborators manage to come to terms with death, and more importantly, they negotiate with Death and even God, question or challenge them, and overcome the fear of them.

I conclude the dissertation by restoring “everydayness” to the spaces of death.

Death is normal, but in the frame of everyday, it appears inconsistent and evades people’s minds as a mundane phenomenon: it is hard to understand, it is taboo, it always ambushes people in a dark corner that one enters unexpectedly. Even in societies (such as Western societies) where medicalization of death has “concealed” it

(Robben 2004, 4), its fearfulness and unpredictability still persists. However, death is still part of the everyday, and actually the most consistent part because there is no living person who does not experience it.

“The everyday” is dynamic. On the one hand, it “imposes itself on all members of the relevant society, who, with some exceptions, have only minor variations on the norms at their disposal” (Lefebvre 2014, 679). On the other hand, it allows people to make fissures and differences, in many cases using folklore, the expressive aspect of

22 everydayness: “folklore is seen as emergent, rising up from the interstices of institutions and the new platforms of digital culture” (Noyes 2012, 16).

Death thus belongs to such an “everyday.” It requires all the members of a society to observe an often complex and intensified set of social rules and norms in order to escort the deceased off his/her stage of life, but exactly due to this density in rules and norms in death-related practices/talks, it offers opportunities for fissure. Death itself is actually a fissure: a loss of a member of the relevant society.

On the other hand, although death seemingly ruptures a linear life stream, it actually follows a cyclic time: a time that is both true for an individual and a group, a time indicates the vicissitudes of life. Only by restoring everydayness back to death instead of simply taking it as a fissure in the flow of everyday life, can we understand how much this avoided and tabooed topic actually matters and occupies people’s mind and expressed in their folklore. Death helps people both address social problems, and sustain the vitality and stream of everyday life.

Of course, my observations and analyses in this dissertation are all “active differences, relations and conflicts,” by “determining them we will be able to define historical and social particularities without assuming the supreme (and always illusory) power of capturing the universal and exhausting ‘being’” (Lefebvre 2014,

483). Death may be universal, but its meanings differ from place to place, from time to time and from individual to individual.

Chapter One: Starting From One Man’s Death

In this chapter I discuss multiple aspects of one old man’s death. I contextualize his death in different social actors’–including my–practices and talks, in order to look at how a person’s death is related to and appropriated in various social relations. My purpose is to offer a concrete instantiation to my argument, theorization of this dissertation and its critique of other scholarly works.

One Man’s Death: Initiating the Topic

Nov. 28, 2014. After a fieldwork break, I stepped once again into the village. The village was somewhat empty, as it was Friday, a workday. With the pale winter sunlight shining on them, the streets gave a dazzling brightness, which was occasionally shadowed by the dust stirred up by passing vehicles.

I walked into the mosque to see my akhond friends. After exchanging greetings and a short conversation about my trip and so forth, I asked Imam Shir, a strong and friendly young man in his late 30s with a shade of heavy beard on his face, “So, how’s old man Mal?”7

Old man Mal is an old mosque member in his 80s. He used to tell entertaining tales and teach folk remedies after prayers to anyone interested in listening to him. He however was diagnosed with lung cancer last year (2014). I visited his bedside twice

7 Old man, in local term Lao di, is a title used in some of the Hui communities in and around SW City, to show respect to any aged person, male of female.

24 after he could no longer mount on his bicycle or even walk, and thus ceased frequenting the mosque.

“Passed away, on Nov. 10th or so.” With a calm voice, Imam Shir uttered the news.

“Oh. …” I was a little bit overwhelmed by sorrow and wanted to say something, partly in order to disguise my guiltiness for not being able to attend his funeral. I thus cannot help mentioning a friend of mine, Allen, a fellow graduate student in America, who, like old man Mal, also passed away recently but unlike Mal, Allen was in the blossom of youth. At the same time, I handed the Imam a small hadiyah of 10 RMB, which equals 1.5 U.S. dollars,8 “Here, … please recite Qur’an verses for old man Mal and my friend.”

Imam Shir promised me.

This was the first time in the field that I felt death so close to me. When I wrote about this experience in a dark autumn night almost a year later, I could still feel a chill in my spine, as this scene now looked like the opening to a series of funerals that

I would now be participating in. Oh Allah, I seek refuge in You from Satan, the

Outcast.

Learning the news also for the first time motivated me to contemplate the power of death that could tear people apart. Not that I was not expecting the forever departure of the old man, Mal. In the contrary, it was due to the fact that his lung cancer made him so vulnerable and susceptible to death, that I had always been

8 Hadiyah is an Arabic term meaning gift, it is used in many Hui communities to mean the cash gift to akhonds. A normal hadiyah was 1 or 2 RMB in the village when I was doing fieldwork there. In December 2016 my mother met a person from this village accidentally in a market, and asked him how much is a normal hadiyah now, this person reported that recently 2 RMB is acceptable but 1 RMB is considered as a little bit too small.

25 desiring to know his situation, but simultaneously hesitating to visit him: fearing that his death would soon suddenly and arrogantly stand between us–I feel a similar rectitude toward confronting death-related expressive culture genres, such as funerals, ghost stories, shrine visits and so on During my fieldwork, this cluster of genres was very visible and sometimes even popular, but I often hesitated to know more–and sometimes I could sense a similar attitude among the collaborators whom I talked to: when we touched on these topics, they would express a chilling delight, but sometimes simultaneously, repulsion.

One reason for this complex emotion could be that, when death or dead men are involved or mentioned, we sense the awe toward death as an awaiting fate for everyone in this world, a tabooed topic, and an unpleasant possibility with the power of rupturing a stable social and familial environment and depriving people forever of a member of their community. However, it is exactly due to this power that death offers a great opportunity for scholars to study how a people address social ruptures, thus to understand an important dimension of its “culture.” As Richard Huntington said, “[d]eath rituals often provide the most interesting and challenging material for the understanding of people and their cultures” (1979, 34), and Michael Rosenow states, “Dead bodies may have been the focus of attention, but the rituals surrounding them reflected the conditions of life and the attitudes of the living” (Rosenow 2015,

3).

Enlightened by my field experience and the literatures mentioned in the

Introduction, I study death related expressive culture in order to come to terms with death as a power, which is of course natural, but its effects are many times social.

26 In this dissertation, to reiterate, I argue that death related practices and talks produce social spaces 9 where particular social structures and hierarchies are highlighted, tensions between social groups are easily referred to, and various actants of a society are mobilized to interact in order to confirm or contest, stabilize or make fluid certain social structures of a family, a neighborhood, a community, a religious institute, or an “ethnic group.” “Spaces of Death” then become spaces to cement or divide and transgress of social structures and hierarchies, which, although are not invisible in other occasions, become intensified by people’s practices and talks in death related events. I will unfold this argument in multiple directions (like a flower blossoming), with the intention of clarifying the argument as well as its relation to other scholarly discussions of death, my ethnographic fieldwork, and other parts of this dissertation.

Beyond One Man’s Death: Building up Rapport with the People and the Genre

I had not gone to the field solely to collect death-related stories. The idea only came gradually, starting with Mal’s demise that opened me to death as a genre of expressive culture. His departure to the hereafter helped me realize that a “rapport” with death related genres in general is crucial in understanding an indispensible part of my collaborators’ life. As suggested by my conversation with Imam Shir, death is not merely personal, but interpersonal as well, thus important in maintaining a

“group.”

9 Here I draw upon Lefebvre’s definition of “social space” as “the environment of the group and of the individual within the group; it is the horizon at the centre of which they place themselves and in which they live” (2014, 525).

27 Talks about funerals, dead people and death itself are not hard to hear, as they form part of the repertoire of the topics of daily conversation among many of my collaborators. The major difficulty of fieldwork pertinent to death was to observe practices related to death and/or dying people. These practices, imaginably, are dense in funerals.

Procedures in funerals may be rich in expressive culture and power struggles attractive for a folklorist like me. Moreover, although talks about death, deceased people and previously attended funerals are popular topics in gatherings, many of them only happen during or after funerals, which would temporarily take center stage in conversations everywhere in the village because of their recent occurrence and the close connection between people in a small scale society (the village is not that small, but many people are relatives or know one another). To attend funerals would be helpful in many cases in better appreciating the context of narratives one would hear later, and understanding connections between them. Therefore, I started to seek opportunities to go to funerals.

Attempts to attend village funerals did not start out smoothly.10 The main reason was that I was conducting my “fieldwork.” This activity itself is a questionable enough task to carry out in any “field” as, though it is so familiar to the fieldworker, it is so unfamiliar to the local community. This unfamiliar activity however questions

10 This period of awkwardness, however, is inevitable. Undergoing this uneasiness is itself a fruitful and treasured field experience that could generate “chance encounter” (Lefebvre 2014, 396, 398), meaning encounters offering chances for me to enter people’s lives, as I demonstrate in this part of my dissertation.

28 “what to others is taken-for-granted reality” and “creates an uneasy distance”

(Narayan 1993, 682) even though I might be assumed to be local (a Hui) myself. 11

A seemingly innocent but always curious outsider could be received as super suspicious in a place where secret investigation of people and reporting to the government have been part of the local political and social tradition, such as China.

To render the situation more complex, my field is a Hui village, and Islam has been portrayed by Chinese intellectuals as an extraterritorial domain posing “threats” to the mainstream society for centuries (see Wu 2002), not to mention the collective memories about violent conflicts between Muslim minorities and the Han, and the governmental surveillance (see for instance Lipman 1997, Gladney 1991, Zhang

1991). Therefore, any seemingly suspicious activity in a Hui community, such as an endeavor of obtaining information of any form from the Hui people could be considered as investigation or surveillance, and thus a potential threat to the local Hui population, even if this activity is launched by a person alleging to be an “insider,” a

Hui, such as me.

Moreover, although funerals are socially dense spaces, they are also sensitive ones. A family in suffering could be very alerted by any outsider who appears unexpectedly, and the fact that someone just passed away forecasts a tension tangible

11 See for instance Kirin Narayan (1993) and Lila Abu-Lughod (1991). These scholars have painstakingly and retrospectively reviewed their roles as to-some-extent natives and at the same time identity-shifting scholars in their respective ethnographic/anthropologic work, they more or less focused on the subjectivity and positinoality of a “native” ethnographer, and argued for why a “native” or “halfie” ethnographer’s role in the field cannot be simply assumed as an insider despite his or her complicated self-identification process; and his/her relationships with the “native” should be differentiated to various contexts. Other input such as Deborah Reed-Danahay (2001) and Myerhoff and Ruby (1992) made their arguments in a more overarching level around how subjectivity should be addressed in analysis of ethnography, with the awareness of the researcher’s role as not only a distant observer, but a key performer of any event s/he participated in, and how to be reflexive in the writing of a scholarly work, i.e., to “include information about process and producer in a product” (Myerhoff and Ruby 1992, 312). These retrospective and reflexive studies all enlightened me in reflecting on my own positioning in my fieldwork.

29 in the air, rendering any activity–such as fieldwork–beyond mourning the deceased, consoling the survivors and offering religious or mundane services annoying and even alarming.

Here, my “unofficial” status, meaning I did not have an official certification from the local government to “authorize” my fieldwork, didn’t help much. Although I was not officially investigating for the government, I could be secretly fishing for information: to pretend to be a friend, obtain information, and go and report it. I still recall the first time I talked to some agreeable old men sitting beneath the viaduct in the summer of 2013, longing for breezes. When I asked for their names, two of them

(in their 70s, later I learned) literarily ran away with their little folding stools under their arms.

I found myself in many cases confirming the idea that Chinese prefer talking to a foreigner to chatting with an “insider,” such as me.12 I was not even received as well as Gail Hershatter (2011), whose research is visibly supported by the Chinese government. Could the reason be that local people believe that a foreigner cannot be hired by the state as a secret informant, or do they simply enjoy talking to a foreigner?

I can only guess.

I cannot help suspecting, that we ethnographers might have be a little bit unbalanced by attributing the power of shifting identification solely to ourselves,

12 Scholars doing research in various subjects in China have long noted this phenomenon, no matter their research is supported by the Chinese government or not: Dru Gladney observes that the government can prevent me from approaching the Hui people, but cannot stop them from coming to me (1991, 105). And this idea is even more articulated in others’ works. For instance in her monograph on rural Chinese women’s memories of 1950s, Gail Hershatter admits the privilege brought by her foreign face in the fieldwork, saying that “[w]e benefited from the oft-noted phenomenon that people choose to say things to an outsider they would not say to their next-door neighbor, because the outsider, a transient, will not reveal their secrets locally” (2011, 20): even this outsider is supported by the government.

30 native or not, and ignoring the agency of local people, who can choose to perceive our performance of identity in ways out of our control; and whose perspective is key for any ethnographer to be considered as one of us, an outsider, an in-betweener, or none of the categories above, but simply someone to whom they can be open.

The problem remains unaddressed however, how did I manage to establish

“enough” intimacy in general?

For a long time I was known among some people in the village as “Comrade

Journalist” or “Teacher [of Islam]”–which, I did not deny right away, as I used the stereotypes to help people taking pictures and learning Arabic. For the first stereotype, as visual anthropologist Anya Bernstein observed, “[t]he use of the camera drew me into a chain of social relations, which had a crucial effect on my positioning and legitimacy as a fieldworker in a restricted social setting, while also facilitating practical issues of access” (Bernstein 2013, 29-30, also see M. N. Srinivas in Narayan 1993). As for the second stereotype, it granted me more social capital as people in the village, especially religious people, do respect the knowledge of

“Islam,” which they do not distinguish too much from “Arabic.” This strategy of utilizing stereotypes gives the villagers enough time to test me, and eventually some found out for themselves that what I was doing was unlike a journalist, who would have reported something in a newspaper, or a teacher of Islam, who would have judged their sometimes “un-Islamic” practices.

I shut my mouth always. Actually in the village, there are several groups of people who do not get along well (such as the akhonds/mosque members group vs. some of the “laymen” groups, as I will further address in Chapter 3), but when they became

31 assured that I do not leak anything about them to other groups, they started to talk in my presence, and did not care if I also hung out with other groups.

Besides, I gave feedback. If I only listened and did not make an utterance, it would have appeared weird. But what should I give as feedback? The only answer seems to be, myself. I talked about my school, my family, my experience in the U.S., my still-not-married-ness… . And my collaborators enjoyed it. I gather that if I am interested in them, they are at least equally interested in me.

The result is satisfactory, as time spent together gradually grew many in the village accepted and even enjoyed my presence. Some of them would even make jokes using the stereotypes they previously had on me: for instance cow farmer Mr.

Huq, and his friend, farmer Mr. Hes, would always introduce me to someone who had never seen me before as a journalist or an officer of the Islamic Association in the

Province or somewhere, then enjoy the shocked face of the one who had not met me.

By doing so, they also helped to spread my name. Once I became part of the village landscape, people accepted my presence on any occasion, including funerals.

Nonetheless, at the beginning I could only appear in the outer circle of a funeral, among the people who come to “send off” (in local terminology, “song song”) the deceased, but was not allowed by akhonds to enter the inner circle with them.

I appreciate my experience in the outer circle of funerals. It not only showed me many talks and practices about death, but also won me social capital. As I have already built up rapport with many collaborators, they would recognize me, talk to me, and introduce me to other people at the funerals. My name as being a student of folklore doing research in the village was thus spread, and people started to

32 understand that funerals and death related practices were also something I was interested in. I also relied on akhonds and mosque members to gradually introduce me into the inner circle of funerals. Of course, even now, there are still some parts of a funeral that I am not allowed to attend, or at which I do not feel right being present, such as washing the dead body and accompanying the corpse at night. These are normally activities attended by close relatives or friends. But I became part of the local social links in general, and funerals in particular. Some villagers even took my presence at funerals as an honor: they would say, sometimes, “Look, he came from the West Pass [to see the send-off]!” 13

One caveat should nonetheless be made here: in some parts of my fieldwork and writing, women’s perspectives toward themselves, male gender and the society are not elucidated enough. The reason is, as a young, unmarried male in the field, it is not very proper for me to frequent the female’s world without permission and the company of the local men. Limited encounters with them are however not enough to eloquently comment on many issues. However, this is not to say that female gender is missing in this dissertation or I am not aware of “gender.” Actually I have addressed female funerals in this dissertation, and in many contexts I did talk to women and have their ideas noted: festivals in the mosque, open-air markets and in some of my collaborators’ households. But because in many social gatherings and especially death rituals the two genders are separated, I cannot claim that I have equal exposure to

13 Firstly, anyone who is not a close relative of the deceased (in which case this person is “supposed” to be at the funeral) but comes to send off is honoring the dead. Secondly, the West Pass is a famous Hui community in Shandong Province, although I am not from that community, my family lives close to it so the people know me as “from” that place.

33 female villagers’ ideas on some issues. This is something I have to work on in the future.

Death as a Space and Assemblage

Once accepted as (to some extent) local, funerals opened more opportunities to me. I became aware that death related expressive culture forms social spaces where religious and mundane norms and hierarchies are rendered more obvious than in other conditions.

Metaphorically, once death-related practices and talks are touched upon, our horizon suddenly becomes the merging point of two worlds: The talking/acting bodies, no matter if they are telling a story of the dead, performing a ritual for the dead (like the akhonds do), experiencing death (like old man Mal), or writing up a dissertation about the dead (like me), all find themselves in a status of holding this world and the one belonging to the spirits together. This is not to say practices and talks about death really bring forward the world of the spirits, but to say that they invade people’s taken for granted routines in their quotidian life, change their familiar landscapes, invite in heterogeneous actants, create anew or at least temporarily enhance certain webs of relationships…

Ray Cashman observes in his writing on Irish wake, “social life intensifies within the frame of the wake” (2006, 17). Think from this direction, death intensifies ideological and social structures and expands them onto new territories where some of the relationships do not normally take place, or are not highlighted, except when death, or practices and talks about death happen.

34 Take send-off for instance. In most Hui communities, although funerals could be private, they tend to be public events. “Send-off” is therefore common and seen as a blessed deed among some Hui. Anyone is welcome to attend anyone’s funeral, if with good intention. Mr. Sa, a Korean War veteran (on the Chinese side, of course) always goes to funerals to send people off, and when we met in one of them (Feb. 25th, 2015), he greeted me with a laughter, “Ha! You came [too]. We send off. You send me off, I send you off (ni song wo, wo song ni), right?”

This statement may firstly appear ridiculous and funny in that, if “you” have already sent “me” off, how can “I” send “you” off?! However, if funerals could be perceived as social spaces, as I suggested above, this mutual send-off could be seen as a statement of obligatory mutual exchange in a continuous social space, and “you” and “I” here do not stand for individuals, but for the whole community which is constantly involved in this continuous social space facilitated by send-offs and other death related practices and talks. To send people off becomes a way of sustaining social links.

Of course, not only practices, but talks about death could serve the same purpose of creating a social space, thus integrating specific feelings, emotions and activities within it. For instance when sending people off, co-villagers would gather, and most of them do not enter the inner circle that consists of close friends and relatives, but prefer to wait in the yard or out in the street for the mayta (Hui’s euphemistic term for dead body, originally Arabic, mā’it, meaning moribund) to be carried to the hearse and transported to the graveyard. It then becomes a social event where men and women gather and talk. Many mundane issues are addressed in this kind of chat

35 sessions. I will return to this point in Chapter 2. Similar chat sessions also happen in the inner circle of a funeral and after funerals during gatherings.

Another instance is my conversation with Imam Shir. We talked about Mal’s death, and suddenly many religious structures and norms became obvious: the gifting of cash in returning for Quran recitation is one of the reflections of the local religious norm.

To appropriate Henri Lefebvre’s theory of social space production, death could be seen as a concrete abstraction (Lefebvre 1991, 86, Stanek 2008, 75-6), which is constantly realized or put into real existence by all the genres of expressive culture related to it and the social actors applying these genres. Besides, death and relevant expressive cultures are for sure not strictly attached to one location, but could happen anywhere, so I am defining this “anywhere” as a “social space.” In other words, death itself is rendered a “representational space” (Lefebvre 1991, 39) that is lived and experienced by the folk in my village of fieldwork, a “Space of Death,” a concrete abstraction that keeps realizing itself by mapping on different, pre-existing physical and also abstract places such as people’s households and mindsets. Death thus creates a continuous space, that indifferently gathers people, things, social practices, ideas, feelings… in however sporadic spots, in terms of both location and time (Lefebvre

1991, 71, Stanek 2008, 71-4).14

14 For Lefebvre, social spaces are produced by repetitive labor in a society that is dominated by state/capitalist hegemony and mass urbanization, but “space is undoubtedly produced even when the scale is not that of major highways, airports or public works” (Lefebvre 1991, 75, emphasis added), and for him, space could be concrete and also abstract, such as a representational spaces, it could be experienced in “more or less coherent systems of non-verbal symbols and signs” (Ibid, 39); and a social space as a “concrete abstraction” could attain real existence through relationships (ibid, 86). Therefore, I feel legitimate to apply the concept of “space” in a less concrete meaning and on a smaller social scale.

36 To introduce death as a space is not to support the idea that death related practices and talks are containers of certain social norms and structures. Rather, as Lefebvre reminds us, space production is a dialectical process, an on-going web of relations

(1991, 77), and moreover, space itself could react against social structures (see

Goonewardena 2008, 126). Any level of a social space, be it conceived, perceived or spatial practice, therefore, could dialogue with the other levels and the whole social structure, to suggest or make changes (see Schmid 2008 and Stanek 2008). Briefly, a space (of death) should be vital and dynamic, just like Manuel Delanda’s

“assemblage” (2006).

Delanda uses “assemblage” to refer to the structure of social bodies. It is fluid and varies with the diverse interactions between its various components so that its effect

(and affect) changes as well. On the one hand, components of the assemblage work

(or rather, cooperate) at one and the same time towards more than one end, they at once stabilize, transform, or change the whole. And on the other hand, “one and the same component may participate in both processes by exercising different sets of capacities” (Delanda 2006, 12).

Therefore, in this dissertation, I perceive any space of death as an assemblage that contains various components (or actants)–including death itself–that work toward different ends in different times. And a space of death thus also gains its life as a dynamic social ecology. This is of course not to say, as clarified in the Introduction, that death is a willing agent, but to suggest its dynamic, flexible nature and the

Moreover, Mayfair Yang (2004) has applied Lefebvre’s space theory in her analysis of spatial struggle between local religion and state supported ideology in rural Southeast China, lending my use of Lefebvre against a background of Chinese Hui communities some legitimation.

37 possibility for it to be activated and appropriated differently by human agents in a variety of contexts. This flexibility challenges traits commonly attributed to death and death rituals, such as liminality, communitas, equality and collectivity.

In the section that follows, I plan to visit such a space of death, in order to look at how various individuals react to social structures and hierarchies differently by their talks about death to confirm and stabilize, or question and mobilize the systems-and- powers-that-be.

In a Space of Death

Ideas of liminality, communitas, equality and collectivity play important roles in understanding death related practices and talks, and also death itself. Firstly, death is the final rite of passage for a person, so it is a liminal phenomenon. Secondly, death is always considered as a shared fate of all the living souls, the “great equalizer”

(Rosenow 2015, 4). Robben also reminds us, “collective mourning helps to draw people closer together and invigorate the weakened social group” (on Emile

Durkheim, 2004, 8). This bestows on death related rituals and practices a meaning of communitas and collectivity. This part of my dissertation will problematize the taken- for-granted-ness of these arguments, although they are undeniably correct observations in my village of fieldwork.

About one month after Mal’s death, in the afternoon of Dec. 11th, I was sitting on the huge pile of rubbles left by the construction of the viaduct, with some of my collaborators. I shall give a short description of this gathering that I always attend.

38 In winter days like this, people gather at the corner between the mosque and the village administration building, an “L” shaped corner with the head of the L pointing to North, in order to shield the freezing wind from the north. They can sit there watching the sunshine tilting gradually from East to West for a whole afternoon. In summer time, a change of place is required, as sitting in a corner does not guarantee the reception of warm breezes from the South and cool winds from the North. People then would choose either to lean on the west bank of the heavily polluted creek where greenish water gurgles, or rest their legs on the rocks and concrete chunks lying under the viaduct bridge, where winds from all directions cross the open land.

Talks about death, dead men, ghosts, supernatural powers, funerals and shrines are one cluster of the often touched on topics during these gatherings. Actually I was a little bit surprised by the fact that talking about death was so frequent.

Our random-talking seminar on that day was directed toward mosque members and akhonds at one point. Then Mr. Wan, a goatherd and Mr. Huq, the cow farmer, had a quarrel about whether mosque members are all bad. They are both in their 60s but Mr. Wan is a mosque member while Huq does not “enter the mosque (jin si menr in Chinese, a local term for practicing Islam).” Although the quarrel finally ended peacefully, Wan and Huq were both a little bit irritated. Jumping up from a concrete chunk used as a stool, Wan said: “Joke about it! How long can we still joke! Look at

Mal, he used to say, ‘I can live up to 150 years old!’ Now what? Dead.”

Huq picked up the words, saying, “Right! Look at Mal, he practiced this and that, saying my heart is just like 50 years old! Lying on the bed, you don’t practice anymore.” He then laughed, or rather, uttered some dry “ha, ha” sound. Some context

39 should be introduced here to better appreciate Huq’s comment. Mal always told people that the best of his “practices” is prayers and how praying helps him stay young, while Huq really suspects this claim. Huq is quite satirical and used to seize chances to ridicule this way of living. For another instance, on January 16, 2015, upon hearing the news that an akhond caught a cold, he said: “I thought mosque members do not get sick?” to suggest that mosque members’ more religious way of living does not benefit their health at all.

Mal and Huq are both good people but apparently they do not share the same feeling towards the mosque and “Allah’s servants” working in it. However, I cannot help noticing that Mal’s death was appropriated as an evidence for the failure of the local mosque and religious practice, if not Islam per se. And this comment is also denying one aspect of Hui’s “identity” as a Hui all together: that of practicing Islam

(for Hui taking Islam as one identification strategy, see Gladney 1991 for instance).

Starting from 2014, Mal gradually ceased attending prayers. He was fading out of my fieldwork, the mosque, and the landscape of the village. I only occasionally picked up one or two sentences commenting on his health condition if I did not intentionally ask or visit him in his household. If a dead body could be seen as a symbol of “liminality” in Turner’s (1969) sense because of its decay (per Huntington

1979, 54), Mal’s living body was actually not far from this status. His family put him in a separated room, where he had a bed, a waste barrel as toilet, and a chair as nightstand. This person was preparing, or being prepared for his final departure, and

40 was thus placed in a liminal space, where he had less and less to do with the social world,15 till his time came.

This renders his “returning” in this social space on rubbles very abrupt. I started to think, what does this dead man, his life and death mean to his community? Does he cease to be part of the community after his departure to the other world? Can he be considered as completed his “liminality” after his final rite of passage? We do not even need a close investigation of Huq and Wan’s words to realize a fact that death is not yoke shattering for Mal, and social divisions and structures do not fade into sentiment and compassion after his death.

Even after death, the dead, such as old man Mal, is not freed from his prison: the

“soul” in Foucault’s sense (Foucault and Rabinow 1984, 177). He remains in a space of death with a doubled way of being: as a present but dead body, and as an absent person. Just as death itself, the deceased is also an actant in the social network/assemblage of the space of death. The space of death becomes trans- historical, because it crosses the barrier between the dead and the living, thus enables a dialogue/interaction between them.16

As a dead body, or a corpse, it ceases to possess a productive and reproductive value to the society and family, and becomes ever more un-submissive than before: as a dead body, it is the decaying, deformed, grotesque and low (Bakhtin 1984). It is,

15 This is the situation for many dying people in the village. I am not in a position of judging the way they are treated. Due to poverty, lack of medical care and resource, and a desire of dying at home, people, especially old ones, in their final stage of life are normally placed in a room that will also serve as a funeral hall later. This room has a minimum of furniture, and is not frequently cleaned except when the waste barrel needs to be emptied. 16 This adds into Lefebvre’s theory of space production a historical dimension, which is considered as lacking in many contemporary appropriations of his theory (Stuart Elden in Lefebvre 2004, 3).

41 nevertheless, exactly due to these newly gained traits, that a dead body invites discipline: it still asks to experience its cultural and contextual specific passage into the next stage of its “life,” here the social life of a corpse, it acts on as a social medium carrying all the meanings the mundane and religious worlds desire to cover on it, wash away from it, and bury with it–in both physical and metaphysical senses

(this is also true when it becomes relics). All in all, “the body reveals the effects of social power” (Bourdieu in Rosenow 2015, 9) even after it enters the status of forever tranquility.

As a forever absent person, “the dead person had acquired a new social status”

(Harlow 2003, 97). Or I should argue that, the dead person even “inherited” some of the social status from the time when s/he was still alive. This social status in the community, or “life” of a dead man, though not “(re)productive” anymore, ironically continues its production: of meanings. And it only becomes even more flexible and boundary merging: as a person who lived, it has a whole life experience to tell; as a dead person who is (forever) absent now, it offers an opportunity for any of its viewers to freely evaluate, if not irresponsibly judge its life, death, and its social relations; as a vehicle of memories and thoughts, it keeps its right of returning to This

World via people’s narratives, memories, imaginations and, in some cases in a society with the tradition of believing in ghosts, it could even return in the form of an opaque, semi-concrete being.

The deceased is not allowed to stop participating in social life, it still has an actancy that enacts a social role in a different category: that of the forever acted on, but never reacting. That has been said, however, the life of the dead is still rich in

42 context and artful, and sometimes even more colorful than his/her life when being alive: many times living people emboss the absent one’s status as being present in the talks of their small scale society (such as a village or neighborhood) ironically by the sheer fact of its physical demise. Because sometimes a person only becomes available to be appropriated in certain lore (such as funeral, wake) established according to various “social bases” (Noyes 2012) when s/he is dead. The deceased provides resources for the communal production of Spaces of Death, which are, of course, also spaces for the alive, where the living folk can cope with the sudden changes in their life such as but not only the losing of a member of the community, can negotiate their lived experiences, and can understand This World in its different permutations.

Take Mr. Huq’s and my reactions to Mal’s death for instance. Mr. Huq’s powerful comment joins my conversation with Imam Shir in helping me reason Mal’s death in an interpersonal way. Once touched on Mal’s death, both the pile of rubbles and the akhonds’ room where Shri and I talked become spots of the “entirety” of a social space that is closely related to Mal’s death, (Stanek 2008, 72) which offers us an opportunity to reflect on not only the meaning of his death, but also our relationships with him.

We were both densely engaged with religious and mundane structures and hierarchies rendered obvious by Mal’s death, and interacted with the hierarchies/structures differently in order to either challenge them or confirm them, stabilize them or mobilize them, and make adjustments to the systems-that-be subtly and overtly to communicate our own feelings and thoughts to other people. To participate in “death” in its various cultural permutations offer the “folk” an

43 opportunity to redefine the meaning of being a member of the group, and to reflect on their own “culture.”

My reaction to the news of Mal’s death was, as mentioned above, to offer a cash gift to the Imam and ask him to recite Qur’an for Mal.17 This action is actually a confirmation of my obligation as a friend of the deceased, and also a requirement of the local religious structure for this sort of events. I could well recite or read the

Quranic verses myself, but I still chose to ask for Imam Shir’s favor, and actually offered cash gift for religious service, which is likewise a submission to the local religious/cultural norm and mosque hierarchy.

If my practices in, and perceptions of the social space created by death related conversation could be said as to conform and obey, Mr. Huq was actually utilizing the opportunity to question, challenge, and overthrow. He was trying to do a lot of things at a time, such as undermine the Islamic practices and those who observe them, negotiate for himself as not a bad Hui for not practicing Islam, and so forth.

Our activities could be defined as the “social work” (Cashman 2008) that certain death related expressive culture does, in order to foreground or negotiate the social structures and hierarchies embedded in it. This expressive culture is actually offering the members of this community an opportunity to reflect on their ways of being in the society, and react to different incidents.

17 In the village, some people say: “Please recite Qur’an (jing, in Chinese, literarily means classics or scriptures).” Some other say: “Please recite the suolai (a transliteration of “sūrah,” meaning verses”). And the akhonds normally recite the selected verses in Khātim al-Qur’ān meaning Seal of the Quran and known in Chinese as haiting or Eighteen Sūrahs. The original editor is unknown. This book includes eighteen verses that are considered as basic among Hui Muslims. People do not always agree on what are those verses, but they may include: 1, 2:1-5 and 255, 93, 94, 97, 99, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, some versions include 36, 67.

44 This is why I suggest that communitas, collectivity and equality in death related practices and talks can and should be problematized. Despite (or because of) the convergence of people from different ages and social backgrounds in spaces created by death, dying or relevant practices and talks, the assemblage nature of spaces of death renders “division” and “hierarchization” among the ruling themes, no matter in a neighborhood, family, or larger “Hui” community.

For instance in death rituals, living people’s practices are all more or less engaged in mundane affairs, such as coping with and reacting to various social powers and hierarchies, or even benefiting (benefits are not necessarily material) from the deceased. Death rituals are not merely “transgressing and reshuffling cultural categories,” as Bourdieu argued (in Bell 1997, 78), it also accommodates practices that transgress and reshuffle social norms and hierarchies.

Spaces of death could also be created out of talks. Recalling death and dead people could well serve a lamentation on the vicissitude of life and broadcast the idea of a fair fate for everyone in the community thus, as a death ritual, can equally introduce a “time out of time” (Rappaport 1999, 216-225) and make possible a feeling of communitas, equality and collectivity among the audience. This is the case, for instance, when I was talking to Imam Shir, as I believe both of us felt a loss of the community.

Nonetheless, death-talks can also raise other feelings. These talks in my fieldsite are more commonly made with the purpose of addressing mundane issues, expressing emotions and concerns toward other people or the power of the Unknown, not necessarily with a purpose of evoking a collective sentiment or sense of group among

45 the audience. For example Wan and Huq’s comments on Mal are very heavily tinged with a sense of social division and hierarchy. Wan warned Huq of joking about mosque members, citing Mal’s death to suggest that one should be wary. But the fact that Mal is a mosque member was utilized by Huq to fight back, saying that his

“practices” are useless. One man’s (Mal) death is thus linked to the failure of the local religious system or the organized religion (Islam), and becomes an eloquent evidence explaining Huq (and some of his companions) out of a liminal or communitas- experience suggested by the equalizer–“death.” Wan and Huq were not mending social ruptures or mourning for a loss. Rather, they even managed to further rupture the sentiment and sympathy assumed by a group-ness of being “Hui” together (i.e.

Huq and Mal).

Of course, I am not totally dismissing a trait of communitas in death and death related practices and talks in my dissertation. I however intend to question the assumed autonomy of communitas in any ritual, as Huntington reminds us to (1979,

12-13), and suggest an at the most questionable liminal and collective or sometimes even anti-liminal or collective nature of the death related talks and practices, as they have so much to do with mundane “structures,” that they many times fail to live up with people’s expectation of experiencing a spiritual, transitional, and structure-less status.

To summarize my argument here: death related practices and talks are social spaces where different social structures and hierarchies are highlighted, tensions between social groups are easily referred to, and various actants of a society are mobilized to interact in multiple ways in order to confirm or contest, stabilize or

46 liquidize certain social structure, be it of a family, a neighborhood, a community, a religious institute, or an “ethnic group.” The “spaces of death” then become spaces of division and transgression of social norms and hierarchies, which are not invisible in other occasions, but intensify in death related practices and talks.

Death and Social Division: a Theoretical Trap

As stated above, Mr. Huq’s words were not only addressing Mal, but also revealing a common attitude in many Hui communities, at least the ones around SW

City, of suspecting akhonds and mosque members, questioning their life styles and their religious service. Many of my other collaborators expressed their dissatisfaction toward akhonds and mosque members too. On the side of akhonds, they also lamented their loss of respect in different mosques among lay Hui Muslims to me many times, compared to the good old days. This phenomenon urges me to reflect on social changes and personal relations among villagers.

Researchers argue for a correlation between changes in individuals’ social practices and changes on a bigger scale, namely in the “society.” For instance, after surveying and summarizing many observers’ conclusions, Christopher Smith argues for a “dominance of market forces” as “the major causes of the erosion of moral standards in China” in Post-Mao era (Smith 2000, 43). In socialist or postsocialist contexts, the interaction between Islam and Socialism are used to explain changes in personal relationships and people’s waning or growing religiousness as Kristen

Ghodsee (2010) analyzed in her case of Bulgarian Muslims, Morgan Liu in his monograph dealing with Uzbek (2012), and Gillette (2010) in her study of the Hui.

47 I have supporting evidences from my fieldwork too. Interestingly, practices related to death practices seem to be a main site where akhonds are losing their foothold: many of my collaborators complained to me that some akhonds do not allow Hui to kowtow to their relatives during funerals, condemning it as non-Islam.

Others complained about akhonds for receiving too much money for funeral service.

It seems apparent and evident, at first glance, that changes in the grand scale, including the downfall of socialist sovereignty, the rise of market economy, the flood of Wahhabiyah Islamic thoughts and Western Individualism … or actually the hybridization of them all, lead to micro level changes in individuals’ logic of daily practices, such as whether or not kowtow to the relatives and how much should the akhonds charge for a death ritual (including funerals). And to blame the social environment here could surely be a shortcut to a reasonable explanation of the unstable structures and hierarchies, a conclusion that pleases most of the scholars, including myself, as it enables a dialogical, mutually effective process among individual, social groups (such as ethnic groups), state, and all the other powers and social agencies one can name, making the academic research not only focusing on the deeds of a small group of people, but reflecting larger social issues as well. I cannot deny this reading, or the temptation of it.

However, when carefully examining my collaborators’ sayings and doings, and place them in connection to other similar events against a more local socio-historical background, I feel that to arbitrarily mount the people’s lived experiences onto any single frame of contemporary social changes will fall into an old theoretical trap created, as Anna Tsing points out in her work, by a division “between symbolic

48 analysts who wrote about the imaginative vitality of disconnected local cultures, and political economists who examined global interconnections but who cared little about creative expression” (Tsing 1993, 289).

In my case, many a local phenomenon may indeed align perfectly with current social trends, but actually have a deeper historical root that linked to another reality or

“tradition.” Besides, doing research in a small scale society, such as a village, if preoccupied by the relation between larger social issues and field experience, it is easy for an ethnographer, such as me, to mistake conflicts at a personal level for an embodiment of a larger social problem. Of course, these two are not mutually exclusive, the risk lies in over generalization. For instance not every person treats akhonds without respect: there are people who still respect akhonds in the village, and akhonds also told me that in other provinces of China such as Shanxi, they are more respected and paid more. And there are people who only (dis)respect some akhonds.

Even for those who do not respect akhonds or local mosques at all, their reasons may vary. This issue will be revisited in Chapter 3.

It is thus quite possible that a seemingly perfect and clear case for studying power relations between and among different social entities, such as religious authority, state, local government, and villagers’ community... will suddenly turn out to be disturbed by personal level relationships. In other words, even if at times relationships are affected by broader social problems, links on a local and personal level cannot not be ignored, because they do not vanish, but could even be enhanced. As Lefebvre maintains, “the local [social space] (or ‘punctual’, in the sense of ‘determined by a particular “point”’) does not disappear, for it is never absorbed by the regional,

49 national or even worldwide level” (Lefebvre 1991, 88); and, the macro level of social reality “makes every effort to contain, to absorb and reabsorb the ‘micro’… It succeeds, but never totally,” as the micro level always “puts up a resistance”

(Lefebvre 2014, 435).

Of course, I am not denying the relation between social changes and folklore, otherwise I would be suggesting an “irrationality and meaninglessness” of an everyday life which is isolated from its social contexts (ibid). I am, instead, merely suggesting a more humble and comprehensive reading of any specific event, in order to avoid masking the reality of everyday life behind privileged, academic conventions

(Debord in Goonewardena 2008, 124). We might realize a case of expressive culture being a “unity of two sides” of an individual event and an infinitely complex social event (Lefebvre 2014, 79), and “a creative cultural intervention in a world we share”

(Tsing 1993, 300). Otherwise, to relate an event arbitrarily to any generalized social trend is but another level of fragmentation of social space, an “alienation” in Marxist sense (Singer 2000, 36, Lefebvre 2014), or defamiliarization of everyday life in the domain of academia.

If simply positioning an event against changes in larger social scale cannot suffice the explanation of these events, what should I do? I argue that, if we cannot understand a certain event by simply referring to a wider range of similar phenomena, i.e. by comparing it to other similar happenings and generalize and summarize their shared attributes, we need to analyze an issue in question by going more profoundly into its every possible aspect and level, with the wish of grasping the whole, and the awareness that all the levels and aspects interpenetrate and superimpose one another.

50 In other words, I suggest including all economic, political, social, historical… critiques in my analysis, while simultaneously avoiding an economic, political, social, or historical “determinism” which “excludes dialectical movement, relative chance and relative necessity, the relatively predictable and the relatively unpredictable” (see

Lefebvre 2014: 391, 405).

Specifically, my analysis of structure and hierarchy transgression/confirmation in the Space of Death should require more than one “map” of the space, in that it simultaneously interacts with multiple intertwining social relationships, such as between mosque and laymen in a community (Chapters 2, 3, 4), within mosque members and akhonds (Chapters 2), among the villagers (Chapter 2), among family members (Chapter 4), between the spirits and the folk (Chapter 3), and so forth.

In my dissertation, I plan to focus but not constrain to these relationships as

“fragments” of a social space (Lefebvre 1991: 88) – the Space of Death in my case, to enrich the reading of it, and complete its meaning as much as I can.

I am aware that this approach of focusing on the everyday and collaborative ethnography may receive thoughtful challenges in terms of academic seriousness and even usefulness. In criticizing postmodernist ethnographic writing as self- congratulatory, Rosalind O’Hanlon and David Washbrook state:

“There runs through it a desire to be seen on the side of the dispossessed against power, working with their strange voices and different stories, subverting dominant cultures and intellectual traditions ‘from within the academy’. But in the case of postmodernist approaches, these commitments can be made with a lightened burden of authorship and a comforting sense that in this volatile new world of cultural self-invention, the critic’s own history is at best a fable” (O’Hanlon and Washbrook 2014, 215).

51 They also believe that collaborative ethnographic research does not emancipate the subaltern from their disadvantaged status. David Harvey even further argues for

“differences that matter” and suspects that other than class difference, differences such as ethnicity and gender that attract attention in the humanities could actually change the situation of human alienation (in Wright 2006).

Although I do agree that this writing does not have the power to emancipate anyone from his/her alienation, I believe that it however has a power of demonstrating. It demonstrates the “minor” struggles that are ignored or hazed by grand metanarratives such as capitalization, globalization, and classes.

Minor struggles are also struggles, and “minor” differences, although may not become a power of instant changing, should not be condemned as “do not matter.”

Because revolution rests in spontaneity, and metanarratives such as globalization actually guarantees that any struggle and difference, no matter how tiny it appears to be, can become the struggle and difference from which a broader social change grows.

More importantly, for any folklorist like me, depicting some villagers’ struggle, one man’s death, trivial differences between people in a social group that appear to be in the same class and even the same “ethnic minority”… are all meaningful to our lives, the society, as well as academia. I will further address this issue in the next section in a retrospective note.

A Symbolic Death and Rebirth, of Actancy and Word

52 Although my dissertation is about death, there is one type of death that disturbs me: that of actancy (of my collaborators) and word (of this dissertation). These two deaths (of actancy and word) are actually two sides of the same question: that of the power and legitimacy of thought, or, a thinking subject.

Michel Foucault attributed “writing” a nature of effacement, or, killing. Firstly it should eliminate the reference to a world of signified and stay in the word-interplay

“referring only to itself;” secondly, writing could well efface the writing subject’s

“signs of his particular individuality” (Foucault and Rabinow 1984, 102). The idea of a self-contained world of signs engendered and manipulated by a detached, god-like author is not new. Hegel maintained a system of signs that effaces the properties of the perceived world (in de Man 1982, 767); and the Peircian version of semiosis has long suggested any representation as an infinitum of signifiers signifying other signifiers (Chandler 2002, 33). Scholars are easily intoxicated in front of their stationeries imagining that they are able to re-create a world out of “data/signifiers” and open it from the inside to the readers by their theorizing tools. Folklorists like me are tolerated, accepted, and even adored and respected in their fieldsites, and once the

“fieldwork” is completed, they take “data” collected from the “informants” to their home institutions to produce their kingdom of academic writing.

Actancy is thus killed, or eliminated from an ethnography, which now becomes an autonomous structure, or a form of completed “art” (in Bourdieu, or rather, Hegel’s sense) with the exclusion of all the collaborators, even the ethnographer himself from the real play (Bourdieu 1990, 31-34 and de Man 1982, 763-764). And “word” is thus

53 dead, as it now ceases to “become,” and gains a power of killing or sealing, and renders a work a closed case.

The reason for the possibility of such a self-contained domain of signs is, in my opinion, the scholarly hallucination of the existence of a pure form of power, either the practicing power of the body (people participating in expressive culture in my case) or the imagining power of thought. However, these two powers do not exist independently of each other. They are naturally blended in any subject, be it of practice or analysis. The division between the two is only a reflection of the social division of labor, scholars are actually proposing a cut of “part-space” of their disciplines or specialties–for me it is folklore studies–from the totality of a social space (Lefebvre 1991, 89-90), that is experienced by scholars and their “human objects” together. Scholars thus risk an action-thought dichotomy that argues for acting participants of rituals (and other lore) and thinking ethnographers (Bell 1992).

I therefore anticipate my work as another form of “art,” this time in Lefebvre’s sense, to break the arbitrariness of word signs by bringing it to the connection to a

“three dimensional dialectic” “wherein the three moments are dialectically interconnected: material social practice …; language and thought …; and the creative, poetic act” (see Schmid 2008, 33). In these three dimensions, I believe, rest the revival of the actancy of my collaborators, especially the deceased ones, and the life of my “words,” or discourses.

The power and legitimacy of my discourses, or metadiscourses is thus not blatantly self-asserted: they are not only from my analysis, but likewise from my collaborators’ doings and thinkings, from the abundant and affective, sensible and

54 sensational “data”–I wrote down this word with a hesitation as the term seemingly renders years of experience in the field the preparatory stage for a process of analysis, summarization, generalization and even essentialization, to “play the game as a game while waiting to leave it in order to tell it” (Bourdieu 1990, 34). Until we realize that what was taken from the people is not “data” but their emotion, their feeling, pieces of their life and even their death (especially true in my case) and “spirits,” the

(meta)discursive power in our hand will still root an inequality brought up with our voices. I am not being unrealistically romantic by bringing up this seemingly metaphorical and empty image as “spirit,” I simply do not believe academic privilege and institutional arbitrariness should legitimize the capsulation of, in a way also the killing of, lively lives, or lived lives in a book, essay, or dissertation. In my dissertation, this would be more unaffordable, because many of my collaborators passed away, and I am analyzing their death. If their actancy is dead, or denied in this dissertation, they become mere pieces of cold data. In the past year of my dissertation fieldwork, or in an even longer past since I firstly stepped onto the field with the intention of “doing research” there, I have experienced too many scenes of sorrows and joys, reunions and departures, … of which, be it sad or glad, people in my fieldsite equally welcomed me as part. I was so present and into their life that even when bad things such as death were happening, they didn’t blame me for poking my nose into other people’s pot, peeking at their secrets, or, watching their sorrows.

I am writing about death, but extravagantly hoping for a rebirth of the actancy, of my collaborators, dead or alive. Maybe it is not that I write about them, it is that they apply me as a tool of expression, probably unintentionally, but not without

55 expectation and willingness, given their awareness that I will be using what I have observed and heard as “materials (cai liao in Chinese, a term used by many of my collaborators to describe what I was “collecting” from them)” for a “book.”

My collaborators and I hybridized the daily encounters in the field, and the academic research by dialogical discourses and interactive emotions circulated between us. I am using the concept of hybrid, not only in Kapchan and Strong’s

(1999) and Narayan’s (1993) sense of blended social entities and discursive practices, but also aligned with Bauman and Briggs’s (2003) analysis of the mutually constructive activities between social (un)realities and languages. I consider this research as hybridized by my collaborators in the field and actually more so by myself, firstly during my fieldwork as a hybridization process of different social practices from my part and that of my collaborators’ in order to make sense of our activities and interactivities, and later as a hybridity of language, social realities, various discourses, fictionalized experiences, power relationship, not to mention genres of lore, such as rites, narratives, material culture … etc., to make sense of the earlier hybridization process.18

As Barbara Babcock argues, “all forms of cultural performance do more than reflect sociocultural patterns and beliefs; they reflexively comment upon those patterns and alter a society’s awareness of itself” (Babcock 1980, 5). And “folktale,” as Michel de Certeau tells us, “provides scientific discourse with a model, and not merely with textual objects to be dealt with” (1988, 78). Therefore, my collaborators

18 Of course, to use the term “hybridity” does not suggest the contrary existence of a “pure” form of any aforementioned components of social realities and (meta)discursive practices.

56 and the field itself become “participant theorists,” of the local society and my current work. They offer comments and guidelines on theorization of their own experiences, and urge me to think of a “humble theory” that does not only dialogue with grand theories such as economics and political science (Noyes 2008), but also “encourage a useful humility” of the folklorists (Noyes 2012, 15) as well as sympathize the folk, who are in many cases also philosophers who “think deeply” such as Packy Jim in

Ray Cashman’s book (Cashman 2016, 13). For instance in Huq’s talking about Mal’s death, he was the one who casted this one man’s death into a miniature of complex social struggle and inequality. The real “authors” of this dissertation thus should include them, or the “them” in their spatiotemporal contexts when their “comments” and “guidelines” in different forms were created. As Lefebvre maintains, everyday life “is the supreme court where wisdom, knowledge and power are brought to judgment” (2014, 28), and it is a “critique … of the superior activities in question,” including academic writing (ibid, 109).

If talks and practices around one person’s death after his funeral are powerful enough to create spaces of death for people to express their concerns and evaluate their community, the spaces of death created by funerals are even more intense in offering opportunities for real negotiations to take place. In Chapter 2, I will analyze people’s practices and talks before and during two people’s conflicting funerals.

57 Chapter Two: Conflicting Funerals. Who Goes First?

Death as a surprise disturbs the sensible rhythm of everyday routine and flavors its profound meaning. One man’s death always brings changes. In the cleavage of people’s daily experienced social space, a Space of Death is carved out and intensively experienced. Nevertheless, one should note that Death, as an unexpected

(although sometimes foreseeable) guest, is ironically not always unwelcomed. In that people’s social life is so hierarchized and carefully maintained in my village of fieldwork, that a rupture is sometimes arguably yearned for to reevaluate, question or even negotiate with and alter the existing social norms and relations between akhonds and laymen and among members of these two groups respectively as well.

This rupture becomes even more intensified and dramatized when two deaths happen simultaneously. In this chapter I will present such a case that seldom happens, and discloses some negotiations rose from this rupture created by the visit of death.

Unhappiness

“They are not happy,” is the impression that I was under, upon seeing some of the friends and relatives of Mr. Geh, who just passed away earlier that day, on April 29th

2015, a sunny spring day with strips of cloud threading the sky. Of course, no one is supposed to be happy at a funeral, but their unhappiness came from a different source other than the demise of Mr. Geh, as will gradually unfold below.

I was there with three other people from the mosque: old man Tal, the Fourth

Master San and a mosque member Yu. We were sent by the mosque to “tear the

Kafan (shroud)” and help prepare necessities for tomorrow’s funeral. Around 2:30

58 p.m., the three ended their duty and descended from Geh’s apartment to the public yard down the building, me following them.

Muslims in my field-site follow the generally accepted custom of procuring three garments for a man and five for a woman as shroud (see Halevi 2007, 96). The shroud pieces are not to be sewed or cut, but should be hand-torn from a piece of cloth prepared by the family of the deceased. Textiles of the cloth could vary from cotton, linen to dacron, but the color is always white. Size of the shroud accords with the body’s size, and ways of tearing shroud vary from one akhond to another–making the job heavily rely on former experience. Normally there would be three people go to the deceased’s household to tear the shroud, and the shroud pieces, together with the hadiyah, a term from Arabic, meaning gift, also known as “jing li-r” in Chinese, meaning “religious scripture gift.” This gift is normally in cash and wrapped in a piece of white paper, or sometimes red paper when it is a celebratory occasion. Cash gift for the Imam (in this village, Shir) is taken back by the shroud-team or later sent to the mosque by relatives of the deceased so that the Imam can write religious scripts

(in Arabic) on the chest of the outer garment. Scripts could be Quran verses such as the opening chapter, Fatiha, or simply “In the name of Allah” or “I seek refuge from

Allah.” Shroud tearers also earn their own cash gift, usually “smaller” (local term for less cash gift) than the Imam’s. Together with the shroud, gloves for akhonds to wear when washing the dead body and shell of the pillow19 for the deceased are also torn from the same piece of cloth, but these two need to be sewed–a job left to the women attendees. For the survivors of the deceased, mourning garments are as well torn from

19 The pillow is normally staffed with fine and incensed soil.

59 the piece of cloth, including mourning waistbands, mourning hats, and mourning trousers: another job for the women attendees.

Mr. Geh is a villager but lives in his small apartment in a nearby building on the side of a heavy industry factory. That means his household cannot offer a wide enough space for all the potential guests. Women who would help with preparing bath water and sewing gloves and mourning garments, and members of his nuclear family were in the apartment, but other people gathered to send him off and the ones, almost always male, in charge of the funeral in general and collecting cash gift in particular had to set up two tables and some long benches in the yard to accommodate themselves.

Normally, according to my experience with funerals, these helpers would stay calm, chat randomly, receive flows of guests and cash gifts, and take care of trivial errands; and the atmosphere among them is often light if not improperly pleasant. But that day, as soon as we stood in the small public yard, some friends and relatives

(approximately ten people) of Mr. Geh approached us with an unsettling anxiety on their faces.

Actually we briefly met them at arrival, but as we were there to serve the dead, they only asked about what will be needed for processing the mayta (dead body); but then since the dead man’s business was temporarily done, they had to settle something among the alive, who, as will become clearer below, do not always bend over a religious hierarchy.

A core issue brought up by the crowd was, our mayta i.e. Mr. Geh should go (to the graveyard) first. Reason for this argument was that, an old lady, Ms. Ha, who also

60 passed away earlier that day, at probably a slightly later time, was arranged a funeral earlier than Mr. Geh on the next day, and Mr. Geh’s family and relatives do not believe it as proper.

Arguing for an Early Funeral

Strong arguments were thus proposed by the crowd in order to claim an earlier funeral for the man rather than the woman, and actually, I noticed, who passed away first is not their major concern. I’ll share a conversation taken from my fieldnotes below.

“We were earlier!” said one of Geh’s relatives (his younger cousin, De).

“They [Ms. Ha’s family] told us that they have already settled this with you.” Yu wondered.

“Settled with whom?!” De was irritated.

“They talked to which one [here? We don’t know!]?” Another man joined in.

“They talked to akhond Shir. Shir agrees.” the fourth master, San said.

“Our calling [the akhond] is also earlier, we called the akhond at 6:00 a.m., 6:00 a.m..” declared De and some of his companions.

“We, to tell the truth, do not have ‘People of the Mother’s Family (ma jia ren in local term)’ so it is really easy to process.” De added.

“They have another event to go to, the ones in charge of [Ms. Ha’s funeral], want to finish the funeral [quickly] and go to the other event, of witnessing the bride-price gifting [between two families].” Old man Tal intervened to explain.

61 “No matter it’s bride price or what, tomorrow their [Ms. Ha’s] ‘people of mother’s family’ will come, right?!” De insisted. “But we are different,” he continued, “if you [akhonds] arrive at 9:00, we can finish exactly at 9:00, no troubles

(no delay)!”

“Aye, aye.” People confirmed.

“We agree too.” Fourth Master San said.

“It is hard to change the plan now, they have settled the plan with akhond Shir, that we [akhonds] go to their place at 8:30 and finish at 10:00…” Old Tal started to hesitate, “But, it is true that your funeral [should be arranged earlier]… ” at this moment he was actually ready to compromise.

“We’ll have hot water ready [to wash the body] … but no matter 10:00 or 10:30, if people of her mother’s family do not appear, you’ll never finish the funeral!” De and the crowd came to a conclusion.

“Yeh… they have the ‘mother’s family’… You have to re-arrange that.” Tal finally compromised.

At this moment, Yu and San stepped out, to tell the crowd that a best way to solve the problem is to send a couple of representatives to the mosque, which is not far, to talk to Imam Shir.

“Imam Shir does not have to go to the graveyard [after reciting Quran for Geh], we can go to the graveyard, and he can directly go to the woman’s funeral from here and that will speed up the whole thing. … Actually we were just talking about this.

We say, this arrangement is just awkward.” Now Yu and San took Mr. De’s side.

62 Then the crowd started to negotiate who should be their representatives to go to the mosque to negotiate a new plan with akhonds (especially Imam Shir) and Ms.

Ha’s family members. And we left.

In the presented conversation, or rather a quarrel or verbal conflict, we can see that on the issue of who passed away/called the akhonds first, the two sides, namely the ones representing the mosque and Geh’s family/friends had a dispute, therefore this did not form the base for De’s claim of an earlier funeral. However, when the crowd directed the focus to “people of the mother’s family,” their argument was magically accepted by the mosque members. So who are the “people of the mother’s family,” and why are they so powerful?

In some Hui communities in and around SW city to which the village is affiliated,

“people of the mother’s family” is a term specialized for members, men and women, of a woman’s original family before marriage, especially her close male relatives, that is to say, her brothers and her brothers’ sons.

Reason for highlighting these relatives is that, a woman as a supposedly subjugated and powerless figure in her husband’s family can only rely on her brothers

(and the brothers’ sons, her nephews) to speak, or in some cases fight, for her to the family that she marries in, and her funeral is the final opportunity for these people to speak up. Normally, the “gang” would appear as picky lamenters, the brothers lamenting their sister, their sons lamenting the aunt, actively searching for evidence of maltreatment of the deceased, accusing the husband (if still alive) and children’s

63 incapability of offering a decent life for the dead, thus causing the procedure of the funeral to pause.

In most cases, the gang is only doing this half-heartedly as a ritual and can be soothed by nice words if they still recognize the husband’s family members as relatives and would like to get along with them in the future. But in some cases their purpose is not lamenting at the first place, but benefit. In this case they can only be shut up by cash; and in extreme cases, by a fight. So the people of mother’s family in my fieldsite are respectfully invited, well treated and highly positioned at a funeral, and no one dares to mess up with them.

But if the deceased is a man, he does not have such a gang speaking for him, not because he does not have a mother’s family, but because he was the one in charge of the family, and if he suffered, it is all because of himself. 20

This is why everyone present in the public yard was so concerned of Ms. Ha’s

“people of mother’s family.” The mere mention of this term brings a set of

“referential” (Foley 1991) knowledge, connotations or even former experiences stored in tradition bearers’ mind and accordingly, the awareness of this group of people intrigued performances of concerns about it. The term “tradition bearer” is used without prejudice and suggestion of the folk’s passive role in tradition making, as

Dorothy Noyes criticized (2003, 11), but to suggest a relative static status of the

“traditional” knowledge of “mother’s family” in my collaborators’ mind before it is activated by certain situation. As the people from “mother’s family” can forever postpone a funeral if they want, if Geh’s funeral is after Ha’s, there is no guarantee

20 My knowledge about “People of Mother’s Family” is gained from my collaborators, especially Akhond Su.

64 that it can be completed within one morning, or even worse, it is guaranteed to take more than a morning.

Some of my readers would shrug over this worriedness. So would Mr. Geh. He was lying peacefully upstairs in the electrically iced tabuut (local term for coffin, originated from Arabic) waiting for his transitional passage tomorrow to become the ritually absent. To postpone a little won’t bother him at all, as anyway he has no say in this game: it is the living people who want an earlier funeral. So, why an earlier funeral is preferred? Don’t people want to spend more time with the deceased?

I will offer some thoughts, with the awareness that the following rationale only draws my mental path in reasoning one particular event and should not be over generalized.

One possible idea is, according to Islamic teachings, a fast burial is preferred. As

A. S. Tritton noted that, for the procession of a Muslim’s funeral, “the pace had to be quick” (1938, 655). Hilma Granqvist mentioned similar custom in Jordan, that “Three things are urgent. The marrying of a ripe virgin. And the meal for the guest. … And the burying of the dead” (1965, 55). A local idiom in my village of fieldwork also states, “Dead men expect soil as [the alive] expect gold (wang ren pan tu ru pan jin in

Chinese).” The akhonds should be the ones who worry about this the most, as they have more religious knowledge and would claim the religious benefit of a fast burial, and make sure the two bodies will be buried as fast as possible. But the fact is they did not manage to do so. As aforementioned, the original arrangement would almost guarantee a late burial for Mr. Geh, and at the same time would not accelerate the burial of Ms. Ha.

65 Another possible reason may be, attending a funeral is time and energy consuming, the sooner the funeral is done the sooner the attendees can return to their normal track, as many of them have excused from work, some are aged and cannot stay for too long, and some have their own families to take care of … The forever departure of one member of a community means a rupture of the social relationship, and a break of balance, in an aspect that all the related community members should temporarily leave their daily tasks mending the rupture, but lest more ruptures in other capacities emerge, the process should not be too long.

More importantly, as soon as Geh passed away, he no longer belongs to this world and his otherworldliness renders the whole apartment and the yard a liminality, a threshold phenomenon that influences everyone present. This sudden change imposes a pressure on the people present, forcing them to negotiate a way out. Funeral is the only proper way, as it gives both sides a legitimate excuse to separate. However, before the final departure of Mr. Geh, the familiar space of quotidian life, which was also his quotidian life too, is thus suddenly changed, by the tabuut (coffin like box for the deceased to lie in before burial, but not to be buried with the corpse) laid in the middle of the living room and flows of people as well as objects, which were not part of the landscape. This is not to say that, the akhonds or mosque members are feared and considered as “polluted” by death as the funeral specialists in Watson’s case

(Watson 1988), rather, the ones offer to help with funerals are generally respected, treated well and rewarded with cash gift.

However, although the religious authorities, such as akhonds and mosque members are invited in to facilitate the funeral, the incompatibility between mundane

66 and religious spaces abruptly becomes obvious. Now lay people are required to bend over akhonds or people of “know-how” who are normally not part of their social space and occupy no position in their daily experienced hierarchy.

Some explanation is needed here. Although the village is a “Hui” village and its residents are by default Muslims, in a village that hosts a population larger than 3000, normally only 40 to 50 people go to Jumca prayer, and at least 10 to 15 of them are not local, but Muslims from other provinces doing business here.21 Daily prayers witness even fewer attenders. Most villagers only go to the mosque for religious services, such as weddings, baby naming and funerals. So I venture to say that religious authority is not part of the daily social space for many people in the village.

Only in scenes about funerals are certain relationships between religious authorities and lay people constructed or highlighted, thus the funeral is included into a totality of a religious (ideological) space (Lefebvre in Stanek 2008, 71), here a Space of

Death. This issue will be discussed in more details in Chapter 3.

It is thus easy to perceive that, in a space of unfamiliar practices and representations, Mr. Geh’s family members and friends were all experiencing a dislocation, of their daily life and the used-to social norms. The death brought an estrangement of everyday life, by highlighting some hidden aspects of it. Tension between the familiar social and spatial practices and those in a Space of Death, between the normal social hierarchy and the temporary, religious hierarchy will be present as long as the funeral does not end.

21 I attended almost all the Jumca prayers in the mosque from summer of 2014 to summer of 2015 and many other daily prayers during my fieldwork, and counted the attendees every time. My feeling that Islam is not part of many villagers’ everyday life is also supported by my conversation with the akhonds, mosque members and also those who do not practice Islam.

67 Following Lefebvre’s criticism of everyday life (Lefebvre 2014, 51-54, 169) and

Bourdieu’s notes on symbolic power (1991, 168), I may be able to argue that the everyday life of my collaborators is segmented by a modern, industrialized society and the division of religious labor. The humane aspects are deprived of the “work” or productive aspect of a person’s everyday life, and attending funeral becomes a luxury and even equals leisure, as the people at work should ask their “bosses” for a “leave,” which could not be elongated as one wishes. It is due to a fact that human beings are so separated from the world as a whole, and the “private” sphere of life is kept from the public sphere, coping with sudden disruptions such as death represents both a familiarization of humanity, and an unfamiliarization of the segmented daily experience of social realities. This alienation of life circle from work or labor could also explain why Mr. Geh’s relatives and friends did not stop us to talk about their concern until the job of tearing shroud was done: the funeral specialists’ appearance is a phenomenon of doubled meaning, as on the one hand they are respected and desired for their know-how or specialty; on the other hand, they are dismissed and even regarded as useless once the ritual is finished, i.e., when they can and should conveniently vanish again from the quotidian life.

A question of “which side needs to bend?” is always present. Of course, normally the mundane hierarchy bends over to the religious, more humane one–that is why the friends and family members could temporarily be off their mundane duty/work and participate in the funeral: the religious social norm successfully take over the mundane. However, as just analyzed, if this tension exists or has the potential of

68 stretching for a prolonged time, a desire of restoration of the mundane social norm would prevail, thus the dispute with the akhonds as in the case of Mr. Geh.

Nonetheless, the situation was actually more complex, and the “religious” side was also hybridized by profanity too. We see that the shroud team (Tal, San and Yu) accepted the argument without too much difficulty. Actually, they, especially San and

Yu, were already expecting this dispute, and well utilized it here.

During their quarrel, I suddenly recalled some earlier conversations among the akhonds in the mosque and on our way here, which I documented but did not quite appreciate the importance.

Let’s set the clock back to earlier that afternoon, in order to further clarify this religious duty blended with mundane concerns, and find out how the tension between mundane norms and religious norms was employed in a Space of Death to challenge an existing religious hierarchy.

Round One: In the Mosque

Earlier, at around 1:00 p.m., we, including akhonds, some mosque members and I gathered at the West Mosque for Peshene (afternoon) Prayer. Yu normally does not attend the daily prayers in the mosque but that day he was there too so that he could drive us to Mr. Geh’s place to tear the kafan right after prayer.

Tearing kafan, in Chinese si kefan, is the second step of preparing a dead person for his/her passage to the Hereafter. The first step is called “covering the face (gai menglian bu in local term), and is normally completed by any akhond available at the mosque right after the person’s demise, and the akhonds, after covering the

69 deceased’s face, will dictate the arrangement and leave the dead’s friends and relatives busy with making obituary announcement, setting up chairs, benches and sometimes cushions, preparing food for guests who will gradually arrive, and other tasks. Tearing the shroud is only finished later, by lower ranked akhonds and mosque members, or rarely, people who “know how.” So the funeral’s time and outline should have already been discussed and settled when the funeral enters this stage of tearing the shroud.

But apparently Mr. Geh’s relatives and friends did not think the arrangement as proper, and Tal, San and Yu, as the normal shroud team for male maytas (dead bodies, as aforementioned) and who “know how,” are in fact all aware of the improperness at the very beginning. I will share an extract from my fieldnotes below to explain:

Now the prayer ended, San, Yu and Old Man Tal were standing in the yard talking about the funeral arrangement and necessities needed to bring to the funeral from the mosque, with Imam Shir dictating some funeral details to San, and my questions interrupting now and then. Akhond Su was also present.

“The arrangement is just awkward.” Yu said in a low but discernible voice to San when the two were talking about fetching some pitchers22 from the mosque to wash

Geh’s body. Imam Shir could definitely hear it as I eavesdropped the words clearly and we were standing together.

22 A pitcher is called a “tang ping hu” in Chinese, it could be of brass, iron or even silver but is normally made of plastic nowadays, it is used by Hui Muslims to perform their daily ablution and also wash the dead body. It is a symbol of Halal food in many Hui communities too.

70 “Just awkward!” Akhond Su repeated the sentence louder, approving Yu.

“The woman’s funeral starts at 8:30, 8:30 and ends…” Old man Tal murmured.

“[Probably] later than 10:00!” Su said.

Tal then became worried, “as she has ‘people of mother’s family’ in the east village, the Ha Family.”

“It will be later than 10:30 when we get back from the graveyard [so the man’s funeral may be postponed].” Su grasped Tal’s anxiety.

“No, it won’t be that late.” Shir denied this dangerous and challenging thought, as it was him who set the time with Ha’s family earlier, he had to defend himself: “10:20 at latest. They [women akhonds] of east village are swift [in washing and processing dead bodies], and the woman’s body is not in iced tabuut [so it is better to process it faster].”

Yu continued his comments, seemingly addressing San, still in a low but clear voice, “As long as The Old Woman Akhond (lao shiniang in Chinese) does not meddle in.”

“Oh… The Old Woman Akhond will go [meddle in to the procession of Ms. Ha’s body instead of allowing the woman akhonds of the east village to do so]” Akhond Su heard Yu and brutally confirmed the latter’s worriedness.

“How she won’t [be there], being a relative by marriage [of Ms. Ha]?!” Yu raised his voice, probably feeling more confident?

“It is impossible for her to be swift [in washing the body] then...” Akhond Su followed up.

71 At this moment San fetched three pitchers from the washroom, and Yu, Tal started to walk toward the gate. I told Imam Shir that I was also going then we all took a leave.

In this round of verbal “combat,” the shroud team, together with Akhond Su failed in successfully persuading Imam Shir, who is in charge, to change his mind.

Imam Shir was optimistic about the smooth transition between the two funerals tomorrow, and he had his reason: Ms. Ha, the deceased woman, is originally from the east village. The local tradition is that her “mother’s family” should bring female akhonds from their own village to wash her body, and as these female akhonds are young and swift, they will be able to complete the procedures rapidly, leaving the local male akhonds plenty of time to rush to Mr. Geh’s funeral and finish the job in the same morning.

But Shir failed to appreciate a fact that The Old Woman Akhond of the west village is Ms. Ha’s relative by marriage, so the former has the right to process the latter’s dead body if the “mother’s family” does not insist of using their own female akhonds. According to Yu and Akhond Su, it seemed that The Old Woman Akhond would be in. And she is locally “notorious” for being troublesome and slow.

But why Shir repudiated old man Tal and Yu’s protest? And why San did not even utter a word at that moment? We may find some clue for their silence (or being silenced) in their own conditions:

Old man Tal is in his 80s. He is a local celebrity, a quite energetic man considering the age, he always appears nicely dressed in his “traditional” Chinese

72 outfit and willing to participate in all the religious affairs. However, his position is a little bit subtle: he was the Imam, but resigned his position giving way to the current

Imam Shir.

San is an “akhond” in the title’s general sense, but he occupies the lowest (fourth) rank in a mosque hierarchy. Though the hierarchical setting does not strictly apply to any mosque, San’s position is lower than the other three people in the mosque (Imam

Shir, Akhond Su and Akhond Na) without doubt. He is already in his 70s, but due to his inadequate religious knowledge, he can only perform basic tasks such as slaughtering animals, tearing shrouds, sometimes calling for prayers, and also gardening. He always complains to me, “who cares listening to me?!” especially when he is ordered by the akhonds of a higher position to pass words to other akhonds. San is also the least well off among the akhonds.

Yu is a pleasant young man in his late 20s. He was an akhond in the mosque but later relinquished to run a small business. He and his father volunteer now and then when the mosque needs helpers for religious services.

All the three would habitually wear white round brimless caps, a “symbolic” costume of a Hui Muslim and in my fieldsite more a legitimation of their affiliation to a mosque, but none of them is now a core member of the mosque. Therefore, they either do not have a strong say in decision-making, such as Tal, or, as San or Yu, hesitate to risk their relationship with the current Imam, Shir, or to embarrass him by suggesting blatantly an alternative arrangement.

Akhond Su is of a higher position in the mosque hierarchy than the shroud team, he is also Shir’s cousin. But his word also did not suggest any change, but only

73 appeared as a reference, a simple statement of fact. His attitude was clear: whatever is the arrangement, I’ll do my job and that’s all.

However, they at least managed to allude their doubt about Imam Shir’s arrangement, and paved the road for further hierarchy-overthrowing actions.

Round Two: In Yu’s Van

After Tal, San and I had seated ourselves in Yu’s van out of the mosque at around

1:50, he gradually steered the vehicle onto the main street.

“The arrangement [of the two funerals] you see? Is just awkward.” Yu reiterated his argument.

“Isn’t it?!” Forth Master San agreed. He was sitting beside me on the back row.

“Geh’s funeral should be the first…” Yu said.

“That’s fast.” San picked up Yu’s words, “Geh is a man [who has no ‘people of the mother’s family’ issue], and they have their own cars, Shir just needs to go recite

Surah Taha for them then we can go to the graveyard.”

“They [Ms. Ha’s family] came to Shir [to make the arrangement].” San continued after a pause.

“Akhond Shir? He just knows ‘yes yes yes’ and ‘right right right.’” Yu scorned.

When the car reaches the mouth of the village, a woman passed us, riding a bicycle. Yu and San suddenly recognized her as Big Girl (nickname), belonging to the female shroud team, and is going to join The Old Woman Akhond in tearing Ms. Ha’s shroud and of course also tomorrow’s funeral.

74 “See? It’s The Old Woman Akhond’s job. Here Big Girl is helping her tearing the kefan.” Yu made a signal to San using a tilt of his head, “if they [Ms. Ha’s ‘mother’s family’] invited the female akhonds of the east village, it would be faster. … But now, it will be later than 10:00 [when we finish Ms. Ha’s funeral] for sure.”

“Really that late? Oh yeah, her people of mother’s family will mess up [the funeral].” San said.

…

“Now everyone can contact Shir directly as he has a mobile phone, so he takes all the jobs himself.” San complained.

The car arrived at Mr. Geh’s community.

This conversation further demonstrates that San and Yu were actually not content with the arrangement at all, but they did not articulate their concern or directly confront Imam Shir earlier in the mosque. They were quite right in not doing so, as I have showed, as anyway Imam Shir would not allow them to rearrange the funerals.

But they, especially San, knew that an alternative arrangement would benefit more than just Mr. Geh’s family.

San said “Shir takes all the jobs,” and “he doesn’t need to go to the graveyard.”

With some background knowledge, I believe, one can better appreciate these words.

“To go to the graveyard” means income. One courtesy in many Hui communities is, when akhonds are reciting Quranic verses at the graveyard, relatives and friends of the deceased should reward them (akhonds) with cash gift. But these cash-gift-wraps are not equally distributed to every akhond in the mosque but only put into a bag

75 carried by the akhonds whom were at the graveyard. Therefore, if higher ranked akhonds do not go to the graveyard, the cash gift could be more abundantly distributed among the lower ranked akhonds: though it is not guaranteed, an opportunity is better than nothing.

More importantly, Shir’s taking care of every funeral from beginning to end could be easily read as manipulative and dictating, or even a lack of trust in his colleagues.

Being an old akhond, though a “Fourth Master,” San has plenty of experiences in processing funerals, but the mosque hierarchy hinders his free performance of his expertise and even the right of making suggestions: a more possible source for the sourness sensed in San’s words. He saw the faulty arrangement, but did not even utter a word in the mosque.

Moreover, San does not acknowledge Imam Shir’s qualification of being an

Imam. As he told me (summer 2013), he believes that the reason for Shir’s becoming the Imam is that Tal, the former Imam “prefers him [to the other candidate], because his physical appearance is dignified.” One can imagine San’s frustration then, being an old man working under a young person whose position is gained by sheer decent appearance (at least per San’s understanding). The only way for him to vent his emotion is to complain to Yu, an outsider of the mosque but familiar with the hierarchical discursive system and aware of the underground issues.

Thoughtful readers must have noticed the silence of another person, old man Tal, in the conversation in Yu’s van. The reason is Tal’s being very hard in hearing. He didn’t seem to catch anything so he did not interact with San and Yu on this issue.

However, his attitude is not difficult to predict: in “round one,” he was worried about

76 Ms. Ha’s “people of mother’s family,” so he would not have disagreed with Yu and

San’s perspective.

When talking about funerals, Yu’s van becomes a Space of Death, what of concern in this space is, but at the same time is not the arrangement of two funerals: as stated above, religious affairs were blended with mundane issues. Talking about the awkwardness of the funeral arrangement is but an expression of the daily accumulated awareness of hierarchical discursive/performative system of the mosque.

San managed to alter his own representational space (Lefebvre 1991, 33, 39) commenting on the mosque system and the local religious authorities.

This “round” of struggle, as Round One, actually did not change the situation either, nor has it addressed Imam Shir directly, but it enabled an alliance among San and Yu (maybe also Tal), and shared a rhetoric criticizing the hierarchy. So that we saw at the beginning of this chapter Yu and San’s diplomatic maneuver of Geh’s friends and relatives’ unhappiness to push them toward a negotiation with Imam Shir: the hierarchy could be challenged from the outside.

As analyzed above, Mr. Geh’s relatives and friends’ tolerance of the presence of religious hierarchy was limited because of the alienation of their everyday life, or the separation of a more private, humanistic sphere, and public, working sphere. That made them San’s allies. The two parties do not share the same interest, but they can work toward a same end: to challenge the religious hierarchy is the only method by which to reach their respective goals. As the shroud team and Geh’s relatives and friends joined force now, the next round is expected to solve the problem.

77 Round Three: Back to the Mosque

On the way back, the four of us did not talk too much about the funeral arrangement, but discussed the environment of the community.

After Yu pulled off at the mosque, San went into his room in the outer yard and

Tal went home. Yu walked to the inner yard to the akhonds’ room. I fell behind a little bit, but also went to the akhonds’ room.

“We’ve settled that!” As soon as I entered the room, I heard Imam Shir’s voice.

Round Three was on. Ahkhond Su was still there.

“But they [Mr. Geh’s relatives and friends] are right too.” Yu tried to persuade

Shir in a soft and calm tune, “even if we arrive [at Ms. Ha’s] early, so what? Waiting for her ‘people of mother’s family?’ He [Geh] has no guests [from mother’s family], so we can finish the funeral at 9:00 if we arrive at 9:00 [without delay]. …”

“The grave [for Geh] is dug?” Shir asked.

“Dug.” Yu answered.

“Well you see? What were they thinking about…” Shir was apparently confused.

“Who said they negotiated? The ones in charge of both families did not talk about this at all!” Su asked in a loud voice.

“Aye, aye.” Shir and Yu confirmed.

“It is useless for us to talk about this there [at Geh’s], as we are all people whose words have no power, but who have power utter no words (shuo le bu suan, suan le bu shuo in Chinese),” Yu stated with a smile, “and we suggested them to come to the mosque [to negotiate].”

78 “Their two families should [talk], do not come to the mosque…” Imam Shir said.

He did not want the Geh’s family to come to the mosque, trying to avoid trouble, “… the ones in charge [from the families] should talk about this.”

“Cannot, the ones in charge push their funeral first, they only care about their own funeral, they do not care about the other one.” Akhond Su told a fact, I think.

“Both sides desire an earlier funeral.” Yu agreed.

“But they [Ms. Ha’s family] came to me [for an arrangement] earlier… They told me that they’d be quick.” Shir still tried to defend his original plan.

“Even if they are slow we have to finish the job [once we go to their funeral first]!

You cannot simply leave [the body] there!” Yu almost laughed. Now his voice was relaxed.

“We should ask them to settle it first and we just listen to their decision.” Imam

Shir insisted that it is “their” problem.

…

Then it appeared that Akhond Su tried to save some face for Imam Shir. He recalled, “Remember that you thought they have already settled this before coming to us? I told you it may not be the case when they left.”

At that moment, I heard people’s voices in the outer yard. Geh’s family might have arrived?

Yu went on persuading Imam Shir: “… [Geh’s] grave is bricked, they have hot water ready, they have no ‘mother’s family,’ you come at 8:00, you finish at 8:00, you come at 9:00, finish at 9:00…”

79 “Sure sure, it is guaranteed that we will agree with them [Geh’s] even both sides come to the mosque [to argue],” Akhond Su saw the finale, “you cannot refuse. If they say ‘you come at 8:00,’ as we have nothing to do tomorrow morning, we should just go there at 8:00 and finish it.”

“Emm.” Imam Shir seemed to have finally nodded his approval.

In this “round,” the main performers became Yu and Akhond Su, either assumed a different role with a different purpose.

Yu’s words “we are all people whose words have no power but who have power utter no words” is a local idiom consists of two parts, each part with the same words but switched words order, so the meanings become different: shuo le bu suan to suan le bu shuo. It eloquently commented on the position of the shroud team and urged

Imam Shir–whose words do have power, but did not manage to use it well–to make a decision. On the way to Geh’s apartment, Yu’s saying that “Akhond Shir? He just knows ‘yes yes yes’ and ‘right right right’” is a poignant critique on Shir’s incompetence and timidity. Juxtaposed with these words, Yu’s self-degradation is actually an artful way of speaking and communicating, a performance of verbal art

(Bauman 1998, 2002), he did not really think his words were powerless, nor did he really believe that Shir was powerful: it was only a rhetoric, a way of clarifying that the responsibility rests on Imam Shir, not the shroud team, and Shir should be the one who steps out to talk to the two families. “Those who have power do not utter a word” appeared innocently and naturally as just part of an idiom for the purpose of self-

80 degradation, it however formed an obvious critique on Imam Shir. Viewing from this perspective, Yu’s words are ironically of power.

Akhond Su helped Imam Shir by explaining him out of a situation of being considered as incompetent in handling conflicting funerals. Su said that Shir

“thought” the two sides had settled the issue before coming to the mosque, a rather self contradictory allegation as he earlier said either side only cares about their own funeral. Akhond Su was understandably in a dilemma as on the one hand he had to defend the mosque hierarchy in which he is the second highest one below Shir, plus they are cousins; on the other hand, he did not want to be criticized together with Shir, that’s the reason of his disclaimer of “I told you that it may not be the case.” Su however chose side and clarified his attitude at the end of the conversation, that if

Geh’s family wanted to argue, the only choice would be to respond positively to their request of completing Geh’s funeral first. But again, he was not the one in charge.

Imam Shir’s attitude is worth mentioning too. It is quite noticeable that he did not intend to tackle the conflict himself at all as he said twice that the two families themselves should settle the dispute, which was however exactly generated from his vague attitude. He was still defending the original plan, and actually also defending the mosque hierarchy and as well as his competence, which was seriously challenged:

“the belief in the legitimacy of words and of those who utter them” (Bourdieu 1991,

170) now no longer exist. However, one should note that as long as Shir did not compromise, no one could force the event to develop to another direction.

In this round, Fourth Master San stopped at the outer yard and retreated into his own private space. As mentioned above, he occupies the lowest rank of the mosque

81 hierarchy, making his words the least cared. He is aware of this frustrating fact, so he did not bother to persuade Imam Shir, but artfully suggested in the margin. As the alliance between him and Yu had already been established and Geh’s friends and relatives were on their way to the mosque, he could and only could anticipate the turn point. However, this does not mean that the Space of Death also stopped at the outer yard of the mosque. It still embraced all the people concerning tomorrow’s arrangement. Because everyone was still densely involved in talking, preparing for and thinking of the funerals, and actions aiming at challenging or protecting the authorities/hierarchy were still on-going, even on the Fourth Master San’s part. His silence was not inertia, rather, it was a strategic resignation, an inactive action.

In this Space of Death, the “propulsive force of heretical criticism is met by the resistant force of orthodoxy” (Bourdieu 1991, 131). In such a moment of crisis, the orthodox discourse found its impulsion of defending itself. Imam Shir seemed to have nodded an approval, but that was just the first step towards an ultimate compromise.

The Space of Death here only facilitated a struggle on the technical plane among the akhonds and mosque members, but the real problem still remained unsolved. For all representations of an ideal arrangement to meet and wrestle, the space should incorporate more social relationships, such as those with Geh’s and Ha’s family members, as we’ll see in the next round.

Round Four: In the Yard

Yu raised his head, looking into the inner yard.

82 “Who’s that? [Is it] Akhond Na (another akhond of the mosque)?” Imam Shir wondered.

“A couple of people came in?” Yu said.

Akhond Su stood up and glanced through the windows, “Woo! Not a ‘couple,’ a

‘crowd!’”

We all stepped out of the akhonds’ room to receive the group, which was Mr.

Geh’s family members and friends as expected.

There were four of them. I recognized De as the leader of the group, a young man in his early twenties–Mr. Geh’s son, and two other men I didn’t know, both middle aged. They addressed Imam Shir directly as soon as they appeared in the inner yard, about why their funeral was to be the second one to be processed.

“They [the village functionaries in charge of Ms. Ha’s funeral] have a bride-price gifting ceremony to witness tomorrow morning, so they want to finish the funeral and go there.” Imam Shir explained.

“They want to finish [the funeral]?! It doesn’t make sense!” De and his two middle-aged companions were a little bit irritated. But the young man seemed uncertain.

“Don’t talk to me, you should talk to the ones in charge on the other side [Ms.

Ha’s].

“We informed you earlier [than them]!” De said.

“No, they informed me earlier [than you].” Shir denied, “Early this morning they came to request the funeral. And I asked whether they’ve talked to you. They said

83 they can make it 8:30.” It is interesting to notice that Shir hinted that the two sides should be well aware of the arrangement as he “asked” whether Ms. Ha’s family had talked to Mr. Geh’s family. Although ironically Shir had no answer to the question he asked.

De did not seem to have noticed the hint. He chose to present the strongest argument: “They can barely finish at 10:30! They have the mother’s family! …”

“They’ve told the mother’s family [to come early].” Shir still saw a chance.

“Even so there’s no way for them to start at 8:30. … But we can start at any time.”

Akhond Su intervened then, “What about you going to that [woman’s] one and we

[he, Akhond Na and Fourth Master San] go to this [man’s] one?”

“Same thing. We have only one car to hearse the body [so even Geh’s body is ready for burial it has to wait].” Shir said.

“You have to consider who came earlier [to report the death].” Another man said.

All of a sudden, Fourth Master San stepped out, not to support but to argue against the Geh’s family: “Actually they [Ha’s] came here this morning.”

“Right! They came here this morning and told me that they’ve informed the mother’s family [to come early].” Shir confirmed. “You should talk to them later.” He suggested.

“Still it is impossible for them to start at 8:30.” De insisted, “Her mother’s family is not just one family, she has eight or ten? They cannot come [punctually]. But we can let you process even if you come at 7:30.”

84 “We actually prefer to go to your funeral earlier.” Shir suddenly changed his attitude, “Yours is a man’s funeral, it has no such troublesome issues [as mother’s family].”

“So we go earlier? So that the car carrying the body could have some leeway between two funerals?” Akhond Su promptly accepted this signal as an approval for an alternative plan.

“It has quite a leeway then.” San said in a cheerful tone. Sounded like the plan had been changed, and akhonds started to discuss similar conflicting funerals happened before. Su told me that funeral conflicts rarely happen, especially between a man and a woman.

In this round, the Space of Death took over the yard and incorporated more social relationships, which seemed to become more complex than previous ones.

First to be addressed is the relationship between mosque members/akhond.

Imam Shir referred to the “first come first serve” rule. However, this “reactionary discourse” (Bourdieu 1991, 131) against challenges was too weak: first of all, no one witnessed who came first; secondly, Shir’s assertion that Ms. Ha’s family came first is suspicious: evidence shows that actually Geh’s family was the first to arrive at the mosque. Geh’s household is further than Ms. Ha’s from the mosque, but he was the one who is lying in the iced tabuut, which proves that by the time his family members arrived at the mosque this morning, the tabuut was still available. Besides, in Geh’s apartment and the yard, I saw the green cushions borrowed from the village mosque

85 to offer rest places for guests, but in Ms. Ha’s yard, the cushions being used were the blue ones borrowed from another further mosque of the east village.

That is why it is interesting to notice that Fourth Master San stepped out to support Imam Shir at this point. San was among the ones who disagree with Shir’s plan as we have seen in the previous rounds, but now acted as if he supported it, however on a weak stance. To say San’s support was on a weak stance, because his statement that “they came this morning” diplomatically avoided addressing the core dispute about who came earlier.

As demonstrated above, the Fourth Master’s status is the lowest in the mosque hierarchy, demanding him a mere function of supporting and following, not subverting or diverging. The situation when the tension between the Geh’s family and the mosque as a unity was highlighted offered an ideal opportunity for San to express his supportiveness though superficially.

It is also exactly due to his low status, San gained a perspective different from the akhonds’, and legitimately did not really feel a sense of belonging to or necessity of speaking for the mosque unity.

As for the relationship between Geh’s family and the mosque, the former entered a space, concrete and also abstract, that is unfamiliar to them but realizes the

“canalization of … the coding of their reciprocal relations” with the people in it

(Foucault and Rabinow 1984, 253, emphasis original): to which they do show a respect. One detail is worth mentioning here. Before leaving Geh’s family/friends, I overheard their discussion of who should be going to the mosque, and one said, “You go, I had quite a few of drinks earlier.”

86 This means although these men do not practice Islam, they think it as improper to go to a mosque after drinking.

This respect is however relational, i.e. not definite. From the shroud tearing to negotiation in the mosque, the ritual processes and religious spaces also served at least partially as planes for “bargaining for reality” (Rosen 1984) and mundane social interaction.

Once the religious unity including the akhonds and mosque members does not live up to the funeral attendees’ expectations, the latter start to challenge the religious authority’s decision. Alienation of individuals in their everyday life and incompatibility between religious and mundane social spaces form part of the reason, as previously argued, but akhonds’ reputation and personality may also have contributed to the of the mundane world’s challenging religious prowess. Imam Shir, as both San and Yu have mentioned, has the reputation of being a “yes man,” rendering him someone who could be argued with. Besides, the shroud team’s maneuver is not to be neglected: let’s not forget the whole event was triggered if not completely planned by their suggestion, that Mr. Geh’s family and friends should go to the mosque to talk with Imam Shir.

Of course, as argued in the first chapter, the low reputation of akhonds and degradation of religious labor should not be considered as a necessary result of the commercialization of the society, but have to be further contextualized. For instance,

Imam Shir’s reputation of being a “yes man” and unqualified for his position may be a mixture of narratives about akhonds circulating in the village, Shir’s daily

87 performance of his personality, words spread intentionally or unconsciously by co- workers, and so forth. I will return to this point with more details in Chapter 3.

Although it seemed that the mosque and the Geh’s family have reached an agreement, Imam Shir did not finally decide whose funeral should be the first.

Because a change of plan cannot be decided merely by two sides, so Ms. Ha’s family should also be consulted.

Round Five: In the Space of Death

De and his two middle-aged companions were still arguing with Imam Shir about who came first this morning. Geh’s son mostly kept quiet.

At this moment a young girl about 14 or 15 entered the mosque.

“She is from Ha’s family! [We can] ask her to call the ones in charge of her side!”

Shir told De and his companions.

The girl then dialed a number and handed her phone to Shir.

“Geh’s side wants their funeral to go first, you come here to the mosque and we have a talk, alright?” Shir asked. I heard a loud voice in the phone saying they’ll be here right away.

“Ha has her people of mother’s family in the east village and also TS village, it’ll take a long time for them to gather here.” Yu said.

“When can the woman’s funeral start then?” I asked.

“… No earlier than 10:00.” Akhond Su told me, “We process the man’s funeral first, nothing will be delayed. Even if we go to the woman’s funeral first, there is

88 nothing that we can do as the washing is carried out by the women akhonds [so we have to wait anyway].”

On the other side of the yard, De was still complaining about the arrangement to

Shir. At this moment two stout old men rushed into the mosque. I was glad to recognize one of them: a friend, Mr. Lu. The two were both local functionaries, normally they help in funerals if the deceased’s family needs someone to supervise the event. They also witness gifting of bride price upon request.

Mr. Lu nodded his greetings to the people present and said, or probably “roared” is a more proper word, “Tomorrow little Joy has something for us to do (he meant to witness the gifting of bride price)! We have to rush there after the funeral!”

De responded: “We have no guests to wait, hot water is ready [to wash the corpse] and we pour the water into the drains!”

“Pouring the water” here wants a brief explanation. As mentioned in the introduction, according to local custom, the waste water after washing the corpse cannot be poured just anywhere or drained, but has to be poured onto clean sand piles in the yard, believing that the soul of the deceased will linger there and protect the family. Pouring water is normally performed by close relatives in a way of passing the basins used to catch the waste water when they are full. But that means longer time for the basins to be passed, emptied and returned to the akhonds to resume washing. It only becomes more difficult to be achieved for a funeral going on in an apartment because there is no place for sand piles in the public yard downstairs and even if there is a sand pile, it is hard for people to empty a basin downstairs once it is full and return it to the akhonds. So in current days to pour the water in drains is

89 accepted by people living in urban areas, but not in the village. Viewing by some as lacking respect for the dead and violating a tradition, it however efficiently speeds up the washing process.

Lu promptly agreed: “If you can be done at 9:00 it is fine. [Akhonds should] arrive at ours no later than 10:00.”

I believe that Mr. Lu was aware that Ms. Ha’s people of the mother’s family cannot be easily gathered. That is the reason for his prompt agreement on the new plan. His expectation of the akhonds’ arrival time, 10:00 meets Akhond Su’s estimation.

“Even the akhonds arrive at 7:30, we can finish, we don’t have guests.” De said.

Now the only question was when the akhonds should arrive at Geh’s apartment.

“How about 9:00?” Shir proposed.

“You process theirs at 8:30 and come to ours right after that.” Lu suggested.

“Not a problem.” De agreed.

“Fine, after processing the body, I go to the woman’s funeral for reciting Surah

Taha, you guys (addressing akhonds Su, Na and San, Tal is old so he seldom goes to the graveyard anyway) go to the graveyard [to bury the corpse].” Imam Shir finally decided.

Then all the people were relieved. They started to joke about what if one gets late, with Imam Shir’s orders of what should be brought to the funerals, who hearse the bodies and San’s responses to the orders intersecting.

“Make sure you get there earlier, Old San!” Mr. Lu joked with San, “You’ll be washing the body.”

90 “Fine, fine, I’ll be there early.” San said with a smile.

Later, “If we get there late, it’s Yu’s fault [as he has the car].” San argued.

“Hear that? No, it’s your fault if it doesn’t work out!” Akhond Su teased with San.

“I’ll drive you here after Bamdad prayer (around 5:30 a.m.) tomorrow morning!”

Yu joked with San too.

People laughed and left the mosque.

In this final round, the discussion of funeral arrangement successfully included all the agents and relationships between them. In other words, all the agents together live and produced the Space of Death. Some utterances in this space were evaluated, responded and taken as guidance for further action, others were joked about and will be forgotten, but all of them deserve to be chewed over because they are all constructive materials of such a space facilitating discussion of funeral plans as well as social relationships, past, present and in the future. This Space of Death was not only for arranging the funerals for the deceased, but more for the living folk to experience their everyday realities; what matters for the deceased/funerals are the words taken seriously and put into actions, but all the utterances, including the joking words, represent the experienced social space, where the alive cope with all the social relationships, religious and secular.

The newly emerged agents were the two people supervising Ms. Ha’s funeral.

They actually had already become part of this Space of Death even during their absence, as they had been referred to by Imam Shir as a reason for his hesitation of accepting the alternative plan. But the fact was that, the funeral supervisors did not

91 care whose funeral should be completed first as long as Ms. Ha’s funeral could be completed before their next task starts.

These two supervisors’ plan for the next day was interesting in that they would switch from one rite of passage to another, from a Space of Death to a Space of

Wedding, from a funeral to a bride price gifting ceremony. The seemingly incompatibility between the two tasks of supervising a funeral and witnessing a bride gifting rendered the two old men betwixt and between, and simultaneously suggested a fact that the liminality generated by a funeral does not necessarily influence every participant of it equally.

It is this unequally weighted liminality and different concerns about the funeral and the deceased allow agents to think differently and adjust or even alter certain social norms according to their own needs.

For Mr. De, he actively adopted a new method of draining the water for washing corpse in order to haste the funeral procedures. It is true that to dispose the waste water in an apartment does not really allow an alternative choice, but to articulate this violation of “tradition” in a village where the socially sanctioned method of disposing waste water is still pouring it on clean sand is a different story, especially this articulation was before the dead man’s son and all the people (akhonds and two old men) who are familiar with the traditional way of waste water disposition and the meanings embedded in it. (It is not possible that Mr. De himself was not aware of the cultural meaning in “pouring water,” otherwise he would not even bother to highlight the way he intended to dispose the water.) Mr. De did not only challenge the local religious authorities by disagreeing with their decision; by his open suggestion of

92 sacrificing the “traditional” way of water draining, he also transgressed the locally accepted boundaries between the spiritual and profane, high and low, respectful and disposable.

At the same time, San, Yu and Tal, and even Akhond Su managed to temporarily subvert the mosque hierarchy and adjust an already made decision. Their endeavor could be seen as one of accelerating the procession of funerals to fulfill Muslims’ fast burial requirement, but meanwhile it was a protest against the hierarchical mosque system, as well as warning Imam Shir of his arbitrariness and inconsistence. More practically, monetary benefit could be brought by this endeavor to some people: as

Imam Shir was not going to Mr. Geh’s tomb, the odds were other akhonds/mosque members would have a bigger share of tomorrow’s cash gifts distributed at the graveyard.

None of the subversions and transgressions could be realized were they not tempted by the discussion of funeral conflicts that produced a space where death related topics prevailed, but at the same time these discussions and the results from them in turn change the Space of Death.

As aforementioned, the funeral and all the preparations for it transformed Mr.

Geh’s household and even the public yard downstairs to a Space of Death. By arguing for an earlier funeral for his brother Geh, Mr. De managed to make this Space of

Death transient, condensed and compacted to the most capacity to facilitate the fastest transition for the Geh’s family and friends (also other residents of the apartment building) from the unfamiliar space dominated by death related elements and supervised by mosque authorities to a familiar, mundane space.

93 Never the less, the “spirit” of the deceased would still linger for certain amount of time rather than flow away with the wastewater in drains. Unlike all the other embodied human or non-human actants in the funeral such as akhonds, the dead body, the tabuut coffin and the green cushions borrowed from mosques which occupy concrete positions in a space but cease to do so once the funeral is finished, the

“spirit” or the “forever absent man” (see Chapter 1) is not a possessor of a concrete space or a conductor of spatial activities, but s/he still acts and lives in people’s mind and influences village people’s “lived space” (Lefebvre 1991) in their memory, imagination and so forth. So it does not vanish together with all the tangible elements of a funeral mentioned above, but would continue assuming the role of an actant sporadically however staunchly or even religiously in the alive’s everyday life for instance when a photo is seen, an old object found or a day in the past recalled. As

Hallam and Hockey state, the space of death thus “transcends the here and now, connecting with past and future lives and deaths” (Hallam and Hockey 2001, 84).

Although the mending of social rupture and restoration of life order could take place right after the funeral, the forever absent man will become a phantom of the Space of

Death, which does not interrupt but will be gradually incorporated into the “rhythm” of the everyday space (Lefebvre 1991, 205-7) experienced by the alive.

As for Tal, Yu and San, in participating the discussion of funeral plans they also managed to produce their own Space of Death, which was tomorrow’s funerals. To appropriate Lefebvre’s theory in a smaller scaled society, this space was to facilitate a

“differential space” (Lefebvre 1991, 52) in which lower ranked akhonds’ labor is differentiated and their status recognized by assuming a role in the funeral

94 independently or at least out of the Imam’s supervision. The new arrangements in this

Space of Death commented on the local hierarchical religious space armed with a mosque order and a discursive system that prevents lower ranked mosque clergies from free utterance and equal benefit. The spatial struggle here is at the same time religious and mundane, horizontal and vertical, inward and outward, and the spatial is also temporal.

Religious because it is marked by the service performed by mosque members and akhonds to prepare the deceased on a religious scale, mundane because the spatial could also be monetarily beneficial. Horizontal because the space for San and Yu was actually stretched to a wider scope in that now they became the sole practitioners of religious service at Mr. Geh’s tomb but would not have to share the space with Imam

Shir. Vertical because the lower ranked akhonds and mosque members occupied a space without the supervision of the mosque authorities, which is not impossible but rare to observe. The spatial struggle is inward as it was started by the unsatisfied insiders and it is also outward because it was about the relationship between the mosque and the laymen, the struggle would not have taken place, as already demonstrated, without the effort toward either way. And the funeral conflict is likewise about the relationship between space and time, by relocating labor, the time slots during which the two funerals happen now overlap, the spatial is also temporal.

Conclusion:

I do not believe that my collaborators’ practices and talks about death “center around a spiritual rather than a practical necessity” (Malinowski 1938, 242-3), nor can

95 I agree with Mathieu Deflem (1993, 12) that religions/beliefs “have a ‘surplus value’ over and above other, secular forms of thought.”23 Rather, in my opinion, although we cannot arbitrarily rule out the spiritual aspects of the rituals that I analyzed in this chapter, practical and mundane concerns prevail.

Funeral arrangement surely does not influence the deceased at all, it however brings a pressure urging living participants of this death related event to adapt the sudden happening into their daily life and also helps to forecast a future, when a reunion with the body they are now send-off is expected: all the current happenings establish models for later events to follow.

That is how and why, when Space of Death dominates, a different “spatial consensus” (Levebvre 1991, 56) takes over. The mundane learns to bend over the religious, the living over the dead.

However, social divisions never vanish even in a Space of Death. Very specific division of labor between akhonds, village functionaries, laymen … and so forth, makes time-flows that normally diverge in their life (or lives) intertwine here. They nonetheless cannot afford sharing the same feeling toward time in the process of funeral. So they have to establish networks of exchange in order to balance. Religious service, cash gift, words, ideas, even redemption, all these and even more circulate and ex-change in the Space of Death, which changes itself accordingly as well. As

Lefebvre reminds us,

23 Here Deflem also argues, “whenever ritual is inspired by a religious belief… its status is different from … inner-worldly forms of knowledge.” But at least in my cases of study, whether or not the rituals are inspired by a religious belief is never clear. Rather, we could even say that this uncertainty nurtures laymen’s mistrust of akhonds, as stated in Chapter 3.

96 “Though a product to be used, to be consumed, it is also a means of production; networks of exchange and flows of raw materials and energy fashion space and are determined by it. Thus this means of production, produced as such, cannot be separated either from the productive forces, including technology and knowledge, or from the social division of labour which shapes it, or from the state and the superstructures of society” (Lefebvre 1991, 85, italics original).

To become densely involved in a Space of Death however does not merely mean to share and exchange but also weigh on the living participants of funerals a burden and impulsion of re-evaluating the survivors’ lives and reshuffling the living’s social ecology, to challenge the spatial consensus that may not live up to their expectations.

The task of reevaluation and reshuffle, as demonstrated in this chapter, seldom falls onto those who assume a seemingly core role in the events, such as the akhonds undertaking religious preparations for the person’s final stage, compassionate survivors acting out their emotions toward their lost, and local authorities or village functionaries in charge of the whole funeral’s arrangement and also cash gift collection. Because the main purpose of funerals is to complete a transitional rite, and engaged participants are sometimes either too immersed in deep sorrow to care about anything other than lamentation, like Mr. Geh’s mother and son; or too used to the scene of death, like the akhonds; so they become chastisers of “The” way and Know- how, and stand in the opposite of any possible violation of the accepted social norms and hierarchies demonstrating themselves in the funeral.

On the contrary, those who re-evaluate or even challenge the existing hierarchies and social norms are some other participants, such as friends of the deceased, distant kinsmen, “mother’s family,” and sometimes mosque members and akhonds who are not in charge… in short: people who are in the margins, or lower in the religious and

97 emotional hierarchy are not bonded to any rules. They tend to have more leeway in coping with the current situation, in order to make it better accommodating his/her own desire.

Worth noticing is, however, these manipulations of re-evaluation are tactical rather than strategic, they only “serve as an intermediate zone where [people] can adjust and adapt to the space of the other rather than subvert and customize it to

[their] own ends” (Mayol in Sheringham 2006, 240-241). For instance, for San the mosque hierarchy still exists after the funeral arrangement changes, for Mr. Geh’s friends and family members, next time when they need religious services, they probably have to argue or negotiate with akhonds again. But that negotiation, just like the unpredictable members of mother’s family, could also be seen as forming an everyday “rhythm” (Barthes in Sheringham 2006, 202-205) to which the community is tuned. Without it, a funeral arrangement will be lack of any creativity, but become a mere reproduction of previous cases.

It is also interesting to notice that many non-participants, at least the ones not taking part in the funerals per se, could also be actively engaged in many a different ways. With their endeavor, the Space of Death leaks out of the mosque and the mourning households to flood the streets and is appropriated there for different purposes, as we will see in the next chapter.

98 Chapter Three: Past Funerals and Current Relations

In this chapter I discuss how people use their talks about past funerals to evaluate religious norms and authorities in the village. My argument stays coherent: by projecting themselves to current social activities, past funerals help my collaborators, lay or religious, criticize or confirm their experienced religious norms in the village.

I start with two observations that are crucial in perceiving my argument:

Firstly, funerals offer an indispensible religious experience, or even the sole religious experience for most of my collaborators in the village, so they also offer the most prominent contact zone for laymen and religion, and laymen and akhonds/mosque members.

Secondly, talking about past funerals and sharing knowledge about funerals in general form an important social experience in the village, therefore it expands the

Space of Death to out of funerals, and make it possible for people to generate talks about and comments on past funerals as well as akhonds’ service almost any time.

I shall elaborate these two observations below.

Religious Space as the Space of Death

Understandably, the tension between laymen and mosque could be easily observed in funerals, where exchange between money and service forms the key relationship being experienced in this specific Space of Death, as analyzed in previous chapters.

However, I would like to push this observation one step further to venture to say that, death related practices offer the only occasions where many villagers’ everyday life overlaps with the religious space. In this chapter, these practices are mostly

99 akhonds’ religious services in death rituals, not only funerals but other smaller rituals

(will be detailed later) too. These rituals provide the opportunities for laymen– especially those who do not “enter the mosque”–to evaluate, question, or even criticize and challenge the mosque system and its service artfully in their practices and talks. And death related religious services are likewise among the most possible situations when mosque and akhonds are condemned due to the high frequency of this sort of practices and the obligatory money gifting in them. Briefly, for many villagers,

Religious Space equals a Space of Death.

Insightful readers may have already been wondering, that how can I legitimize this seemingly arbitrary assertion, as religious services are needed not only in death rituals, but as well in other occasions such as festivals, weddings, births, baby naming, and moving, all of which could provide a contact zone mediating the relationship between religious men–most importantly akhonds, and laymen? I will explain.

Firstly, when people do not “enter the mosque” or “practice Islam,” their religious experience is limited to their contact with akhonds when religious services are needed from the former. Secondly, although there are other situations when religious services are needed, funeral and other death related rituals are major religious events for most of the lay Hui in the village.

Two prominent differences should be noted between funerals/death rituals and other situations when religious services are required: firstly, inviting akhonds (and mosque members) for religious services is not necessary except in funerals/death

100 rituals; and secondly, other than funerals, other events or rites of passage seldom generate repeating obligations dictating to people for further religious services.

For instance, although there are many new couples come to the mosque asking akhonds to “write nikaah” 24 for them, and when a baby is born, its parents or grandparents may come to the mosque and gift the akhonds cash (and sometimes a beautiful rooster if the newborn is a boy) asking for a “religious name”25 for the newborn … these are only one-off events: for most people, they do not go to mosque at their wedding anniversaries, or every birthday of their children.26

When it comes to funerals and the deceased, however, frequent visits are required to be paid to the mosque, thus more cash gifted to the akhonds. The funeral itself is already a burden for some, but after that, there are still The Seventh Day, The Fortieth

Day, The One Hundredth Day, One Year and the Birthday of the Deceased, at least five post-funeral ceremonies waiting to be observed within the first year after a person passes away. From the second year on, there are at least two days annually–

Anniversary and the Birthday of the Deceased, when relatives should gift akhonds for

Quran recitation or sometimes even invite them for a feast. These two dates, namely

Anniversaries and Birthdays, are normally to be observed up to five or even ten years.

Of course situation varies from one family to another: some families cease the observation of these rituals earlier, some take them as obligatory annual rituals, and others only invite akhonds every five years after the first post-funeral year.

24 Meaning, to write a religious certification for their “nikaah,” a loan word from Arabic for marriage. 25 Normally every Hui child should have a “religious name (jing ming)” which actually means an Arabic name, normally chosen from the prophets’ names, used as a proof of the new baby’s being born as a Muslim. But nowadays many Hui children do not have this name. Either because their parents are not familiar with this tradition, or they no longer identify themselves as “Muslims.” 26 For “Big Birthdays,” such as a hundred days’ birthday, the first birthday, the fifth birthday, the tenth birthday … some grandparents still go to the mosque, but it is not obligatory.

101 Nevertheless, even if a family only observes post-funeral ceremonies for five years, there are thirteen such events (five in the first year, two in each year after)–after the funeral per se, in which a family requires religious services by either directly gifting the akhonds in the mosque or inviting them home for a feast and then, again, cash- gifting them. The longest observation of funeral anniversaries and Birthdays of the deceased in the village is sixty years per my observation.

And there are other trivial occasions when akhonds are gifted and death rituals are improvised: on a May day of 2015, I was surprised and impressed to hear an old woman in her sixties asking Imam Shir to recite Quran for her long passed away mother, because the coming Sunday “is Mother’s Day.” We should keep in mind that

Mother’s Day is a “Western” festival that is totally foreign to many Chinese elderlies in rural areas. Sometimes, family members or friends happen to think of or have a dream of a deceased relative or friend, this situation is considered as a sign sent by the unrested soul from underground–though not an Islamic way of reading it– thus requires an appeasing rite: inviting the akhonds to recite Quran in the mosque, or a visit to the graveyard.

It will be arbitrary to sweepingly generalize my observation even in my village of fieldwork, because when it comes to specific occupations, such as butchers, the everyday religious occasion for them becomes asking the akhonds to recite

“tasmiyah,” i.e. “in the Name of Allah” when slaughtering animals. This is of course another Space of Death, of the death ritual for animals.

Festivals are another space of religion for more people to experience Islam in some capacity. However, only on the two major festivals, Fast Breaking and Sacrifice

102 Festivals (Eid-l-Fitr and Qurban), do people come to the mosque, and according to my observation, only about 150 adult men and children would actually enter the hall and pray with the Imam, more are only there or arrive later for the feast afterwards.

Also, in terms of frequency, festivals fall behind death rituals.

It is therefore probably safe to conclude that in my village of fieldwork, religious space relapses into Space of Death for most laymen, and death rituals performed for laymen assume the major share in akhonds’ daily religious service, bring them the most income, and as will be demonstrated below, also draw them the most reproaches.

Living people’s rites are ephemeral, as once it is done, people proceed to their next stop, but “being dead” is the most prolonged natural and social status a person could achieve, death related rituals and formalities are thus endless, till the ones who memorize and observe are also taken away by Death–whence comes the real death of the being memorized. However, it is due to this fact that village people display a special attachment to funeral experiences during social time, and living people’s tension with the tenders of death rituals–akhonds, is stressed.

Religious space stays “abstract” for many lay people in the village until it is realized or rendered “concrete” by funerals and other death rituals as well.27 Only then can laymen realize that the Space of Death (rituals) is dictated by religious authorities and flooded by their ideas, therefore they would like to create their own

27 Religious space is a “concrete abstraction,” a “‘social abstraction,’ which ‘has a real existence, that is to say practical and not conventional, in the social relationships linked to practices.’” This definition is given by Henri Lefebvre, cited from Stanek 2008, 68, italics original. Here Lefebvre emphasizes on the real, social relationships between people.

103 spaces of death by producing narratives and talks, to question the “official” Space of

Death. Which, leads to my second observation, that talking about past funerals and sharing knowledge about funerals form important social events where laymen’s comments and critiques on religious authorities are enabled.

Space of Death Expanded: Memories of Funerals

Below I share a conversation between some of my lay collaborators after they learned about Mr. Geh and Ms. Ha’s conflicting funerals introduced in the previous chapter.

These conversations contain rich information and knowledge about funerals, and also project themselves on my collaborators’ spatial activities: such as with whom they gather, do they practice Islam in the mosque or not…. Space of Death thus emerges as a “representational space” that lived by my collaborators through ideas, narratives, imaginations and memories incorporated into their social relations (Lefebvre 1991,

38-39 and Harvey 2006, 279). Representational space “immediately implies time”

(Lefebvre 1991, 42) too: not only experiences of past funerals are used to comment on current activities, also, Space of Death is no longer restricted to the time when death really happens, but could be realized at any time.

After the fierce discussion about Mr. Geh and Ms. Ha’s conflicting funerals,

Fourth Master San went back to his room in the outer yard, former akhond Yu and

Old Man Tal returned home, and akhonds Su and Na withdrew to the resting room for a nap. Everything seemed settled, and the afternoon appeared lovely and tranquil again. Imam Shir grabbed the Arabic textbook on his desk and sat down with me to

104 do some readings: a routine if he had some time after prayers. I also took it as an opportunity to strengthen the good relationship between us and do something in return for his help in my fieldwork.

Although the weather started to warm up, it was still chilly in the akhonds’ room, we went through some paragraphs and Shir decided that we could resume next time.

After confirming with him the time of Ms. Ha’s funeral, I left and walked out of the mosque.

Walking out of the mosque always means running into gatherings, especially of male villagers. As mentioned in previous chapters, they could linger at a street corner, chatting, sometimes all day long except during lunch and dinner time, or running small errands such as picking up their children/grandchildren at kindergarten/school or purchasing household necessities from nearby stores and markets.

That day was no difference. I walked out of the back door of the mosque to the corner at the village administration building, one of the normal gathering places for men and women, expecting some familiar faces.

My old friends did not turn me down. I noticed that Mr. Tri, a retired worker who smokes like a chimney, was sitting there, and yards away on the creek bank, sitting three other people. As Mr. Tri cannot talk too much after recovered from his last stroke, I only briefly greeted him and talked about weather, then excused myself and wandered toward the creek bank, where Mr. La, Mr. Huq and Mr. Hes were sitting in a row and waving to me. Receiving wastewater and trash from factories and households, the creek is clogged and almost dry, with thin, colorful fluids sobbing their way down the riverbed.

105 “How comes you are from this direction?” Huq asked me.

“Oh, I came from the other way.” I said, “and, why you all moved here? I thought you were there around that corner.”

“This place is cooler. That place has a wall and blocks the wind, it’s stuffy.” Mr.

Hes addressed my question.

“I thought you were at the factory.” Huq laughed. By factory he meant Mr. Geh, because the latter’s apartment is near that locally famous factory. As “[s]patially indexed tactical knowledge about the social world is essential to collective human life anywhere (Liu 2012, 129),” I was not surprised that Huq mentioned about the factory and I suddenly realized that he meant the funeral.

“He has no idea of it (the funeral).” Mr. Hes asserted, “If he had heard of it, he would definitely go there for some ‘interview.’” Although I was no longer addressed as “Comrade Journalist,” interview was still the local term for my fieldwork.

“You mean that funeral? I surely know about it.” I felt so proud.

“So you went there? How comes you know it?!” Mr. Huq was surprised.

“Is there anything that I don’t know?” I laughed.

“How comes that you are not a local villager but you know this?!” Huq teased me.

“Right?! See that?” Hes was also interested.

“I heard people talking about this in the mosque.” I confessed, “There are two funerals tomorrow, for the factory one, I followed [the akhonds] to tear the kefan.

This one in the village I cannot go there, it is a woman’s funeral so they don’t need us

[to tear the kefan].”

106 “Wow, you went there for tearing the kefan? You should learn to tear it too!” Huq suggested.

“What for?!” Hes sniffed at the idea of learning to tear kefan.

“No, I better learn it!” I said wholeheartedly.

“Man has three garments, woman five.” Hes said. It is easy for him because he was a khalifa in a mosque.

“Man three, woman five, how do you tear them? What is the width and length?

Saying is easy.” Although Huq didn’t seem interested, the topic still started to revolve around kefan.

“Right right, [that’s why I] should learn how to tear it.” I supported Huq.

“[I’m] surely familiar with the rules.” Hes sounds a little bit offended.

“Right?!” Huq nodded. He knows that Hes learned the knowledge before.

At this point, the other man, Mr. La, who had been sitting there quietly so far, uttered his first sentence: “This saying (story)? Is [about something happened] fifteen years ago.” La’s voice is low, but attracted everyone’s attention.

“What’s that?” Huq wondered.

“We were tearing the shroud cloth.” La said.

“Right, you were in charge of that [when you were young].” Huq recalled the old days when La was a village functionary.

“Something happened [during the time of tearing kefan] and they asked me to deal with it.” La continued, “When we got back? [the shroud cloth was not there.]

‘Where is the cloth?’ I asked. They told me, ‘Little Kid (a nickname) was tearing it somehow.’”

107 “Uh?!” Hes responded the person in the story, playing La’s role, “was tearing somehow? That means he didn’t finish the job, right?!”

All laughed.

“So how was Little Kid tearing it?” Mr. La’s story went on,

“He tore the cloth, to make mourning waistbands. He made every strip of cloth this wide [and this long].” La used his two forefingers to measure the width and length of the cloth-strip in air while narrating, “I asked, ‘who tore this!?’ Little Kid confessed bravely. I then asked, ‘what for?’ He said, ‘for waistbands isn’t it?’ I told him, ‘you should measure your own waist first, is it long enough to get around your waist?!’”

“He made it short?” Huq wondered, “and I know that the width is different in winter from it is in summer.”

“Now that kid’s [Little Kid] dead.” La concluded his story with an abrupt and sad fact.

“Well, Little Kid didn’t know anything about it [tearing kafan].” Huq said. “For this kind of tasks, if you don’t know how, do not meddle in.”

“Didn’t you bother to pay some attention when we did it before?!” La criticized

Little Kid, though the latter is forever absent now.

“But no matter in summer or winter, the waistbands should be wide.” Hes said.

He was trying to answer Huq’s concern of the width of band.

“Some tear very thin waistbands, some have them wide.” Huq argued.

“Outer shroud should be one and a half fu wide (approx. 114 cm), inner shroud should be one fu wide (approx. 76 cm).” Hes’s voice suddenly became excited. He

108 stood up from the creek bank and started to measure an invisible shroud using his hands, and tear it, to show me the procedure, while my conversation with the other two was still going on.

“So you went to the factory [apartment]? Third floor right?” La asked me.

“Yes.” I said, “… He [Mr. Geh] goes first.”

“Sure, he died earlier.” Huq said.

“Actually originally Ha was to go first, but the two families decided to let Geh go first.” I told them.

“Yes, [because] it is easier to bury a man.” Huq and Hes said together.

“Because there is no ‘mother’s family’ [for a man]!” Hes added.

Hes went on explaining to us how the Arabic scripts should be written on a separate piece of cloth and wore by the deceased in his/her grave, and how long should the pieces of shroud be.

But suddenly La stood up, “Don’t say this to me, I’m old and cannot remember these things.”

“Haha!” Huq laughed, “right! We don’t want to get involved. Go back and check your long beans [which is more important]!”

“Ah… I am going, but for a haircut.” La moved slowly with his everyday bottle of milk in his small shopping bag dangling in his right hand. He is in his seventies.

“Right, you’re going to send him [Mr. Geh] off tomorrow [so you’d better be neat].” Huq caught the point of Mr. La’s haircut.

“Yeah… When his son was drowned, I worked that funeral.” La recalled his long lasting relationship with Geh, by referring to another funeral.

109 “Where did he drown?” Huq was interested, “It has been, about 20 years?”

“In the rivulet near the Woods. It’s more than 20 years.” La said and left.

In this conversation, one of the fascinating facts that attracts my attention is the expansion of Space of Death. The Space of Death that leaked from the mosque and the dead man and woman’s households continued its leakage and radiation in a representational space, in other words, in people’s mind and mouths. Moreover, it did not only horizontally spread, but vertically included the past, it is fragmented, but also continuous, it is an abstraction that could be realized any time and anywhere, and includes any time and anywhere. It is not static but a fluid power, a power of becoming.

In the conversation between Huq, Hes and La, by virtue of their breakthrough into performance, three funerals (Mr. Geh’s, Ms. Ha’s and the one in La’s story) and four deaths (Geh, Ha, Little Kid and Geh’s son) converged and interacted to comment on and offer more information about the current topic: funeral. The Space of Death, or

Spider of Death expands its web almost indefinitely with relationships as warps and time as wefts (which fits in the “relational” conception of space, see Harvey 2006), catching every little beetle of reminiscence humming from a distant or recent past, and every prey of this web presents a death related event, a memory of a forever absent man/woman, or knowledge of death rituals. And once digested by the Spider, it produces a piece, or pieces of comments on the current social relationships. To revert to my main argument of this dissertation, this web offers rich contexts and situations for people to contemplate previously experienced events and comment on currently

110 experienced relationships, and if in the previous chapter we encountered a spontaneous questioning and challenging of the religious hierarchy, in this chapter the narratives, memories, or generally, knowledge of past funerals, deceased men/women and death rituals could be reckoned as an ever lasting reflection on not only the mosque-laymen relationship, but more generally on people’s relationship with one another, and with death and religion, which are all mediated in Spaces of Death, and sans doubt, these relationships in turn contribute to the production of such spaces.

We can claim that the three men, Huq, Hes and La are all quite interested in funerals (this conversation was triggered by their interest in Geh’s funeral). This is not a rare phenomenon. As mentioned in the Introduction, many people who would join this kind of gatherings, especially aged men, have an interest in talking about funerals. A recently occurred or forthcoming funeral is among the most common occasions where past funerals and dead men are mentioned and discussed, and information about funerals is brought up, exchanged, and even showed off. Other occasions may include television news about old people died in solitude or talking about aging and diseases in general.

In any case, funeral-talks offer a topic that many of my collaborators enjoy, they are thus not only “religious” talks but as well serves the purpose of being “social.” In these talks, such as the conversation presented above, we find that many social issues, especially relationship between laity and religious authorities are addressed, shared, and talked through.

For instance, despite the fact that they are all interested in funeral talks, La said:

“Don’t say this to me, I’m old and cannot remember these things;” Hes belittled the

111 idea of learning to tear kefan; and Huq said long beans are more important than funerals and he did not want to get involved. The reason for them to express a negative feeling is, I argue, to suggest a positioning, to choose a side, and to draw a line between them and the akhonds and mosque members. Here in the spatiotemporal specificities, funeral talks ironically become the “affective kernel” (Lefebvre 1991,

42)28 of a representational space in which my lay collaborators detach themselves from funerals and speak to the religious authorities: that we don’t want to know these things, we care more about long beans, and we are not part of this.

I have alluded that funerals are occasions where akhonds are reprimanded the most, and I argue that the most determinative, if not the only reason for this critique is related to money, or the cash gifting custom in funerals. I believe that this exchange between money and religious service created a tense relationship between lay Hui people and their religious authorities. Many of my collaborators share this opinion. In the next section, I will support this argument with some ethnographic notes followed by analysis.

We have to firstly understand why akhonds require money from laymen: a phenomenon decided by the special way in which Chinese mosques are run. I have mentioned previously that akhonds or Imams (prayer leaders) in China are not volunteers and do not have their own “secular” jobs. Rather, they take their religious positions as an occupation to support themselves and their families. In city mosques such as the Great South Mosque of Jinan, the capital city of Shandong Province and

28 Lefebvre stated that “Representational space is alive: it speaks. It has an affective kernel or centre: Ego, bed, bedroom, dwelling, house; or: square, church, graveyard. It embraces the loci of passion, of action and of lived situations, and thus immediately implies time” (1991, 42).

112 also my hometown, akhonds do not have salaries, but the government funds their monthly deposits into social security accounts. Situations however vary for akhonds in village mosques in Shandong Province. For akhonds in my village of fieldwork, they do not have social security accounts as they are farmers, but they receive a salary of 300 hundred RMB (approximately 44 USD) from the mosque. What does this amount of money mean? Some numbers can explain.

1) According to Shandong Statistical Bureau, the 2014 annual per capita disposable income for rural residents mounts up to 11882 RMB, which equals 1753

USD. The 2014 per capita consumption expenditure is 7962 RMB, which equals

1174.7 USD. 29

2) In the village of my fieldwork, in 2014 beef was sold at 28 RMB per half- kilogram, which is 8.2 USD per kilogram. One steam-bread costs 0.5 RMB, and a family of three people may need at least 10 daily, so the price could add up to 5 RMB, which is a little less than 1 USD.

No matter being compared to the grand level of disposable income, or put into a more everyday and local produce market, village akhonds’ monthly income obtained from mosque is low. Therefore, they rely largely on lay Hui people’s cash-gifts when offering religious services. This leads to a demeaning comment made by laymen on them: that they run the “dead men’s business.”

Dead Men’s Business, Laymen’s Critique

29 I conducted my fieldwork from 2013 to 2014, so I believe the 2014 data are relevant. The data are obtained from Shandong Statistical Information Net: http://www.stats-sd.gov.cn/art/2015/2/27/art_3902_158678.html [November 6, 2016].

113 The scenes will be shared below are randomly chosen, representing only a small portion of the events of similar theme documented during my fieldwork. They all indicatively or overtly address akhonds’ religious service in funerals as if it is a business, in both method and end.

It is helpful to see akhonds’ service as a Space of Death where “authoritative” religious ideas dominate and the laymen’s comments as another space of death where vernacular thoughts emerge. To relate this critique to my main argument, the laymen’s perception of a space of death questions and challenges the akhonds’ understanding of the Space of Death.

1) July 8th, 2015 was still in Ramadan. In the afternoon before Shaam (Sunset)

Prayer I was sitting with Huq, Ouh, Wan, Tri, Tsa and some other male villagers, none of them was fasting, on the huge pile of rocks and construction debris looking over the mosque. Huq started to talk about the 40th day ceremony of a female relative of his.

“Yesterday they invited the female akhond and mosque members.” Huq said.

“Invited the female akhond? Which one? This one or The Old Woman Akhond?”

Ouh asked, pointing at the direction of the mosque by a lift of his jaw. By “this one”

Ouh meant the female akhond recently invited into the women’s mosque. The new akhond is only in her late 20th, now moved in the village with her husband and daughter.

“The Old Woman Akhond!” Huq said, “She was the one who washed the corpse.”

“But we have invited a new one here.” Ouh said.

114 “[The situation is] not easy to deal with.” Huq sighed.

“The Old Woman Akhond, can she even move at her age?” Ouh wondered, “She just cannot have enough money.”

“No, she only dictated the orders and Big Girl washed the corpse under her guide.

Aye, cannot have enough money!” Huq agreed.

… “It’s high time for her to resign! But she clings on her position.” Huq added.

2) Feb. 2nd, 2015. I was chatting with some old friends including Huq, Hes, Tri and Baggy Pants, a nice old man nicknamed as “baggy pants” because its Chinese pronunciation sounds like his real name.30 Hes amazed us by narrating his experience of recognizing cheaters’ tricks and avoiding being gouged in markets. While ironically Tri told me that many people followed Mr. Sa the veteran (the one who told me about “send-off,” see Chapter 1) to “get free staff,” a trick played by many “cheat and run” humbugs in China’s rural areas.31 What a world of tricks and cheaters! And it is not irrelevant to my topic, as I will demonstrate below.

After a while, Mr. Sa came back, with his trophy: two or three eggs in a plastic bag. This time what being sold was heat keeper underwear, perfect product for cold weather. I warned him about the tricks but he just shrugged the alert off: “I’ll be cold

30 The nickname is not a translation of his real Chinese nickname, but a similar image. I choose to use his nickname to address him because I want to give my readers a feeling of the way people joke about one another’s names in the field. Actually Baggy Pants’ friends only address him using the nickname when he is absent, because it is related to pants thus not decent. 31 Normally, these humbugs never stay in a village for longer than three days. In the first one or two days they would deliver cheap staff, such as a couple of eggs or towels to villagers, especially old people, for free, to earn their trust, while at the same time propagate certain product’s untested benefits, such as “good for health.” These products are normally cheap goods of poor quality, and sometimes counterfeits. Then on the last day of their stay, they sell the products at an exorbitant price (sometimes they even force the old men to purchase) and run away on the very same day. However, due to lack of awareness or care from the family, many village old men and women would attend this kind of activities as an entertainment, and many of them eventually make purchases. Some of them, to my surprise, would still do so even being aware of the risk. This phenomenon itself could make a good article, but is not the focus of this dissertation.

115 if I don’t buy it.” Then he changed the topic: “Man, you are here! Are there many people in the mosque?”

“No, it was quite empty.” I said, and seized the chance to ask, “why you guys do not go there to warm it up?”

“You go there once, you have to pay the akhonds once.” Sa’s answer was not beyond my expectation.

… Mr. Hes added: “Last time I went there to give the cash gift for a death anniversary, old San (the Fourth Master) was there and he said, ‘I will make it worth.’32 I thought, ‘what?! You make it worth?! What is your right to make it worth

[as a mere Fourth Master]?!’” (Huq has similar stories about San.)

3) Jae was a high school teacher and now runs a small business. At the very first time we met he started to blame the mosque and akhonds for ruining the “true Islam.”

He is a cynic and a harsh critic and leads many online discussion groups about Islam.

He composes sarcastic doggerels satirizing akhonds as greedy and uneducated people who do not know what they are talking about. His perspective on the relation between akhonds and funeral services is: as long as akhonds still murmur “Arabic syllables”

(not Quran, as Jae does not believe they really understand Quran) and “run the dead men’s business (si ren sheng yi),” they can never earn living people’s respect, because they cannot survive without other people’s charity.

32 In Chinese “jiao dai,” an expression could be literarily translated as “to end it.” In this context it means “to recite Quran for whatever reason you ask me to.” Normally people go to the mosque to cash gift the akhonds asking Quran recitation for a deceased person, as I stated at the beginning of this chapter. I translated it as “make it worth” because what being “ended” here is the prepaid deal, and it only becomes worth the money after the akhonds recite Quran.

116 4) Although I do not intend to over-generalize my observation, I noticed that the accusation of akhonds’ being greedy and running dead men’s business is a common phenomenon in other Hui communities in China too.

To share some instances from other Hui areas in support of my observation: a recent on-line thread shared by many of my Hui friends via China’s predominant mobile messaging application “WeChat” sharply criticized akhonds in an area of

North-West China for their greediness for money and good food. At the end of the article, the anonymous author highlighted some akhonds’ indecent behavior of nabbing the seats on vehicles in order to rush to the graveyard to collect cash gift. An

Imam is even recorded as asking the lay Muslims in his wacaẓ (preaching) before

Friday prayer: “My old men, what is the meaning for you [laymen] to go to the graveyard? The ṣadaqa (cash gifts) are for us, akhonds and manlas (religious students)!” 33

The second example: recently (2016 Mar. 1st) a member in Mr. Jae’s online discussion group who is also from West China complained about the ridiculous amount of cash gift her aunt’s family made to the mosque and akhonds during a funeral only after the Seventh Day34 ritual: 70000 RMB, which is more than 10000

U.S. dollars. Although not every ritual costs the same amount of money, a fact is, as aforementioned, they tend to be accumulative and generate more occasions when

33 “Mosque Fails in Canteen (Jingtang hui yu shitang, meaning, religious services are spoiled by asking money)” at “http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzAxMjU1ODkxMw==&mid=404629821&idx=1&sn=88dc14987473c1ab96 afed692413c6fe&scene=2&srcid=0214ccifoALEneOfs1RvM7yS&from=timeline&isappinstalled=0#wechat_redir ect” [2016/2/14 12:57 AM] 34 The Seventh Day ritual is probably related to an old belief inherited from pre-Islamic traditions stating that the spirits of the deceased are in the vicinity of their graves for seven days (Smith and Haddad 2002, 57), but actually non-Muslim Chinese also perform such ritual.

117 akhonds need to be gifted, and let us keep in mind that for every family there are more than one forever absent member, meaning doubled, tripled… cost.

All the critiques from people mentioned above unexceptionally singled out the akhond’s greed for cash gift in performing death rituals. Veteran Mr. Sa made an interesting statement. For him, the only purpose of going to the mosque is to give cash gifts to akhonds: “you go there once, you pay them once.” But the fact is, payment is not necessary every time one enters the mosque. For instance I go to the village mosque quite often but do not pay for a ticket. This has been said, however, one should notice that an unbreakable link was established in Sa’s mind between

“entering the mosque” and “cash gifting akhonds.” Unlike Matthew Erie (2016, 315-

316) has observed among the Hui in Linxia, China, gifting akhonds for many of my collaborators is not a way of demonstrating their piety, or absolving sins, but some extra costs that should be avoided if possible.

Mosque is thus perceived by some villagers as a workplace where akhonds work and earn a living by selling their religious knowledge and expertise just as anyone else in the village of any other occupation: farmer, worker, or goatherd… who practices his or her specialty and activates his or her knowledge in a specific space of work and time of work, but become a different person in his or her private space and time. Akhonds are thus not seen as whole or coherent as a servant of Allah is supposed to be: at work or at home, he/she should be an incarnation of Islamic way of behavior. Rather, akhonds experience similar Lefebvrian “alienation” (Lefebvre 2014,

500) as any other modern persons, who are deprived of the connection between work

118 and life, social and individual, nature and human labor… but one can read more layers of their (akhonds’) alienation from their co-villagers’ description of them:

Firstly, akhonds are alienated by their very assertion of serving the Divine. For many villagers, akhonds do not serve the community or Allah, but money and themselves. Religious service is traded for cash.

Secondly, ironically, although akhonds are condemned as secular and greedy, they are also condemned for being alienated from quotidian reality, as: “the only community they know is fictitious and abstract” (Lefebvre 2014, 242). This is not to say that akhonds are perceived as innocent and naïve, but they are criticized as not adjusting to changes in the world, but clinging on their “dead men’s business.” Not only Jae has this concern, other people share similar feeling too.

To give another instance here. The former akhond Yu’s (a member of the male shroud team) father is a religious man, but not a mosque member. He is a merchant.

He does not like the way akhonds behave and earn their living, blaming them as narrow-minded, not adjusting to the society or improving their living condition. “If you are so poor, who would follow you? For what? Being poor together? … That is why I asked Yu to quit [the mosque], you should be able to survive in the society.”

He told me.

We should note here that Yu’s father and Yu own two shops selling tealeaves and cooked beef and chicken on the nearby market affiliated to the village, and they earned some money by selling land when the eminent domain happened, so they are relatively well off. Old Yu’s idea of akhonds’ and mosque members’ being “poor” does not negate other people’s observation that akhonds and mosque members can

119 extract money from the mosque and laymen. Rather, akhonds’ unsatisfactory economic condition could be a contributing element to their “greediness.”

Worse still, even as “businessmen” (running dead men’s business) the akhonds are not recognized as worthy service providers, but cheaters who cheat the living by murmuring “Arabic syllables” and bully the dead by gouging their survivors for more money. For many villagers, their service is but a worthless knockoff of Islam:

For instance Hes questioned San’s qualification of performing religious tasks,

Huq and Ouh criticized The Old Woman Akhond for only dictating orders while asking an unqualified person (Big Girl) to perform the actual task, Jae blatantly argues that akhonds do not understand what they are reciting.

The most interesting instance for me however is the conversation between me and

Mr. Sa. If we recall, the veteran Mr. Sa was just back from a cheat and run marketing organization’s meeting and intended to purchase a suspicious, probably fraud heat keeper, but when being asked about “going to the mosque,” he expressed the hesitation of donating to the akhonds. As mentioned in Chapter One, the normal amount of cash gift or “hadiyah” in the village is just 1 or 2 RMB. According to Huq who made a purchase recently, a heat keeper was sold at hundreds of RMB. I am not here to judge where the old men’s money should be spent–actually in my opinion to buy heat keepers (if they are of good quality) is a better investment because it could keep the old men warm. I only want to point out that the old men rather deal with cheaters than akhonds: a choice worth chewing over. Probably for them either side they are dealing with is tricking? I cannot help but recall another conversation in

August 29th of 2014, when the same Mr. Sa and a couple of other villagers bought

120 water filters from the humbugs. I asked Sa, why he would buy such a thing that may be of little use or value, one of the several reasons he gave was: “At least I have something left.”

By juxtaposing Mr. Sa’s attitudes toward religious service and counterfeit or low quality products advertised to the old men in the village, one could make a conjecture that his hesitation of donating comes from a feeling of loss, that he does not “have anything left” in his hands after a supposed transaction or exchange: religious service is too surreal, the akhonds may be able to appease a dead soul in the Hereafter by reciting Quran for him/her, but they fail in the real world to demonstrate to the living people the value of their service.

As Arjun Appadurai puts it, my collaborators are treating “gift exchange as a particular form of the circulation of commodities” (1986, 12). Even worse: as when gifting/paying the akhonds, there is something exchanged but there is at the same time nothing exchanged, the value of the commodity (recitation of Quran) and the usefulness of the commodity are both in the hands/mouth of the akhonds. Every RMB gifted to akhonds is in no way a “free gift” but expecting for “reciprocation” (Mauss

1967), something real left in hand.

Besides, as aforementioned, similar to the Space of Death generated by human death rituals, there is another Space of Death generated by slaughtering animals. This

Space of Death is also believed as quite promising in terms of monetary benefit.

Actually villagers say that it is so profitable that some akhonds even fight for it. I have heard many accounts about how mosques of east and west villages divide their territories so that one cannot recite tasmiyah for butchers in the other’s “akhond-

121 dom.” The “business” is not only of dead men, but of dead animals too. It is a

Business of Death in general.

By now we should have already gained a picture of how akhonds’ religious service is perceived as running a “dead men’s business” (or dead animals’ business) by some villagers. This is, to reiterate, the most prominent reason for village laymen’s critique on akhonds. As mentioned several times in this dissertation, mending social relationships is considered as an important thing that people do in funerals, but the akhonds’ service ironically separates the village people. The division is not only sporadically observed in funerals and death rituals, but is continuous in everyday life.

It destroys the general rapport between akhonds and laymen and erodes lay Hui people’s interest in religion and their mosque, which is considered as playing “a central role in daily activities” (Gillette 2000, 82). When many lay villagers’ religious space could only be realized in Space of Death (funerals, death rituals, funeral-talks), it started its decline and foreshadowed its own “death.”

In the section that follows, I plan to look at the aftermath of the expansion of

Space of Death to take over Space of Religion in the village. My focus will be on many laymen’s narratives about the supposed center of their social life –the mosque, in order to see how past funerals project themselves on more general religious activities, such as daily and congregational Jumca prayers, to cast laymen–religious authorities relationship.

I don’t Enter the Mosque

122 I asked many people why they do not “enter the mosque” when this happened to be the topic of our conversation, and the reasons they gave vary. But a shared feeling toward the mosque is that it no longer stands for Hui’s moral principles and the people working for it (akhonds and mosque members) are not decent. More precisely, as we have already known from previous sections of this chapter, the akhonds and mosque members are accused of corruption, greediness and trickery.

Dec. 11, 2014, a not so freezing winter day. In this kind of days, sitting in the afternoon sunshine was quite enjoyable and it is a beloved entertainment for many male villagers when idling. On that day, I saw Mr. Huq the cow farmer, Mr. Sa the veteran (farmer too), Mr. Fah, another veteran and former village accountant, and Mr.

Wan, the goatherd with his two goats. Later Mr. Tri, the retired worker and heavy smoker we introduced earlier, joined us too.

In this group of people we see co-villagers of various occupations, but Mr. Wan among them is the sole mosque member, though he only attends Jumca prayers but not the daily prayers (reason he gave is that it is hard for him to hold urine thus the status of ablution because of his prostatic hyperplasia). While the rest do not “enter the mosque” at all. Atmosphere that day thus was interesting and subtle, as chances are rare that mosque members and people who do not practice Islam could sit together and chat.

Topic started as who “enter the mosque” now. Huq and Sa listed the mosque members and the number made up to 8 or 9, and they mentioned a mosque member

Yeh who is quite poor and has an infamous reputation of misappropriating mosque funds. Huq suspected that Yeh still obtains money from the mosque, so the laymen’s

123 donation disappears in a mysterious vacuum. Wan is a mosque member, so he spoke for the mosque and the mosque members and denied Huq’s suspicion.

“Brother, you and I, you don’t die, I don’t die, we live and see what happens [so that you know the people in the mosque are good].” Wan said.

“I don’t enter the mosque, I don’t enter the mosque and I don’t want to know anything about them.” Huq responded, “they’ll be rich and I don’t want to kiss their ass.”

“If there were no benefit, no one would pray, why we do not pray? [Because] we have work to do, they pray because they can get money there [from the mosque]. …

People only care about money nowadays, look at The Old Woman Akhond, she’d never resign!” Huq went on. Sa and Fah agreed.

…

“To be frank, after that [misappropriation] Yeh shouldn’t have stayed! But all the akhonds, mosque members, no one ever speaks for righteousness!” Huq was quite disturbed. “… How could you all still pray toward West [Qibla, without feeling ashamed]? Quran teaches you to do good things, but what are some good things you

[who enter the mosque] did?!” Huq asked.

“One bad person makes us all bad!?” Wan contested.

“You have governmental financial allocation (zheng fu bo kuan), in every festival you collect a lot of money [donated by lay villagers], why are you still asking for our money? Where did the money go?” Huq’s questions were sharp.

“We, the five of us (referring to those who were present), we live, live long and see where we end up [so that you know we are good or bad].” Wan stood up irritated.

124 He dragged the rope tied on his goats’ necks, the goats shook their heads, still chewing the dry grass on the ground, and the goat bells started to ring delightfully.

His words did not answer Huq’s questions.

“Where you end up? You end up in Communist Society!” Huq suddenly became sarcastic, “you get gentrification [of village] and end up in apartments on high buildings!”

“Oh it’s getting cold here.” Fah said this to cover his chuckles. Other men all nodded and murmured, “yes, it is getting cold” while chuckling, trying to appease the quarrel.

From the conversation presented above, we can sense Mr. Huq’s strong repellence against practicing Islam, or rather, against the people who “enter the mosque” in the village. This feeling though seems to be generated from the suspicion about one mosque member (Yeh) or one event (misappropriation of mosque funds), it could also represent a general bad feeling toward akhonds, mosque members and the ways they behave, which are wide spread among villagers.

Some people used to visit the mosque in the past, but ceased doing so after something–expectably, normally related to money–happened. Kungfu master Mr. Rud gives us an instance. Rud is a talkative man, we used to chat at the construction site where he worked as a gatekeeper. At first he said he is too “sinful” to enter the mosque. And this is a confusing excuse. Is he drinking alcohol? Smoking? I can only guess the “sin” that he committed. But finally, with our growing intimacy, he disclosed his real concern about the mosque and akhonds:

125 “That was 2009, I went to the mosque on the Fast Breaking Festival, but when I was to make my donation, I found out that it was not akhonds, but the village functionaries who were collecting the money. What is their relationship?! Where will the money go?!”

Rud has a reason to worry. I personally donated money to the mosque for three years, and it was indeed the village functionaries collecting donations. Likewise, although normally a list of names with amount of donations is posted publicly after each festival, the mosque does not have its accounting records open to the public for inspection, nor does it offer receipts to individual donators. Receipts are only for institution donators. I had the luck of looking at (not reading) the records once, but they only served briefly as a proof of Old Man Tal’s righteous deeds and pride of being a capable bookkeeper of the mosque when he was relating his past days to me.

Admittedly though, I do not have a legitimate stand to inspect the mosque’s records book anyway, but even villagers do not have any access to the records. This results to a lack of trust.

As noted in Chapters One and Two, among the village’s more than three thousand population, only around 15 men–with three akhonds, Old Man Tal and Fourth Master

San included, would attend the daily prayers, in workdays or vacations; the women’s mosque has even fewer attendees, about 7 or 8. Without doubt, reasons for thousands of people’s not entering the mosque vary, and I have no intention to generalize my finding or to impose any reason on their seemingly shared activity (or lack of activity), but this discourse of blaming akhonds for possible abuse of lay Hui people’s donation is shared by many people whom I talked to.

126 In a “Hui” Muslim village, not entering mosque could be recognized as a denial of the Muslim way of life, thus lacking religious morality. However, in certain spatiotemporal specificities such as the scenes introduced above, not practicing Islam ironically altered the codes of being moral. The discourse about akhonds’ greediness is appropriated by many people who do not enter the mosque, in order to exempt them from religious obligations and explain them away from any possible feeling of guilt brought by not participating in religious life. This discourse becomes moral and a claim of not being companions of indecent people or tolerating unrighteous deeds.

Therefore, practically and on a quotidian level, not entering the mosque releases some people from the burden of making frequent donations to the mosque and its members, under an acceptable, even moral excuse.35 “Moral discourse,” as Deborah Kapchan may agree, does not change the fact that some people choose to or not to enter the mosque, “[i]t does, however, establish a different value relation between choices”

(Kapchan 1996, 65, emphasis original).

Huq’s response to Wan’s question “where we end up?” eloquently suggested division. His change of the pronoun from “we” to “you” actually managed to tear the interlocutors present at the construction debris, and even the Hui people in the village to two parts: the ones who enter the mosque and the ones who do not. Huq was self- othered. Pronouns are not always “porous,” (see Kapchan 1996, 84) they could become impermeable too. Huq imagined a high, far but unreachable status for Wan and probably also for other mosque members, the imagination is thus consonant with

35 I do not intend to judge the villagers’ behavior as right or wrong. But to blame the mosque members seems to be a shared strategy among my collaborators who do not practice Islam.

127 his earlier words that “they’ll be rich and I don’t want to kiss their ass.” By positioning himself (also the ones present who agreed with him) in lower status while pushing the opposite side (Mr. Wan) unrealistically high to the “apartment” and

“communist society.” Huq placed them in a to be realized (but not yet) social space where who enter the mosque seemingly possess a scale higher than Huq, but we should keep in mind that actually neither of “apartment” and “communist society” is necessarily desirable, as many villagers I know, including Mr. Wan, do not want to move into apartments but prefer flat houses in rural area;36 and “ communist society” has become a synonym for unrealistic dream in many socialist societies. Huq’s words seem to have lowered himself (possibly also other people who do not practice Islam) in an imagined social space, but it simultaneously positioned Huq higher in a “quality space” (term appropriated from Fernandez 1972) of morality in the real social space, where although he does not enter the mosque, he maintains a moral discourse for his choice. The akhonds/mosque members and lay Hui people who do not enter the mosque are thus differentiated in their social positions, not only in terms of occupation, but also in terms of morality.

This moral discourse however, further squeezes lay villagers’ space of religion, and minimizes their contact with akhonds only to funerals and death rituals when visits to the mosque are inevitable. The shrinking space of religion ironically helps to

36 Wan told me that his daughter lives in “a third floor apartment” but he does not like it as it is hard for him to climb up and down the stairs. Many other villagers, old and young, also demonstrated their preference of flat houses over apartments. Of course, moving to apartments is popular among some people as it signifies a change of social status from farmers to city dwellers. That is why I said apartment is not necessarily desirable: it could be, but not for everyone.

128 generalize concerns in funeral talks and to include bigger issues, such as entering mosque or not, into the whole picture of laymen-religious men relationship.

We have to ask, nonetheless, as akhond’s way of life-earning is the same now as it was in the past generations, why their living on other people’s donation appears upsetting to many villagers now? Although the “reason” given by many laymen (i.e. akhonds living on other people’s charity) legitimizes and offers sources for their critique on the religious authorities, I suggest we look behind the scenes and address the village’s spatiotemporal and also historical specificities in order to better perceive the tension between laymen and religious authorities.

Behind the Critiques

Some of my collaborators who are to some extent affiliated to the mosque, such as

Old Man Mal, Akhond Su, former Imam Tal… all recalled a past tinged with a nostalgic rosy tint: that, in the past, people used to respect akhonds more and they used to compete to give akhonds more gifts. Before the current tension between akhonds and laymen, there was a harmony.

We may ask a question, then, what is the reason behind the tension? In previous sections of this chapter we have already demonstrated that the expression of this tension is mostly realized by a feeling of doing business with akhonds in a Space of

Death, and the accusation of akhonds’ yearning for money.

The relationships going around money suggests a familiar formula to explain social problems in any commercial society. In our contemporary society–I am not defining “contemporary” here but rather using this term to refer to the current social

129 realities that my collaborators all experience–no one has absolute power over their everyday life, but all suffer from a process of an alienation, or being “colonized” by commercialization and capitalism. As Lefebvre reminds us,

“[E]veryday life was being colonized. Colonized by what, exactly? Colonized by the commodity, by a ‘modern’ postwar capitalism that had continued to exploit and alienate at the workplace but had now begun to seize the opportunity of entering life in general, into nonworking life, into reproduction and leisure, free time and vacation time” (Lefebvre in Merrifield 2006, 8; the idea of “colonized everyday life” is inaugurated by Guy Debord, see Lefebvre 2014, 305).

Commercialization and Modernity have alienated the akhonds’ religious authority from their service, labor from everyday, and “resolved all natural relationships into money relationships” (Marx in Merrifield 2006, 66); they also replaced the traditional perception of cash gifting as a ṣadaqah (meaning charity) with an idea of exchange between money and service. Anthropologists doing research in different cultural contexts have also observed that in modern days death rituals have gradually lost their spiritual meanings and only the forms are retained (for instance see Suzuki 2004).

However, this theory is not perfect. It could address some of our concerns, but has its deficiencies:

Firstly, it only makes sense against the assumption of a previous status of

“natural” relationship between akhonds and laymen was not commercialized, or everyone back in the past understood cash gifts as morally beneficial charity, or an inseparable part of their everyday life of being a Hui. But this assumption cannot be verified and is mostly impossible, as every village at any time has its cynics and people’s minds are never unified, rather, facts almost always demonstrate otherwise.

130 Secondly, we do acknowledge the influence of commercialization, we should however be aware that it does not necessarily lead to a tension indiscriminately. I hear stories about some well-off families spending even more money on akhonds nowadays than the bygone days when market economy and commodity were not dominant in the village. They invite akhonds for luxurious feasts and generously gift them in order to spread words about their new houses, new business and demonstrate their power and generosity, a phenomenon long observed by Mauss and his colleagues (Mauss 1967).

So how to compensate for deficiencies in the over generalized theory in explaining laymen’s critique on akhonds for greediness? In other words, how can I dialogue with the grand theory using my “humble theory” (Noyes 2008)? I suggest, as already noted in Chapter One, that tension between akhonds and laymen should be understood basing on more concrete, personal reasons which do not have to be newly emerged ones in a commercial society, thus they cannot be reduced to an over- simplified contemporary social change toward the edge of commercialization.

Therefore, more everydayness should be introduced into the generalization in the name of the Lefebvrian critique of everyday, in order to avoid imposing “a logical order on … the immense disorder of facts” (which is criticized in Lefebvre 2014, 296-

7). I will offer some possible rationalities for the tension and the production of tension between akhonds and laymen, to offer some food for thoughts but not other sweeping assumptions. I refer to Imam Shir frequently as he is the most important figure in the mosque and could be seen as a representative or even personification of the mosque system and morals, at least in some villagers’ eyes.

131 Firstly, in my case, one reason for the tension resides in the akhonds’ themselves, more precisely, their localness. According to the “traditional” way of running a mosque, the Imam should be invited from other places on a contract, so that he was more distanced from local affairs and could be more daring in pointing out local people’s mistakes in behaviors and guide them “righteously,” meaning, according to

Islamic religion. Because anyway he would have to leave after the contract ended so he did not care displeasing anyone.

This way is still observed in some areas in China but not in my village of fieldwork. Imam Shir and Akhond Su are both born in the village, and Akhond Na is from a nearby village but settled down with his family here. Being “local kids” in many of the akhonds’ aged co-villagers’ eyes is not an advantage. Imagine that you saw this little boy swimming naked in the river yesterday (which Imam Shir really did), and today he stands in a dastar headgear preaching at you. Many old villagers still address akhonds by their nicknames. On the akhonds’ part, they also have many concerns when criticizing people, especially those of age or reputation.

Besides, akhonds’ families offer another source of critique. Because the families live right in the village, their behaviors are under constant gaze of the villagers and are to fulfill the latter’s expectations. But once failed in doing so, the akhonds’ reputation drops and the damage is hard to repair. For instance, Shir’s wife does not wear a hijab, making her a target of rebuke and bringing to Shir some doubts about his ability of persuading even his own family members to adopt more “Islamic” way of life.

132 As well, I noticed that when Shir constructed a new house, when he owned a new electric scooter, bought a new car … all these very private consumption activities had become at least temporarily a topic in the village. This actually applies on any villager, but for a religious figure who lives on others’ donations, i.e. an akhond, these could undoubtedly fan the fire of laymen’s, even colleagues’ petite talks picking on his/her consumption and funding source.

Secondly, the mosque is under supervision (and surveillance) of local police station, government administration and religious and ethnic bureaucracies such as

Ethnic Affair Commissions (min zong ju) of provincial and municipal levels. Besides, these governmental units, plus other semi-governmental entities such as the local

High-Speed Rail administration all donate to the mosque at least annually.

As a result, these entities expect the mosque to be obliged to them. Therefore, one of akhonds’, especially Imam Shir’s daily routines is to maintain contact with, and sometimes even plead these authorities, particularly during Islamic and Chinese festivals, so that they can continuously donate. This interweaving between religious space and governmental-dom inevitably leads to villagers’ confusion and even dissatisfaction.

For instance, on July 18th 2015, Eid l-Fitr or Breaking Fast Festival. Although daily prayers have few attendees, many villagers still gather in the mosque during

Islamic festivals to celebrate and enjoy the feast afterwards and watch the performances. Today some well off villagers, on behalf of the mosque, invited a “stilt team” that consists mainly Hui performers, and Imam Shir made an announcement

133 days earlier that the prayers would start at around 9:10, so people could watch the performance, pray and then enjoy the feast.

At around 9:00, however, some governmental functionaries and police officers rushed into the mosque to “celebrate the festival with the Hui ethnic brothers and sisters.” They made the donation and entered the mosque’s northern hall serving as a dinning room accommodating villagers after the festival prayers. Dishes were ready, and mosque members and even akhonds served at the table, so the functionaries and officers could sit down and enjoy the “ethnic food” with Imam Shir and former Imam

Tal accompanying them. The time for prayer was postponed. About 15 minutes passed since the announced time of congregational prayers, as some officers were still devouring freshly baked sesame-butter breads, chicken porridge and lamb stew (some, however, just took a bite or two and looked at the alien food with apparent repulsion–

I could not help but to realize that the food touched by them would be dumped, although it was difficult to prepare and many villagers think they have magic power of healing and bringing good luck), villagers grew more and more unsettled. We should keep in mind that in summer days when people drink a lot of water, to hold the status of Abudaisi (from Persian ā bdast, meaning partial ablution) is difficult, especially for aged men.37

Finally a young man in his early thirties, Mr. Hei, burst out shouting in the yard,

“We are waiting here! You said the prayers start at 9:00, at 9:00! We are fine but what about the aged men?!” Some people started to sooth him: “Calm down calm down!

37 Because urination is among the activities invalidating partial ablution. As many of the old men suffer from benign enlargement of the prostate, they need to release themselves frequently. Even for a healthy young person, to hold urine is not a pleasant experience. Besides, as there are so many people in the mosque in festivals and the capacity of the washroom is limited, to re-do partial ablution after urination could be difficult.

134 The officers, government, they all make donations, what could we do?!” However, his complaint was so loud that it reached the dinning table, the functionaries and officers were confused and subtly upset, and Imam Shir had to leave them to lead the prayer in order to put down the vigorous atmosphere.

This accident bears negative influence on both sides on the governmental authorities and villagers, and it drove Imam Shir into a limbo, where he did not only lose the trust of his co-villagers and confirmed that akhonds were fawning on secular powers, but also risked his good relationship with the local authorities on whose donation he and the mosque rely very much.

A third reason could be that, as akhonds have been religious elites ever since, the tension between them and the laymen is a heritage passed down from older generations. Folktales reproaching akhonds’ greediness are not invisible.

In a collection of China’s “traditional ethnic folktales” published in 1992 edited by Ding Shiqing–a professor of linguistics in the Minzu University of China–and his wife Guo Weishi, I found tales collected from Ningxia (now is the Hui Autonomous

Region). In these stories the local akhonds are depicted as possessors of social and natural resources and hypocritical custodians of filial social hierarchy. 38 Margret

Mills also mentioned about a similar image of akhonds in Central Asia in our personal communication. The negative portrait of akhonds and their greediness is thus not

38 In one story “Mi la ga hei,” the akhond desiring monetary reward helped the local leader force a Hui young man Mi la ga hei’s fiancée to marry him when Mi la ga hei was away fighting for the Emperor (Ding and Guo 1992, 103-7). In another story an old akhond is depicted as not only greedy for food and money, but for young girls, he actually died because of eating too much from the lamb and fried flat breads offered by lay villagers (ibid, 201-5).

135 necessarily newly emerged with commercialization of the society, but could be reinforced and doubled by it.

Fourthly, bad feelings inherited from old Imams. This reason could be seen as an extension of the last one. When the current Imam/akhonds’ predecessors did not have a good reputation, or were not loved by the whole community, their successors may inherit the reputation or bad feelings that still resides in some people’s mind. For instance, although the former Imam, Tal is a pleasant man and quite righteous, he still receive sporadic negative comments from some people especially on issues related to abusing power to benefit his family and make arrangements for people close to him.

Therefore, Imam Shir’s being Tal’s “favorite boy” only makes the situation for Shir tougher.

All these reasons, while not necessarily represent the “truth,” offer some mental paths for us to at least meandrously walk through the tension between akhonds and laymen in the Space of Death, and also better appreciate the laymen’s critiques on the akhonds in death rituals in particular and the mosque system in general.

Nevertheless, to focus on the laymen’s critique should not blind us from seeing the main practitioners of customs in any death rituals–namely the akhonds, who also make a point in their counter narratives.

Akhonds’ voice should be introduced and juxtaposed to the reasons presented above with a purpose of learning how akhonds themselves evaluate their religious service and respond to some of the critiques, especially the ones about doing dead men’s business and being greedy, thus we can have a whole picture of the relationship between laymen and religious men.

136 Frankly speaking though, these counter narratives are rare and not easy to collect, partly because I never mentioned laymen’s comments to akhonds, feeling that it will be an indecent instigation, thus a violation of not only my own ethics as a scholar and a person, but also morals of my fieldsite. Another reason is, akhonds themselves seldom voluntarily mentioned their negative images among people. But I did manage to document some.

Counter Narratives: What We Actually Did in the Space of Death

October 14, 2014, after the afternoon prayer, Old Man Tal announced a piece of news at the main hall of the mosque that the mosque’s neighboring villager wants to expand the wall of his house toward the mosque. Imam Shir lamented on the fact that nowadays religious space is more and more disrespected and even eroded by mundane interest, I then asked about another case of such erosion, the viaduct.

Ever since my preliminary sporadic field visits in 2013 to the village, the viaduct has attracted my eyesight, as it is so flamboyantly protruding from the humble earth and incompatible with other grimy constructions in the village. Later on I learned that it is a governmental project facilitating inter provincial transportation that occupied local land, including Hui’s (and also Han’s) graveyards in the neighboring 14 villages by eminent domain.39

39 I have the local newspaper urging the removal of tombs in lands claimed by the eminent domain in 2008, but it will be too easy to extract information about my village of fieldwork from the newspaper, so I am not citing it here.

137 Veins of the state sanctioned space pierced the local Space of Death and injected the blood of urbanism into the latter’s body, also brought new opportunities for the cliché of akhond-laymen tension to express itself.

A rumor spread among villagers, including the ones with whom we have become familiar, such as Sa, Huq, Ouh… and even some mosque members, such as Wan. The rumor says, that for each tomb the government removed, it paid a price at around

10000 RMB (equals approximately 1500 USD) but the actual amount of money each individual received was much less: from 2000 to 2500 RMB (about 300 to 380 USD), and the rest goes to the pockets of village functionaries and akhonds. But I never had an opportunity to confirm this rumor.

Today I did not ask directly about the issue either, we just talked about compensation for the eminent domain in general but Imam Shir might have been suffering from the rumor (and probably other critiques) so much that he needed to channel his pressure, or he knew I was expecting his “fight back” against the critiques on akhonds, so he brought up the issue himself:

“It was hard, wow, we had to worry about how to move the tombs, to persuade the villagers. … To move a tomb is so tough!”

“Yes, I am aware of that.” I said, as I happen to have heard several cases from other akhonds in my hometown.

“You know? Among those tombs are new ones. It was in summer. … If you do not make it quickly enough, epidemic diseases may happen. The mini excavators dug it up, and it should not take longer than 2 or 3 minutes for us [akhonds] to jump in.

Even the dead men’s family members did not want to get close [because of the smell

138 and look]. You know how tired we were? It is so hard but we managed to do it. …

Don’t want to do it again. We could not drink or eat on time nor abandon the five daily prayers. We used to get up at around 4:00 in the morning, go directly to the graveyard after sunrise prayer. How much were we paid? 100 RMB (approx. 15 USD) for each tomb we moved. … Even the operators of mini excavators earn 500 RMB for each tomb. New tombs are hard, old tombs are hard to move too. As excavators cannot dig too deep for fear of destroying the bones, so we have to remove the soil by bare hands. …”40

Imam Shir went on explaining why the compensation from the government was not satisfactory to some villagers.

“They [villagers] had no solidarity. … Akhonds wanted to help mediate. Some families moved to the city so it was hard for them to come back to negotiate the price.

They wanted it to be done as soon as possible. … So they compromised. …”

In a macro level, out of urban planning, a Space of Death was produced in living people’s everyday life. Moreover, this Space of Death did not disappear with the removed corpses. Rather, it lingers in This World and generates more Spaces of

Death by narratives referring to the original event. These narratives cannot affect the state sanctioned spatial practices: in the earth that was previously embracing sprouting seeds and resting villagers, now rooted the viaduct, a shred of cold and

40 To understand the difficulty in Shir and other akhonds’ work, we should be aware that a dead body decays quickly in summer, so it was new tombs that gave the akhonds the hardest time. But for the corpses that have already decomposed into skeletons, there are even more workload for the akhonds as they cannot let the excavator dig into the tomb, lest it would destroy the fragile bones. So they have to dig the tombs and pick pieces of bones by hand.

139 imposing “urban fabric” (Lefebvre, in Merrifield 2006, 82); however, they

(narratives) do help different social actants express their concern and process their relations with other agents in the community.

In a micro level, this piece of narrative represents Imam Shir’s, or all the akhonds’ response to some villager’s accusation. Of course, no one is to rule out a possibility that Imam Shir’s story fits into the category of “euphemism” that tries to explain the mosque away from being a profit making institution, and to combine the contraries of sacred and mundane ends (on Bourdieu, in Certeau 1988, 54). But I would rather not to prioritize this possibility, as to do so is only to repeat my collaborators’ suspicion and thus fails to appreciate the meaning of a “counter” narrative. Rather, I will look at this narrative from the akhonds’ perspective.

For the akhonds, this must have been a memorable piece of tough job. On the one hand, it was because of the deceased. For corpses buried for a long time, hundreds of bone pieces need to be sorted out from soil; and for many newly buried corpses, according to Shir, they already started to decay. Only imagining the scene makes me chill, but the akhonds had to really performed the task. On the other hand, the difficulty comes from living people. Those who did not desire to spend more time in the graveyard or wanted their demised relatives to rest in a new place as soon as possible, urged akhonds to rebury, but those who were expecting larger compensation preferred to be patient. The akhonds were placed in the cleavage between villagers holding different opinions, not to mention that the government and railway bureau also relied on them to persuade villagers.

140 Besides, the payment for such demanding service to both the deceased and living is low: even judging from rural consumption level (see previous sections for a reference), 100 RMB for each reburial is underestimating the akhonds’ labor. They earned less than excavator drivers who made 500 RMB for opening one tomb.

Although there is no fixed price for reburial service, I know in my hometown Jinan

City, payment to akhonds varies from around 2000 to more than 10,000 RMB for moving one tomb. It is positively correlated to the degree of corpse decomposition, economic condition of the person who requires the service, and the social status and rank of the akhonds being invited.

Again, Space of Death became a source in mediating between social groups. For akhonds such as Imam Shir, this mediation is their caring for the local villagers–dead or alive, and contribution to the community without asking for corresponding reward.

However, the mediation cannot always be recognized equally by all social groups, its reception is even biased and partial for many times. On some laymen’s part, rumors about how akhonds made money out of the reburial and helped the government to lower compensation conveniently avoided mentioning the dispute between villagers, nor the akhond’s hard work. Imam Shir probably can never make a counter narrative to address the villagers’ suspicion and accusation as he did in front of me. Even if he did, would it cause any change? I am quite pessimistic:

The reburial of so many dead bodies was a public event, and many villagers were able to witness the whole procedure. The akhonds’ labor seems like a shared awareness, which does not require to be redundantly uttered. Nevertheless, the shared awareness did not speak for the akhonds: I cannot recall hearing any word from any

141 villager praising the akhonds during my fieldwork. The reason, I argue, is that a discourse about monetary benefits and/or negativity has predominated villagers’ perception of akhonds.

Enlightened by Lefebvre’s description of Renaissance townsmen’s perception of institutionalized representation of state space, that people started to “go from code to messages, so as to produce a discourse and a reality adequate to the code” (1991, 47),

I venture that as the idea of “akhonds’ behaviors as profit-oriented” has already been established and accepted by many villagers as a code, a new message “laboring at the graveyard to help people rebury their relatives” could automatically be processed according with the previously existing code, rather than perceived as a chance to reevaluate the akhonds. Therefore, for instance, for many villagers, if the akhonds are working so hard, there must be profit behind. Such as the Chinese idiom says:

“Without profit, [one] does not wake up early (wu li bu qi zao).”

Space of Death is a power of division, it separates akhonds and laymen and facilitates their respective comprehensions of death rituals, religious services and even Islam and mosque. So far I have analyzed how different social groups in a Space of Death–be it a funeral or funeral-talks–are granted chances to express their concerns, come to terms with their religious experiences, evaluate other social groups, choose sides and social positions and even shift moral codes.

Death Rituals, a Uniting Power

However, if one steps back from the division, one notices that actually Space of

Death is firstly a uniting power. This “union” however does not mean solidarity or

142 even total reconciliation between lay and religious men. Rather, by “union” I refer to two facts hidden in death rituals or talks about them, that actually tie people of different opinions together. These two facts, if we emphasize on critique and division, may easily be overlooked.

The first fact is that funerals and other death rituals are almost always participated by both akhonds and laymen together, despite the latter’s negative comments on the former. The second one is that many laymen and akhonds actually share a curiosity about and knowledge of death and death rituals.

Before concluding this chapter, I would like to introduce these two facts in order to add another layer into the laymen-religious men relationship, reflect on the limits of laymen’s critique on religious norms and authorities, as well as point out that

Space of Death, given its power of creating social division, only manages to do so when it is firstly resided by different social groups at the same time. My purpose is to avoid a flat and cartoonized depiction of relations between social groups.

I. Laymen’s Critiques: Between the Real and the Ideal

Let’s return to the conversation presented at the beginning of this chapter. As we could see from Mr. Huq’s and Mr. Hes’s memory of past funerals that they knew about, attended or served, every time these funerals are referred to, they bear a realistic meaning commenting on the present religious service as a whole in the village or even in a wider scope Hui communities.

143 It is true that laymen’s everyday narratives may serve as a critique of religious elites and their thoughts, yet they cannot really overthrow the system, which bonds different social groups together, especially in funerals.

For instance Mr. Huq, Sa and Hes all criticized the akhonds for being greedy, Jae even accused some akhonds of ruining Islam, but when their families experience situations requiring religious service, say funerals, they still have to refer to the mosque, reluctantly possible, but they have no alternative options as long as they still desire their family members to be buried in a “Hui” way. Even for Jae who does not enter the mosque but practices Islam at home, he visits the mosque and donates at least twice every year, on Eid al-Fitr (Fast Breaking Festival) and Qurban (Sacrifice

Festival), to maintain a relationship with the community and akhonds (“I am doing this because my mother wants it!” I hear his contest in 2016’s al-Fitr.), and he never claimed a separation with the local mosque system or reprimanded the akhonds to their face. James Watson noticed similar phenomenon in his village of fieldwork, he talked about the people who suspect the local funeral experts, but still follow their instructions:

“Suffice it to note here that even our village cynic, who suspects the local priest of being a fraud, did not hesitate to perform under the direction of that same priest w hen the occasion called for it” (Watson 1988, 122).

To understand this seemingly self-contradictory behavior, one has to be aware that no one can complete a funeral by him/herself, a funeral is not a person’s private issue, but that of the whole community. This is not only true per Philippe Arie`s’s (2004,

41) perception of death rituals in the mental field as “always more or less solemn and whose purpose is to express the individual’s solidarity with his family and

144 community,” but also true in a practical sense. Although some laymen possess the knowledge of processing a funeral, they cannot go through all the required procedures such as purchasing a piece of grave land, carving tombstone without the help of the

“institution,” i.e. the mosque, nor do they have the same power as the mosque to summon enough helpers. When death happens, it is the institution, the mosque that has the right to register the deceased as a Hui and process his/her funeral in a Hui way. The Space of Death is firstly a public space, even if for a Hui “death” is always preferred to happen in a very private setting: one’s household. Or rather, the Space of

Death translates private space into public sphere. Moreover, in the modern society where funeral serves as a way for the government to discipline human bodies after their death, it becomes even more impossible for an individual to process a funeral without being placed under the censoring gaze of the government, the neighborhood, and for the Hui, the religious authorities. The Space of Death is also a space of authorized practices and representations of official ideas and ideologies. These ideologies may be hygienic, religious/ethic, or of urban planning, “noso-politics” or

“bio-power,” (Foucault and Rabinow 1984, 274, 262) and even of ethnic politics in the cases of Hui funerals, because the Hui, unlike most of the majority Han Chinese who are forced by the government to choose cremation, require land to bury their deceased, and this “privilege” is granted by the state as a special politics favoring an ethnic minority.

Moreover, in funerals people can demonstrate their capability of being a functioning member of the society and tamed by state sanctioned “body politics.”

Similar argument apply on the deceased too: for them, funeral is to announce an end

145 of interaction with other people (also a start of a new way of participating in living people’s lives), and to acknowledge their roles of having been part of the community.

Therefore, once disregarded or even not performed correctly, a funeral could become a more profound, social funeral, a close up of not only the deceased’s, but also the survivors’ social life. Hence critique cannot afford the risk of being acted out in a real funeral, but could only exist in representational space.

Even in representational space, the critique is limited and inconsistent: it is still yoked by religion or religious thoughts if not the local mosque system. It is true that some people may not accept the mosque system, but their unconscious or intentional struggle still cannot escape the scope imposed by the religious hierarchy. Their struggle is itself a product of religion or even mosque system. For instance, although in most occasions akhonds as a whole are criticized, Mr. Hes (also Huq) singled out

Fourth Master San, reproaching him for accepting the cash gift and promising a recitation of Quran, which is not his specialty. The idea that San occupies the lowest level in the mosque so he has no right to recite Quran for a cash gift is itself part of the hierarchy imposed by the mosque system. Hes’s critique only confirms the hierarchy. Besides, to highlight San’s incompetence seems to suggest that the higher ranked akhonds do have the right of asking for money, which, as we have observed, was not what my collaborators meant to say.

To summarize, laymen’s critique of akhonds does not totally distinguish them from each other in practicing and even comprehending death rituals.

II. Shared Space of Death: Funeral Knowhow

146 Another uniting power is the knowledge or knowhow of death and funerals and curiosity about such topics.

It is extremely interesting to notice that although the three old men were devoted to funeral talks, they never “entered the mosque.” “Entering the mosque” or not, as I demonstrated, suggests many things such as choosing sides and shifting moral codes, but the choice does not invalidate a fact that people, be they religious or lay, possess some funeral knowledge, or at least a practical knowhow of how to process a funeral: mostly a knowhow accumulated in past funerals.

For instance La, Hes and Huq are all more or less familiar with relevant genres of practical skills as well as expressive culture, such as how the shroud and mourning garments should be made, and how behaviors of “mother’s family” could affect the speed of a funeral. La and Hes could even be said as funeral experts as one of them,

Mr. La, was a village functionary when he was young and has many experiences in

“working the funerals;” while Mr. Hes was a “khalifa,” a religious student in a mosque when he was young and learned all the required knowledge to be an akhond, though he finally ended up being a farmer. Huq’s knowledge is less than the other two, he however also has some basic ideas about a funeral such as the width of a mourning waistband and that a male corpse is easier to bury, because his age has given him much exposure to funerals of different men and women.

It is reasonable here to say that laymen and akhonds share at least some knowledge required in death rituals. This knowledge is itself a Space of Death in the realm of human mind. It thus ignores akonds’ and laymen’s different opinions, and unites them under the banner of “funeral knowhow.”

147 This observation forces me to reflect on the argument of my dissertation in general and that of this chapter in particular: as, what does it mean if the laymen are criticizing akhonds but they share the same curiosity and knowledge?

Above all, laymen’s critique does not mean that they think they could assume akhonds’ roles. As just mentioned, akhonds and their institution, the mosque, still possess an irreplaceable position in funerals and other death rituals.

Secondly, the “knowledge” in question, similarly to the religious knowledge per

Michael Lambek, is a “major currency of [Muslims’] social life” (1990, 24), although it has a more practical side to it and is not identical to the textual or scholarly knowledge analyzed by Lambek in his study of Muslim society in Mayotte. As a

“currency,” funeral knowhow thus could be used by anyone who possesses it in different settings for many purposes.

Therefore, instead of saying that laymen are criticizing akhonds, I believe it is more accurate to say that they are targeting akhonds’ way of activating knowledge. In other words, funeral knowhow is necessary, but its “commercialization” is reprehensive. Laymen have their own ways of activating the same knowhow.

I will conclude this chapter by discussing this knowledge activation to mount my argument onto a bigger picture, namely laymen’s dis-alienating process to bring self- awareness to funeral or religious experiences and restore knowledge into everyday life.

Conclusion:

148 Village laymen normally do not belong to the group that enjoys enough social capital legitimizing their professional service in funerals. It does not matter whether they are well informed of the way to prepare the deceased for his/her eventual rite of passage or not, the knowledge conveyed in their speech is only of secondary concern: in the first place, they are not among the professionals with whom villagers normally consult when a funeral is anticipated. This is an occasion where I believe Bourdieu’s argument, that the “competence adequate to produce sentences that are likely to be understood may be quite inadequate to produce sentences that are likely to be listened to” (1991, 55, emphasis original) could be appropriated. Although what is discussed here is not related to linguistics as in Bourdieu’s analysis, I find this statement useful in understanding my case: what is wanting in and around laymen’s words is not practical skills or persuasiveness, but the social competence legitimizing them to make utterance in a specific domain. Admittedly however, they can seize the chance to express themselves in their gathering spots, where and probably where alone their expertise is appreciated by an audience (such as me).41

So we can understand why La said: “Don’t say this to me, I’m old and cannot remember these things,” while being himself familiar with funerals and had just criticized Little Kid for not paying attention on how they used to tear the mourning garments. La did not really mean he cannot memorize the knowledge–which he probably already had plenty–or to say that he is not interested, in which case he would not have told us the story about Little Kid initially. His refusal of talking about this

41 I do not rule out the possibility that these old men could be consulted when a family member or friend passes away. What I want to argue here is that, for the vast majority of Hui people, the first reaction to funeral is to “find akhonds,” not to find “any person who can handle this.” Moreover, even if a layman is consulted, his or her opinions can never be evaluated as authoritarian as the akhonds’.

149 knowledge, which was brought up by himself just minutes ago is actually to choose his own way and time of activating his agency. Similarly, Hes contested the idea of learning how to tear shrouds, but what he was really against was not the knowledge per se–as he suddenly broke through into performing it to me later–but to make a negative and passive comment on the akhonds’ way of using it, or even abusing it.

People like the three old men temporarily relinquished the right of being with the institution (mosque) and found a way to live ethnically or even religiously without committing to any authorities. Their knowledge boosts up a confidence in criticizing akhonds’ religious service. As Kai Kresse argues in his study of Kenyan Muslims, that “[k]nowledge is involved in granting authority and leadership yet also in challenging or undermining it, by those who know the sources and how to present them” (2009, 79).

Different activations of funeral knowledge, namely the akhonds’ and the laymen’s activations are thus respectively an organizing power and a resisting power. While the former tries to impose a form and claim an authority in death rituals, the latter subsists and resists against the “outer forms” (Lefebvre in Sheringham 2006, 149-150).

In this case, I also find the difference between laymen and akhonds similar to that between a “philosopher” and an “expert” suggested by Michel De Certeau (1988).

According to Certeau, “[b]oth have the task of mediating between society and a body of knowledge” (ibid, 6).

For many laymen, the akhonds are just like the expert, who utters a discourse not of knowledge, but of “the socio-economical order” (ibid, 8) because they speak for

150 authority and money. But the laymen themselves, when activating their knowledge, take on different strata of the same knowledge, being critical and altruist.

For akhonds, purposes of activating their knowledge could be for bringing bread to table, propagating Islamic religion, and/or maintaining an institutional prowess.

However, despite these different purposes, whenever they activate their knowledge, they are offering “labor” and an exchange between money and service is anticipated.

The exchange value of knowledge is highlighted. But for laymen such as Mr. La, Hes, and Huq, old men in my village of fieldwork, they are activating their knowledge in a

“non-labour” social time (Lefebvre 2014, 688) that is not to be designated for

“production.” Therefore the knowledge ceases to be a merchandise, but becomes more “everyday.” They are bringing knowledge back into the daily experience, rather than reducing it to a special merchandise that is only exchanged in death rituals.

Knowledge activated by laymen is more for circulation and education, or a reflection on their situation. For instance when the three old men, Huq, Hes and La talked to me, they were activating funeral knowledge for purposes of education as well as understanding of our relationship.

Huq’s suggestions that I need to learn how to tear the kefan and one should not meddle in if s/he does not have the knowledge, Hes’ sudden break through into the performance of funeral lore… are all endeavors made to educate me: an outsider (a folklorist, not a villager) with a curious ethnographic gaze and simultaneously an insider (a somewhat local young Hui) without a sophisticated comprehension of local death rituals. And La’s comment on Little Kid’s not paying attention, though was a critique on one forever absent acquaintance, was also an alarm ringed for me, a young

151 Hui willing to document and write about the village’s funerals: pay attention to what we said!

I am, in this case, the village counter part of Najar in Sabra Webber’s Kelibia and

Patrick Mullen in Mullen’s Adam County (Webber and Mullen 2011), where the two young men were respectively educated by local elders, Bedoui and Glasgow, who appear to be less sophisticated than the young men but offer refined small narratives about localness, moral, and nostalgia, against grand narratives and the lure of the worldly. Like Bedoui and Glasgow, the old men in my village of fieldwork brought back a past that “functions as the source for bringing spiritual and moral values into the present and into a certain geographical space” (ibid, 231).

Knowledge is space, but is itself spatialized as well, such as to overlap with geographical space.42 In the mosque or in death rituals, outside of the mosque or on the construction debris, different spaces enable the same knowledge different realizations and perceptions. Different visible, tangible, or sensual settings suggest people code the same message differently in contexts, for instance the mentioning of funerals could be recognized as inviting help in a mosque, but it makes the audience expect a sarcastic comment on the akhonds’ greediness in a different setting, such as in laymen’s gathering places or Mr. Jae’s online discussion group. The concrete and abstract spaces are thus dialectically merged and intertwined to offer various contexts for knowledge activation.43

42 My use of this term “spatialization” is different from Foucault’s use of it as a way of a way of institutionalizing certain knowledge (Foucault and Rabinow 1984, 254). 43 Of course spatialization is not definite and different spaces allow multiple purposed knowledge activations to take part simultaneously, and people’s positions do not always predict how they perform their knowledge: practitioners could become critics, and vice versa. For instance, during Miss Fa’s funeral (for a description of the

152 Another result brought by the interaction and overlapping of abstract and concrete spaces is the imagined landscape, where spaces of death are projected onto real landmarks to help people cope with death, or any power beyond their control. This will be the topic of Chapter 4.

funeral, see Appendix), akhonds and mosque members complained that the Old Woman Akhond does not want to resign, and criticized her slow way of processing dead body.

153 Chapter Four: Space of Death and Imagined Landscapes

Funerals accommodate many expressive cultures related to death. In everyday life however, they do not happen frequently. In previous chapters I have demonstrated that even when death is not visiting, Space of Death still manages to haunt people in the village as a representational space in people’s memories and talks. In this chapter,

I will further suggest that this representational space also “overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects” (Lefebvre 1991, 39). In other words, I propose a

Space of Death as an imagined landscape mapped on the village sights to mirror people’s understandings of the world where they reside, and their relations with death and God.

I will introduce and analyze my collaborators’ talks about ghosts and supernatural powers during their gatherings in street corners. All the talks are also related to death and to certain landscapes. Many interesting talks are heard and documented in these street gatherings during my fieldwork, but only a few of them could be forcefully pressed into the institutionalized Islamic perspective on death and human-deity relationship. “The street,” as Merrifield said, “is an arena of society not completely occupied by institutions” (Merrifield 2006, 51). These talks are however not unfamiliar to anyone who knows about Chinese ghost culture, so this chapter is also a contextualization of Chinese perceptions about ghosts and supernatural powers in my village of fieldwork.

I argue that these talks create a Space of Death that overlaps with the villagers’ daily landscape to produce a mental map (or to conjure a “place-world” as Cashman termed it, see Cashman 2016, 150) of the village landscape or at least part of it, which

154 they could use to comment on their experienced social/religious norms, such as Packy

Jim did using his stories about ghosts and fairies (ibid, 18, 156). Or rather, the village sphere itself has two faces, one represents the quotidian, mundane life, while the other links the villagers to a mysterious, ghostly or even lethal World of Supernatural

Others. But unlike Packy Jim, my collaborators also use narratives related to both death and certain landmarks to overturn the taken for granted relationship between

God/gods and Human. However, in this space, like the previous two chapters, what being negotiated or challenged also includes the relationship between people and mundane hierarchies.

The Arch, the Toilet and the Spirit Screen: a Space of Death

Arch is a commonly used mark of landscape in China. Taking the bus from downtown SW city to my village of fieldwork, one, if pays enough attention, can see quite a few of arches. These arches bear the names of villages that have been gentrified along the bus route: a result of urbanization. “Absolute spaces” were divided and made abstract and fragmentary, village space becomes another piece of land that the state could appropriate for any purpose (Lefebvre 1991, 48).

Nonetheless, villages’ names stayed, like dead villages’ spirits haunting the state sanctioned spatial practices, and reminding passers-by of a not distant past (as L. P.

Hartley famously said, it is already “a foreign country”) that hosted a different space arrangement. These names are kept both in bus routes and more physically on the arches erected in locations originally occupied by villages–now most of them are clusters of apartment buildings. Of course, many still functioning villages also have

155 their arches, such as my village of fieldwork.

There are several arches in my village, all of different materials: one made of stone in front of the village marketplace, one of steel framework and covered by fabric at the mouth of the village, and the one I will talk about, which stands beside the mosque, at the end of the main street leading inside of the village.

This arch is constructed of cement, and covered by small blue-white porcelain mosaics. It has four cuboid pillars, which create three arches, a large main arch in the center and two smaller ones on either side of the main arch. On top of the pillars there is a roof of Chinese style, covered by dark red glazed roof tiles. Under the roof, there is a banner on which the village’s name is painted and then faded. Another smaller piece of tablet is hanged under the village name, on which an Arabic “ducaa’” i.e. prayer is written. The prayer reads, “Allah bring those who praise him success.”

What is the arch’s relation with death, thus with my argument?

The arch, as I learned from my collaborators, is closely related to a Space of

Death. Because certain spatial practices, namely constructions are believed by some villagers as death-inviting and thus threatening the village’s residents. Whereas, other buildings are believed to have a protective power that counteracts death.

The arch and other constructions in the field are thus not only landmarks in This

World, they are bestowed another function in the land of spirits, serving as places where ghosts or supernatural powers reside in or are chased out, and various religious/supernatural powers intertwine and wrestle. I therefore draw a map of another Spaces of Death in the village of my fieldwork. Of course, architectures and the discourses that come with them are all products of human agents or institutional

156 social actants such as the government. Therefore, seemingly otherworldly struggles also allude to a this-worldly power negotiation.

The Arch

Feb. 5th, 2015. The weather started to warm up. I bought some corn breads from a local bakery famous for its hand-made steam-baked wheat and corn breads. The bakery is located in the yard of a household, the wife and her father-in-law make breads at home, while the husband works part time here and there. The breads are much cheaper than the ones sold in SW city, but are more tasty and solid. After the purchase I then wandered to the street corner and found my old friends sitting and chatting there as always. I greeted them and joined them.

In the previous year SW city municipal government launched a political/hygienic movement endeavoring to join the list of state “hygienic cities,” in order to lift up the city’s soft power and gain some political capitals for the ones in charge. As part of the movement, the municipality started to construct public restrooms city-wide, especially in adjacent villages where hygienic conditions are always deemed as unsatisfactory. Interestingly, although the nearby market is the place most badly requires a public restroom, the municipality did not build a toilet there. Instead, a toilet was constructed right on the construction debris, looking over the village. And to make things more ridiculous, the toilet has never been opened since the very first day of its existence. Actually few, if no villager at all would ever think of using that toilet as in the village everyone has a bathroom/toilet in household.

But today it was opened for ten minutes for a reason no one knows, and this

157 predictably became a topic: any activity is under constant gaze in the village.

“That is why I say to have a toilet here is not good.” Huq shook his head with a mysterious smile, “but they (the government) built this fucking thing, it stands right on the center of the debris and looking right over the village.”

“Looking over the main street [of the village].” Ouh added.

…

“Its gate should open on the other side.” Ouh commented.

Now I sensed some hidden meanings in Huq’s and Ouh’s words: they did not only mean the toilet is useless, and “not good” cannot be interpreted superficially or literally. I grew more interested in this topic: what do they really mean? However I listened on without asking, fearing that a question may disturb the flow of their conversation.

“The shape of this thing (the toilet) is not good at the first place: it is like a fucking coffin that carries people away, it carries and carries.” Huq did not turn me down. His words sounded both attracting and astonishing.

“Oh… without this, people die too.” I intentionally disagreed to see how Huq would clarify his logic.

“Uh-uh.” Huq did not agree. “Hey, that year, why they built this arch? The arch helped.”

Mr. Ouh nodded his agreement.

“That year? Only young people died.” Huq recollected from his memory.

“Really?!” I wondered.

“See? I am not superstitious.” Huq said, “A lot of young people [died].”

158 “The Six-Fingered, the Winner (both nicknames), and so and so, right?” Huq turned to Ouh, enumerating the young souls that departed to the Hereafter in that very year. “It has been tens of years.”

“Tens of years.” Ouh confirmed.

“And they all died within a short time.” Huq added.

“Some died, some prisoned.” Ouh corrected.

“That year was terrible, only young people, eighteen, nineteen, or in their early twenties.” Huq said.

“What happened then?” I was curious.

“Then, they built this arch.” Huq pointed at the arch standing beside the mosque with a lift of his jaw, “yes, this arch, the arch beside the mosque, and it suppressed

[the wave of death] a little. Originally there is a creek right in front of the mosque

[and the creek brought bad luck].” (In fact the creek is still there.)

“Wow…” I expressed my shockedness, “but what does that mean?”

“That is an old folk idea.” Huq explained to me, “an idea passed from old ages.”

“That is the head of the dragon [of creek],” Ouh picked up the topic, pointing to the south where the rivulet runs from, “the East is the tail of the dragon, and [that year] the dragon’s tail was changed, so the village was influenced.”

“Oh… I see.” Although still confused about how it worked, I grasped the basic idea: an idea related to the Chinese “Feng shui,” or “Wind and Water” system used to help people perceive their physical environment, in which any change in the landscape can influence the fortune of the people living around for generations to come. In this system, if a change in landscape happens and affects the people

159 negatively, something else should be changed to counterbalance the negative influence, to build an arch is one choice.

I then asked, “So [they] built this arch?”

“Yes. Because, [you see] the dragon? It should come from there (south) and then enter the village and get out of it from the other side. [But now it is not.]” Ouh concluded his reasoning. Something left unsaid is, when the trip of the dragon cannot be done properly, problems happen.

“[If] dragon drinks water, it brings water to the village. But now [as the environment changed by the toilet,] what can it drink here [from the toilet]? Shit!?

[Then] it enters the village with shit!” Huq returned from the past to the present to comment on the toilet again.

The whole surrounding suddenly became unfamiliar to me: now the street, the arch, the toilet, the construction debris, the almost dried and heavily polluted rivulet and even the mosque was covered by a haze of mystery and started to suggest hallucinations of supernatural powers, the Space of Death became sensible if not concrete when it so surely overlapped with the villagers’ living space.

Simultaneously, a tension or struggle was sensed here, that between the supernatural powers causing people’s death and the ones saving people from death.

In the story about creek dragon, I can feel the villagers’ disturbance. If no measures were taken, the village itself would have turned to a Space of Death soon.

Young laborers equaled pillars of a family, the loss of young people was more sorrowful and devastating than the death of elderlies. The village needed to keep death at bay.

160 The arch was therefore constructed. It is a landmark, not only that it tells people the village’s name, but it also marks the boundary between the unknown and familiar, between the Space of Death and the space of life, thus an “early warning system”

(Schwimmer 1986, 366-7). Only this time it is not for warning a person from a different tribe as in Eric Schwimmer’s article, but for warding off the village’s invisible and unwelcomed guests. More than that, actually, because the arch is believed to have the force of actually stopping an evil spirit under it, its power is thus

“real,” it can really “suppress (Huq’s term)” the wave of death, rather than merely alerting it.

The Toilet

Our conversation was triggered by the toilet, so I feel obliged to say something about it here. Changes in the village surroundings may harm its residents, this seems to be a shared piece of knowledge among the villagers, at least among the old men whom I talked to. So once the landscape changed again, especially when a collective memory about the last time similar events happened is still vivid, people become alerted. Actually mindful readers may still remember that in the previous chapter, I described the eminent domain that occupied the village’s graveyard and left the very construction debris on which we gather and talk almost on a daily basis and where the toilet is built. If the toilet is considered as a change of environment, the construction debris is even a more observable change. Why the toilet, rather than the lager scaled construction was spotted as starting a Space of Death? I may offer a possible but not definite reading below.

161 We could summarize Huq’s concerns here that firstly, the shape of the toilet resembles a coffin; and second, it could carry “shit” to the village.

The first concern is easy to grasp, but one should be aware that coffin is an image that allows positive reading in Chinese speaking communities in certain contexts, as

“coffin” in Chinese is “guan cai,” with the first character a homonym of “officer” and the second a homonym of “wealth.” But this was apparently not Huq our folk semiotician’s perception of the term or the building (toilet). In this context and his mind, the toilet implied death, it is firstly iconic by resembling a coffin, and its meaning is derived from this sameness in the physical medium, not the phonic medium (for a detailed introduction of icon see Chandler 2002, 40-41). And as a coffin is culturally a symbol of death, its iconic sign, toilet, becomes a symbol of death too.

The second concern, related to the function of the toilet, is its ability of “bringing shit.” This “shit” does not have to, or rather, it cannot be real human excrement, but symbolic again–after all the toilet is not in use, so judging from hygienic concerns, it could be quite clean of excrement and other dirt. But in the villagers’ symbolic system, it represents a concept familiar to people of almost all the Chinese-speaking

(with dialects include but not restrict to Mandarin and Cantonese in mind) societies:

“dirty stuff.” This is a pseudonym used to address evil spirits or ghosts for fearing that to call them by their real names such as “ghost (gui in Chinese)” will actually summon them: the “right word” sometimes cannot be used, and “to know the name of a thing” here unlike in Malinowski’s analysis, does not guarantee one’s ability “to get hold on it” (Malinowski 1965, 233).

162 This is why villagers were concerned of the toilet, rather than the construction debris left by constructing the viaduct, and singled it out as brining the risk of bad luck or even death to the village. The way village functionaries addressed these concerns is amusing, as I shall present below.

The Spirit Screen

2016 May 24th was a sunny day on which I revisited the village of my fieldwork.

The first thing I noticed is what I suspect as an interesting face-saving construction project, a wall that fences the debris inside in order to create a neat (or at least neater) appearance at the entrance of the village. Later Imam Shir confirmed my thought and added that it is a work of the village government.

It is a constructional work, and also an “art work.” The wall is about 2.5 meters high and meandrously extends about 60 meters long to enclose the construction debris. It is decorated by glazed yellow roof tiles on the top and painted with pictures on the body. The paintings on the wall appear quite ethnic or even exotic in rural

China. For instance, there are mosques, hijabed women, arabesque patterns and

Arabic calligraphies. These paintings and the meaning conveyed by them instantly mark the village as Hui/Muslim. There are two openings that cut the continuity of the wall, one on the side and the other at the entrance of the toilet.

What is extremely interesting is, right in front of the toilet gate, there stands another wall that has a huge “ducā’” painted on it. The ducā’ is copied from the hall of the mosque, it says: “Allah, praise goes to Him (inna allāh lahu l-ḥamd).” This part of the wall should not be taken as part of the fence that encloses the debris, nor the ducā’

163 painted on it a mere decoration. To understand this wall, one has to recall what Huq and Ouh said about the position of the toilet: that it stands overlooking the mouth of the village directly and can bring in dirty stuff. This gives the wall a different meaning, or, I should name it more accurately now: it is not just any wall, but a spirit screen, “ying bi” in Chinese.

Sarah Rossbach (1983, 75) observes:

“Some Chinese saw screens inside of doorways as shields against malign spirits or demons. It was said that demons only flew in straight lines so the screens would repulse them. Often a yin-yang symbol decorated the screen as a protective talisman.”

The spirit screen outside the toilet is established for a purpose of protecting the village from evil. The ducā’ on it makes it a “syncretization” of Islam and feng shui

(Herskovits 1996 in Kapchan & Strong 1999, 240). To avoid confusion, the screen has no practical use at all. Admittedly though, scholars believe that spirit screens are more to protect the households’ private space: as when people peep from the gate, they can only see a wall but not the yard (see Ju 2005, 119). I however believe that the toilet does not need a screen to protect the privacy of whomever uses it. Because above of all it is always closed so no one uses it; and secondly the rooms in the toilet have their own doors.

Now I introduced the arch, toilet and spirit screen, together with narratives and beliefs related to them explaining their roles in creating and neutralizing spaces of death. The village “nature” is yet to be separated from the “supernatural” world, it is still interconnected with the latter, and not yet a “secular” nature, or a nature that is

“manipulatable material, determinate, homogeneous, and subject to mechanical laws”

164 (Asad 2003, 27).

How does this nature, or village landscape negotiate with the existing norms, not only those of religion/belief, but also those of mundane society? The following section answers this question.

Feng shui, Islam and Urban Fabric

The three places, namely the arch, the toilet and the spirit screen, are only meaningful in a feng shui system. “The most potent fear, an old feng shui carry-over, is death-oriented symbolism” (Rossbach 1983, 94). This symbolism explains the fear of the toilet, and supports the establishment of the arch and spirit screen. References to “feng shui,” “creek dragon” and “evil powers” prevailed the conversation between

Huq and Ouh and underpinned their logic in explaining the death of those young people some decades ago and legitimize their worries about similar happenings to come. These ideas themselves diminish the supposed dominance of Islamic religion in a Hui village, and submit a space of death that should belong to the one and only God, to that of malign supernatural powers. By constructing the arch and spirit screen, villagers also recast their relation with Death. Now they are not only passive receivers of their fate, they actively restrain the supernatural.

Specific scrutiny of the spirit screen discloses more aspects where belief systems cross one another’s boundaries and people creatively mobilize different elements to produce their imagined landscape. From Sarah Rossbach’s statement cited above, we learn two pieces of information. One, the spirit screen is to shield against malign spirit from outside, or from the opposite direction to the house. Two, its decoration is

165 normally a protective talisman to enforce its power. These two points, if positioned in the case of the screen in front of the toilet, both suggest some logics that do not merely blur the boundary between Islam and feng shui beliefs, but also raise fascinating disturbances within each of these religious systems or traditions.44

Firstly, the toilet is west to the village, so that direction, west, should be where the lethal supernatural power comes. However, the screen is on the doorway of the toilet, making it face the village. It is therefore appropriate to ask, what is the screen protecting, the vulnerable villagers or the space of death created by the toilet?

Secondly, the ducā’ on the screen is worth noting too. The spirit screen talisman actually does not have to be yin-yang, many a time one finds on it the Chinese character “fortune (fu),” powerful mysterious monsters or real beasts such as dragons or tigers, and carved bricks depicting a historical event or a scene of nature. But no matter what the theme of the decoration, its nature is a talisman that is believed to be able to enhance the screen’s protective power. On the screen in front of the toilet, the talisman is Islamicized: it becomes a ducā’. This talisman is definitely “strong.”

Quranic verses or ducā’s have been “esteemed preservatives against disease, enchantment, the evil eye, and a variety of other evils” in many, if not all, Muslim societies since long time (Lane 2003, 247). However, we have to note that Arabic

44 I have to point out that although not based on Islamic religion, spirit screens as decoration are actually common in Hui communities, even as part of mosques. Piper Rae Gaubatz (1996, 143) has similar observation. For instance, out of some mosques in my hometown Jinan City of Shandong Province, one finds gorgeous spirit screens, some of which newly ornamented, such as the one on the gateway of the Great South Mosque of Jinan: The spirit screen stands high and is decorated with Imam Jin Shulong’s Arabic calligraphy: “Love for the Country is of (Islamic) Faith” in huge and noctilucent green letters. The combination of spirit screen and Arabic calligraphy is also not rare, at least not unseen. It could be, as Gaubatz suggests, for mere geomantic purposes (ibid), but I argue that in many cases it is a space for different powers to struggle. For example the one of South Mosque, the ducā’ and its author’s name demonstrate the major intertwining powers in this space. Islamic religion, the state, Imam Jin’s agency in mediating between political and religious concerns, … and many more factors are at play. However, it is rare to find spirit screens in front of toilets, let alone ones with Arabic calligraphy.

166 ducā’ is totally foreign to feng shui system. Will a Chinese supernatural power automatically gain the knowledge to recognize and fear an Arabic talisman when it resides beside or happens to pass a Hui village? I doubt.

Moreover, even if one argues that an Arabic ducā’ functions indiscriminately despite the incompetence of a supernatural power in perceiving its meaning, the charm cannot work properly. Because firstly, as aforementioned, the screen is facing the village, so the ducā’ is showing its protective power to villagers, whom it is supposed to protect. Secondly, the ducā’ is copied from the west wall of the main hall of the mosque, where religious villagers pray toward it everyday. This fact makes the situation even more interesting, as what are villagers supposed to do in front of such a sign, now painted in front of a toilet? This bothers Imam Shir very much. When I mentioned the ducā’ on the toilet spirit screen to him, he said, “I’ll find a day to scrape it away.”

That has been said, although these elements may not fit properly into feng shui system, the screen with ducā’ is still a “syncretization” of Islam and feng shui. It is also a piece of “little tradition” that disturbs the “great tradition” of Islam (Redfield in

Yoder 1974, 5-6).

Architectures do not only speak to religious norms, they address social hierarchies as well. The toilet, for instance, is symbolic does not only because it represents

“death” in a feng shui system, but also due to its silent but sturdy articulation of a power superior to the village and its authorities: that of higher leveled administration, gentrification and urban plan. Veins of urbanization implant and stay.

The toilet built on the construction debris further alienated the villagers from their

167 shared living space that actually had already been estranged by the eminent domain mentioned in the previous chapter: if the eminent domain removed a tamed and familiar space of death i.e. the villagers’ graveyard, the political project running for

“hygienic city” introduced another dangerous and supernatural space of death: the coffin like, “shit” generating toilet. Although the toilet was, at least superficially, constructed for hygienic concern, it is considered as bringing dirty stuff into the village. A dislocation thus happens between the state sanctioned constructional activity (spatial practice) plus its prospected perception (space of representation), and its actual reception and perception among some villagers (representational space or lived space). The villagers’ perception of a state sanctioned space is not only interesting, but also could be said as poetically deconstructive and resistant (“poetics” as communicative competence in Dell Hymesian sense, see Hymes 2001 and Shuman and Hasan-Rokem 2012, 60): it not only deconstructs the municipal government’s

“intention,” more than that, by rendering the toilet a space of death, the villagers were actually resisting the government’s spatial practice and discursively deconstructing a

“conceptualized space:” (Lefebvre 1991, 38) a space that is established by the government to instill its ideology, specifically of what is “hygienic.”

Local village government also participates in the resistance but more concretely as it possesses more resources. It constructed and painted the walls to cover the debris left by the construction of the viaduct, and erected the spirit screen to block evil from the toilet. The old men’s narrative or rather, complaints about the toilet and the local functionaries’ decision of isolating the sign of a higher authority with walls and separating the toilet with a spirit screen all represent a resistance against the hierarchy

168 of administration and also a way of protecting the familiar landscape from being contaminated by newly imposed, “foreign” elements.

Another layer of resistance emerges. Imam Shir said he will find a day to scrape the ducā’ away. Because for him the ducā’ on a screen close to toilet is profanity, a violation of Islam. His resistance is against the local, village government.

Lefebvre claims that “cosmic symbolism”45 makes less sense in urban settings

(2014, 601-2), and urban plan has well demonstrated its existence in the village of my fieldwork. However, as I have observed, urban fabrics such as the debris and the toilet are still rendered symbolic by many, such as the old men to whom I talked. Although being Hui, local village people rely on feng shui to come to terms with changes in landscape or incorporate the newly added landmarks, at least partially, into their

“cosmic symbolism.” Islam is but one element in this symbolism, and it is not the most important one. Moreover, the arch and the spirit screen are both erected to protect the village from a space of death, but they are both constructed on the side of the mosque. This arrangement places the symbol of a Hui village in a tricky situation, as, what can be more powerful in protecting its people than a bayt allāh (God’s

House, meaning mosque)?

The Protective and Punishing Mosque

The mosque stands quietly behind the arch and right in front of Huq and Ouh

45 To over briefly explain, this is a system in which everyday life is understood as a gathering of symbols that suggest a relation between human and the cosmos (see Lefebvre 2014, 594-599). This term is used in my dissertation to suggest a way my collaborators express their concerns by relating them to their surroundings. It renders many changes (not necessarily all) in the village environment causes of changes in villagers’ lives. This term is used in my dissertation without any allusion to the romantic understanding of folk belief as primitive men’s respect to nature (see Mullen 2000, 120-121).

169 when they were talking, but no one refers to it as a protection of religious Muslims or

Hui people in the village in general from any evil that could harm them. Islam is so quiet that people even had to seek help from feng shui to shield off the negative influence brought by a sudden change in the landscape.

It is not fair, nonetheless, to say that the mosque has no supernatural power. It actually demonstrated its power in the history, to both prevent and create a space of death. I share two stories recounted by my collaborators.

I heard the first story on 2013 June 2nd when I visited the village mosque for the first time. When Old Man Tal led me into the main hall of the mosque, we see a wooden beam lying on two benches (in 2015 a glass case was added to protect it). A line painted on the beam reads: “To Memorize: XX month, XX Day in XX year of the

Republic [192x], hit by a Japanese shell in the Sino-Japanese War, and in Summer of the XX year of the Republic [192x] repaired by comrades of neighboring villages

(min guo xx nian xx yue xx ri zhong ri zhan dou bei ri ren pao dan ji hui, min guo xx nian xia ge zhuang tong zhi xiu fu ji nian).” Tal told me: “This is the beam destroyed by a Japanese shell. Why they were aiming our mosque? Because some Kuomintang generals were meeting in the mosque. Japanese got the information and started to bombard our mosque. That shell hit the main hall but did not explode, it only broke the beam. But those bombs fell over the hall all exploded. They blew [things] high

…” This story, I later learned, is in many people’s repertoire, and many villagers refer to the beam as a proof of the story’s trueness. In this story, we see that the mosque protected Kuomintang generals from being killed.

The second story that I am sharing, according to the narrator Huq (I heard it from

170 other people too, but the first one who told this story to me is Huq), happened during the Cultural Revolution. Huq recalled this story in various settings to different people at least three times, I choose the version of 2015 Feb 5th, right after he and Ouh had the conversation about the death-inviting toilet.

“Don’t you recall that year? Yusuf came for the gourd [shaped decoration] on the top [of the mosque]? The gourd on the top of the mosque hall? The Hui from downtown came together to destroy the mosque. When Having-all (nickname) got married, he (Yusuf) almost died. Right behind the mosque, a car almost killed him.

Stuff in the mosque, you do not destroy them. You think He (God) is not looking?

Hahahaha…” Huq pointed to the sky using a rise of his head.

“Yusuf and Riwan, both.” Ouh added, “were ‘Pioneers (xian jin)’.”

“Oh yeah… ‘Pioneer Party Members’ they were!” Huq said with a cynical tone.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“They are the Hui [Party members] from downtown. They came to [supervise us] to ‘Destroy the Four Olds’.”46 Huq said.

“Destroy the Four Olds, and Cultivate the Four News.” Ouh added.

“Those [Hui] from downtown are the worst.” Huq went on, “When there is a movement they start first, but they retreat the fastest [when it goes sour].”

To summarize this story, Yusuf the pioneer Party member was punished by a

46 This is a political campaign launched during the Cultural Revolution in 1966. It is designated to destroy the “Four Olds” namely the Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas, and cultivate new ones, the “Four News.” Mosque as a symbol of Islamic religion, was also considered as a representative of Four Olds, thus needs to be destroyed. During the Cultural Revolution, transgressing the function of mosques and even demolishing them had been performed nationwide, due to the assumption that religious items and buildings are manifestations of backwardness (Gillette 2000, 71, Zhang 2007, 296). Persecution and massacre of Muslims during this cultural and humanitarian catastrophe were also documented by historians (MacFarquhar and Schoenhals 2006, 387-388). Similar violence was applied on other religions, folk beliefs too (for instance see Mueggler 2001, Chapter 8 and Chau 2006).

171 supernatural power because he destroyed the mosque’s roof decoration. Former high school teacher Jae also recounted the event, but his version is that Yusuf was hit by different cars sequentially in three days and ended up hiding at home.

Like the “bronzed human beings” in Katherine Verdery’s case (1999, 6), religious buildings such as mosques as part of the political landscape can be used to mark social changes, especially during the Sino-Japanese War during the 1920s to 1940s, and the Cultural Revolution that prevailed China roughly from 1966 to 1976.

Villagers use their narratives to express political concerns: Tal prefers

Kuomintang generals to Japanese, and Huq and Ouh cherish old tradition rather than the Party’ revolutionary campaign. The events they recounted are probably just accidental, but by linking them to a supernatural power, they managed to imagine the events as God’s protection of the mosque or punishment on violation and utilize them to communicate their feelings toward certain political changes in the village as well as on a broader scale of the society. I should note that not everyone shares the same feelings toward these events. In other gatherings, I hear narratives from other villagers who make positive comments on Japanese soldiers (they were honest, they liked the village kids) and give rather negative depiction of Kuomintang presence in the village

(they were rude, they bullied kids). But difference in feelings does not invalidate my argument here.

By the narratives, villagers including Tal, Huq, Ouh and Jae challenged military and political authorities, the foreign invaders’ bombardment and the Chinese dictator’s arbitrary and ridiculous order and the fanatic power-worshipers who would realize anything their “Red Sun (a title given to Mao Zedong)” declared or even

172 hinted. Narrators of the stories granted agency to the demeaned and destroyed, people and buildings together, and claimed their (belated) triumph/revenge.

In the first story, the mosque as a protector saved the Chinese (Kuomintang) generals from a space of death and did not bend (or fall) over the Japanese military authority.

In the second story, the mosque as the representative of Islam and the Hui, a religious and folk authority managed to revenge the damage that the Party members, representatives of the state authority, performed. Besides, Huq was actually using his story practically to address a social hierarchy: that between downtown Hui and village

Hui. Because that Yusuf is from downtown, a pioneer Party member, came with a bunch of other Hui from the city to supervise and lead the village Hui in destroying something they are both supposed to respect: the mosque. Although Yusuf was not the only one who participated in the campaign, in Huq’s story, punishment goes only to him, the one who are higher in the village social rank, and is from the city.

In both narratives Space of Death is created, by the Japanese troops and by the mosque itself. Although it did not result to a real death in the second story, it is potentially threatening. Again, this space offered the lower ranked social actants an opportunity to negotiate in power struggles, although these negotiations only happen in narratives about mysterious events in the past.

The Mosque: From Another Perspective

Another aspect of these stories cannot be overlooked: that although the supernatural power is protective, it seems like being selective in the objects/people it

173 protects: in the first story, mosque protected the Kuomintang generals but did not prevent a space of death (at least potential death) from blowing ordinary people’s houses. It also did not protect the young souls taken away by the change of village feng shui.

In the second story, the mosque even goes one step further to generate a space of death: the mosque simultaneously managed to prove its being protected by a supernatural power and competence of revenging after being damaged.

This logic sounds familiar to me. Although born long after the Cultural

Revolution, I still remember, from childhood memory, stories about how people destroyed Buddha’s statues during the Revolution and received divine punishment later. Scholars have analyzed this type of narratives in other Chinese speaking communities too. For instance Erik Mueggler documented narratives recounting divine punishment (normally death) brought by the ancestral spirits on communist cadres who insulted the ancestral shrine, Buddhist temples and/or divine trees in political movements in Zhizuo village, Yunan Province. He argued that narratives of those people’s violent death form part of the local understanding of political movements, and more such stories are used by villagers to resist government imposed contract of planting certain fields that are believed to be possessed by deities (2001, chapter 8). In his study of folk belief in a Shaanbei village, Adam Chau (2006, 70-71) cited a local story telling how a small team-leader in the Cultural Revolution had his head blasted off in an accident years after tearing down the statue of Black Dragon

King deity as a symbol of the “Four Olds.” Chau’s idea is that this narrative is part of the local communal hegemony that forces individuals into the belief system, because

174 those who do not will risk violent death as the team-leader.

My case shares certain aspects with these analyses in that they are all talking about violent death/threat of death happened after certain damages are done to temples/deity statue/mosque, and they all suggest villagers’ making use of narratives of divine punishment as a means to resist against or at least question political campaigns such as the Cultural Revolution.47 However, it is due to these similarities, a problematic is observed: that of localizing Islam.

In Huq’s (and Jae’s) narrative, Yusuf risked death after he destroyed the mosque’s decoration. For both Huq and Jae, it seems that “death” itself is a punishment from

God onto Yusuf, just like the cadres in Chau’s and Muegller’s cases: they were dead, thus punished for what they did.

In Muegller’s case, the deity is collective ancestral spirits, and in Chau’s case the deity is a local Dragon King. It seems like those vernacular deities (appropriated from the term “vernacular religion,” see Primiano 1995) serve their local followers after accepting offerings. But this is an idea unfamiliar to Islam. First of all, God does not require offerings, but belief. Secondly, for “unbelievers,” one can only assume the righteousness of a punishment, but cannot find definite support from Islamic scriptures.

47 Huq and Jae are not trying to persuade people into Islam. Above all, although the village is a Hui village, villagers who frequently practice Islam are rare. Therefore it is doubtable whether there is a community hegemony that desires to force people into Islamic religion. Besides, although Huq disagrees with the Pioneer Party members’ activity, there is no reason for him to contribute to the communal discourse of persuading people into religiosity. On the contrary, as we have seen in the last chapter, he himself does not practice Islam and has many reasons to dissuade people from entering the mosque. Moreover, as mentioned above, Huq actually has some belief in feng shui, this makes him a dubious figure and unconvincing propagator of Islam even he repudiates the activity of destroying a symbol of Islam: the mosque. Rather, his way of “believing” is quite similar to what Steven Harrell termed a “practical believer” who holds an attitude of “half trust and half doubt” (in Chau 2006, 67).

175 Quranic verses are not quite clear about divine revenge/punishment. For instance one finds this verse: “… If they repent, it will be best for them; but if they turn back

(to their evil ways), Allah will punish them with a grievous penalty in this life and in the Hereafter: They shall have none on earth to protect or help them (9:74 transl.

Yusuf Ali)” This verse is addressing people who said blasphemous words against

God. It conveys a message that God has the ability of punishing wrong doers in this life and the willing to do so. But in other verses God is all forgiving, even if the wrong doers do not repent or ask for forgiveness. For example: “O my Lord! They have indeed led astray many among mankind; he then who follows my (ways) is of me, and he that disobeys me, - but You are indeed Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful

(14:36, transl. Yusuf Ali).” This verse does not say what will happen on those who disobeys the Prophet, but states that God is forgiving, therefore He may just overlook the wrong doers.

Even if the punishment is destined for “unbelievers,” one should note that in

Islam, “death itself is not a punishment,” the real punishment “lies ahead of the grave and at the end of the process” (Bowker, 1991, 106-107 emphasis original). Thomas

O’Shaughnessy also suggests that according to Quran, death is a “prelude” to disbelievers’ punishment (1969, 54) and that the instinctive fear toward death and life after death are the punishments received by disbelievers (ibid, 61).48

48 As for believers, they have confidence in their life after death so they are not afraid of this final stage in their mundane life. Besides, although O’Shaughnessy also mentions death in This World and death in the Afterworld as “double punishment,” his analysis suggests otherwise: firstly, in the Quran verses he cited (7:36-38, 33:68, 38:61) one cannot find the exact words for mundane death as a punishment. Rather, in 38:61 the verse is clear that it means the sinful receive doubled punishment “in fire,” meaning, in Hell after their death. Secondly, O’Shaughnessy believes that this “double punishment” is inherited from the idea of “double death” in Nestorian theology, but the text he cited to prove this argument actually states that the two deaths are “one of nature and the

176 Therefore, the folk belief or vernacular religion among my collaborators is not necessarily based on Islam or has anything to do with God’s moral attributes, although the narrative is about the punishment after destroying a mosque. Huq and

Jae actually localized Islam, equated the mosque to any element in their cosmic symbolism, and perceived God as one of the revengeful deities who punish by death if maltreated.

Actually, in my village of fieldwork, one can easily observe that for many villagers the equation of Islam and a lethal supernatural power and incorporating it into the local cosmic system does not have to be so subtle as I analyzed above, for instance in the narrative that I share below.

2015 February 10th was a sunny day. Afternoon sunshine warmed up everything in the mosque yard. After ablution, I went to the akhonds’ room waiting for the afternoon prayer to start. The temperature inside felt much lower than outside in the sunshine. Akhond Su also finished washing and came in, hissing because of the coldness.

Su: “It is really warmer outside!”

Me: “Aye.”

Su: “It is gloomily chilly in here.”

The Chinese word for “gloomily chilly” Su used was “yin sen,” meaning coldness brought by a creepy feeling, very often of ghostly beings. It is definitely not a term one wants to use to describe a temple or a mosque, because to say a place is “yin sen”

other of sin.” Therefore the first death cannot be a punishment, but a natural phenomenon, while only the second death “of sin” can be a punishment (1969, 22).

177 is normally to allude that the place is haunted.

I thought it was a joke, as how can an akhond say a room in his mosque is gloomily chilly? I then asked, half joking: “How? A mosque could be gloomy? That’s not very good to say!”

“You see people are even scared to enter!” Su laughed. For a moment I believed that he was being cynical about how few people come to pray (“enter the mosque,” as mentioned in previous chapters, is a local term that means practicing Islam). But then he said something that altered my understanding of his words.

“Hey, seriously, people dare not go to the mosque.” Su said.

“Why? Because it’s gloomy?” I asked.

“In the old days,” Imam Shir also came in and joined our conversation, “there were several huge cypresses in the mosque.”

“Yes?” I turned to Shir.

“Quite thick. Two people? Two people’s arms cannot get around the trunk.” Shir referred to Su for confirmation.

“Yes, and the trees used to cover [the yard].” Su nodded, “it was really dark.”

“Gloomy.” Shir said, “and there were the –?”

“The vines, grape vine trellis.” Su finished Shir’s sentence, “no room left in the yard.”

“Must be nice in summer!” I said.

“Well, cool in summer though,” Shir said, “it was gloomy in winter. Some old men were superstitious, they did not allow kids to go to the mosque.”

“Kids didn’t care much.” Su said.

178 “Even adults dared not to come, they didn’t allow their kids to come.” Shir continued.

“Now we have the summer madrasa [teaching Arabic] here, but the old men still hold on their ideas and do not want kids to come to the mosque.” Su explained.

“Why?” I wondered.

“Ghosts (gui).” Su finally gave a simple answer.

“Dead rūḥa are all in the mosque.” Shir said. Su started to chuckle.

Here Shir used an Arabic word rūḥa, meaning spirit or ghost. Hui people normally use this word to call the deceased.

“What?!” I was shocked.

“Dead rūḥa,” Shir repeated, “all the men who passed away live in the mosque.”

“Gloomy.” Su chuckled.

“And it is an old mosque,” Shir added, “they are even more afraid…”

“[Of] hundreds of years’ rūḥa.” Su completed Shir’s sentence again.

“Wow that must be many people.” I said.

Now we can understand why the mosque in a critical period (as Huq and Ouh recounted) was not a trusted protector of its frequenters, or non-frequenters from the destiny of death or being in jail, and villagers needed to build an arch to halt the space of death. The mosque existed for a long time, hundreds of years, but many old men in the village still believe that it offers a shelter where ghosts hide. The mosque itself is a space of death, how can it protect the Hui people?

By tolerating a Space of Death, or more precisely, a Space of “Bad Death”–as

179 all the people who died were young people–to trespass the boundary to fret the village, the mosque, or the religious system represented by the mosque is already subordinated to a more powerful spiritual agent. Even worse, the mosque itself could scare or harm the kids. In the eyes of some villagers, the supernatural power of the mosque, or, of Islam or even God, is no more powerful than that of the toilet, creek dragon … Islam is localized and familiarized in a sense that it is incorporated into the local “cosmic symbolism” and becomes an actant in the supernatural landscape that experienced by the villagers daily, instead of behaving like a dominant, aloof and monotheistic religion that speaks to its believers in a definite, foreign and incomprehensible monologue: a Scripture written in Arabic. By referring to spaces of death, villagers intentionally or unconsciously altered the supposed God-Human relation, from a genuine worshiped-worshiping one to one that allows suspicion and superstition to sneak in. Villagers as practitioners of religion/belief, freely write the village religious “text,” and offer alternative ways of experiencing its landscape (de

Certeau 1988) beyond the buildings themselves.

Another interesting objects in the akhonds narrative are the cypresses. In China, cypress is considered as a plant suitable for graveyard, or “yin households (yin zhai in

Chinese, meaning dead men’s households or graves) but not for “yang households

(yang zhai in Chinese, meaning living people’s households)” because this tree is evergreen thus a symbol of the dead, who is wished to be immortal now in the Other

World (see Ju 2005, 89). Therefore cypresses in the mosque can easily convey a gloomy feeling to some villagers. Trees, as I analyze in the following section, form another indispensible part of the village landscape and allude to a space of death that

180 allows villagers to question the human-God relationship.

Grass-Wood Human

Along the creek bank outside the mosque there are lines of aspens. These fast growing trees are sold by trunk (price varies according to its age) and bring to villagers some extra income. Aspens however are also considered as a tree that should not be planted close to “yang households.” The tree has a disturbing nickname

“Ghosts Clapping (gui pai shou)” because in windy days their leaves make huge noise that sounds like clapping (Li 2006). People believe the noise covers the noise made by thieves and also attracts ghosts. In some villagers’ eyes they also bear a mysterious meaning.

Martha Norkunas (2002, 182) states in her book that trees can be symbols of bodies thus part of the monumentary landscape. In my field they are also linked to corporeal bodies, their seasonal vicissitudes also are seen as a representation of human life cycle, of any individual man or woman, but more of human beings as a whole.

Mr. Sa, the veteran is also among the men who would gather and talk. This narrative is from him on April 21st, 2015. The temperature was already quite high, and new shoots started to spring from aspens. I as always joined my friends beside the mosque.

Our random talk started from Sa’s and Huq’s idea that people are born unequal.

They mentioned a child singer recently made his debut in a show at Shandong

Television Station. Huq said he was born with the talent, thus the money. I do not like

181 the idea of “child stars,” so I suggested that it is just temporary, but not a good way of organizing a child’s future. But Huq and Sa had a different logic.

“You live only at this very moment. [Only if] you pass this moment, then you can think of the next moment.” Sa said.

“Right right!” Huq nodded.

“Look at those aspens.” Sa was sitting with his back leaning on the wall, he could see the lines of aspens “clapping” in the spring breeze.

“They are so happy now. But wait, after half a month their bad luck will arrive

(dao mei le).” What did he mean?

“You see they are prosperous, but those goatherds, they come with poles, just one strike, those [leaves] are down. Because [after half a month] the sprouts are bigger and goats can be well fed by them. Those [leaves] who are not reached? They survive.” Sa talked about aspen leaves as if they are human lives.

Huq chuckled a bit, but he was listening cautiously, probably because he was amused by the logic.

“Right?” Sa asked, “Isn’t it like that. Right? Human beings are like that too.” Sa directed the topic from plant to human.

“Walk one step, mind one step.” Huq commented, nodding his confirmation.

“[Even] the young people, those ‘goatherds’ come and seize them and they are gone.” Sa went on.

Huq nodded again, smiling.

“They say it’s sudden [death for the young people]? Fuck, it was those human- abusing soft-haired fucking kids on the Other Side [caused the death]. Or we look at

182 the grass.” Sa pointed at the grass. “Grass-wood human, we say ‘grass-wood human

(cao mu zhi ren in Chinese),’ [see] the grass on sides of the road? Nowadays kids do not reap grass [to feed goats or cows]. But when we were kids, we used to reap grass.

We sharpen the sickles, after eating, we go to the field [to reap grass]. We walk along the road, and see some prosperous grass. To test the sickles, we cut them, ‘ci-lou!’”

Sa mimicked the sound made by a sickle skipping grass.

“We used to do that just for fun.” Huq also recalled.

“But the grass, we cut them from middle and they die.” Sa said.

A motorcycle passed by with its engine roaring. But a silence filled our conversation.

Sa paused a while and continued: “Human beings are the same. Those from the

Other Side come and manipulate us, we are dead.”

“Who are ‘those from the Other Side?” I asked.

“Those whom we do not meet.” Sa answered.

“Haha, what a question. Who are those from the Other Side?!” Huq sounded like I asked a silly question.

A silence prevailed our conversation again.

After a pause, Sa went on and addressed my question indirectly. He said: “Now, they say, my man, ghosts and gods do not exist. But we still put it on TV shows.”

“Right, still in many shows.” Huq agreed, “ and the High (shang bian, meaning high ranked government officers) still make offerings to those deities.”

“You say, those big officers, do they believe [in ghosts and gods]?” Sa asked.

“Yes, they have a stronger belief [than ordinary people].” Huq said.

183 The conversation was directed to that highly ranked government officers actually fear supernatural powers despite the official atheist propaganda in China. As it is not related to my argument, I stop here. But their response to my question has already clarified what they mean by “those from the Other Side” means supernatural powers, ghosts or/and gods.

In his narrative, Sa compared wood (aspen leaves), grass and human beings. In his narrative the people, old and young, resemble the aspen sprouts and spring grass, who are susceptible to those arbitrary, abusing and mischievous reapers with scythes in their hands. Although a reaper “‘mowing down’ the living” (Barber 1988, 51) has never been part of Chinese depiction of Death, Sa used his childhood experience and came to similar image. Woods and grass are no longer mere part of the village landscape, but also become symbols of human’s, thus Sa and Huq’s own lives. They looked at lines of aspens and grass on sides of the road along the creek, pictured another imagined landscape, and conjured a space of death out of the daily objects/plants.

Sa in his seventies and Huq in his sixties looked back in retrospect at their much younger selves. While they were kids, they used to cut young and prosperous grass to test the sharpness of sickles, they used to strike down aspen leaves to feed goats. Huq said, “We used to do that just for fun.” Was he sorry for the grass that he harvested young and without a proper reason? Or was he seeing human beings including himself as vulnerable as the grass now? Their grandfather’s look, I believe, is not only on their own past as kids, but also on the supernatural powers that would playfully

184 take people’s lives, just like what they did to the grass. Sa and Huq were commenting on their childhood behaviors, but these comments, in their older age, sounded more like addressing the Unseen, or as Sa put it, “those whom we do not meet.”

In Sa’s narrative, Death becomes “human-abusing soft-haired fucking kids on the

Other Side.” His way of addressing the Unseen reminds me James Green, who argued that belief is a contract, “a manner of contracting with a cosmic partner, an Other on the opposite side of the table” (Green 2008, 190); and Talcott Parsons et. al, that life and death in Christian culture is a reciprocal gifting session between the Divinity and

Human (Parsons, Fox and Lidz 1973). In my case, the contract or reciprocity of life and death however appears arbitrary and not solemnly divine, because there is no decent and intelligent beings negotiating and bargaining with the living people: on

“the opposite side of the table,” as Green puts it, or “on the Other Side,” as Sa stated, there are only “soft-haired kids” similar to Catherine Bell’s “benign and malevolent” power (in Green 2008, 32), or kami (gods) and yōkai (unworshiped supernatural beings) who move along a continuum of good and bad, and can play tricks on human beings (Foster 2015, 21).

It is, nevertheless, exactly due to the child-like, playful, tricking and benign feature of this lethal supernatural power, although it still cannot be overcome, it is forgiven by human beings represented by Sa and probably also Huq. Because as the performers are just “kids” who can never be disciplined, what can you do as an old and experienced man, especially as Sa who survived the Korean War, other than looking at them with an affectionate and understanding look? By his narrative about death, Sa managed to speak up to the Great Unknown, gained “the temporary defeat

185 of the inevitable” (Harlow 2003, 105) or became at least mentally open to the moment when the “kids” will come for him.

Sa was like Cashman’s Packy Jim who wants to find a place “in this life and … the next” for himself in his narratives and come to terms with this world (Cashman

2016, 20), however, unlike Packy Jim, Sa did not show his respect to God. Rather, he expressed an almost rebellious attitude towards God. Moreover, Sa did not even try to make sense of this world, especially the finalization of a man’s life: it is arbitrary and without any reason, it is but a mischievous activity of the mysterious “kids.”

These thoughts disturb the assumed predominance of Islamic belief in a Hui village again, just like the feng shui talks given by Huq and Ouh in the last section of this chapter. I introduce over-briefly the arbitrariness of death and Muslims’ supposed attitude toward death in Islamic/Quranic teachings below, because these two points are pertinent to Sa’s narrative the most.

Firstly, depiction of arbitrariness of death can be found in Islam. Because God is the only Being that decides the date of a person’s death. Human, and even the Death

Angel ʿIzrāʾīl do not know when a person is dying:

“When the day of a man’s death approaches, Allāh causes to fall from the tree below His throne the leaf on which the man’s name is written. ʿIzrāʾīl reads the name and has to separate the person’s soul from his body after 40 days.” (A.J. Wensinck, on ʿIzrāʾīl in Encyclopaedia of Islam)

Secondly, however, human beings should submit to God’s decision. Whenever s/he is dying, s/he should not complain, as life in This World is only God’s test, and its time limit is ordained:

“[I]n the qurʾānic view any attitude to death implies an attitude to God, either of belief or unbelief. In the qurʾānic view, life and death have been instruments of

186 God's providence to humankind from the very beginning. This theocentric view of death implies a radical contingency of human beings as well as of the world in which they live and to which they should no longer attach themselves.” (Jacques Waardenburg, on Death and Dead in Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān)

Sa is probably also familiar with the Islamic way of interpreting death, as he goes to mosques on festivals and memorial dates of his deceased family members, and sometimes even prays in the mosque. He has plenty opportunities to learn from the akhonds’ preaching, even unconsciously. His attitude toward death is actually not much different from the attitude requested by Islam: he accepts the fact that anyone can depart from This World any time, therefore he accepts God’s decision. Huq holds a similar attitude: he said, “Walk one step, mind one step (zou yibu, kan yiwa-er).”

This is a local idiom meaning one only knows and can only focus on what one is doing at this very moment, because the future, which of course includes the ultimate destiny: death, is something only God knows. This also responds to the trigger of this topic: the child star’s future.

The only discrepancy observed between their perception of death and Islamic teachings on this topic is that, Sa also cursed the arbitrary power, but he intentionally or unintentionally ignored the Islamic teaching that God is the One behind the curtain.

To blame God for taking anyone’s life will be blasphemy, and judging from his daily activities such as going to mosques and even praying, it appears that Sa still performs religious practices and identifies himself with Muslims to some extent.

Nevertheless, Islam as a social structure or a religious endeavor of socializing

(Islamcization) an individual (Sa) meets a gap, a gap between Sa’s emotion toward death and Islamic teachings. As I have mentioned, in these gatherings death is one of

187 the favorite topics among the old men. In his age, like other aged people, Sa is forced to respond to death as a “stimulus of society” (Lefebvre 2014, 356). In his narrative of grass-wood human, he chooses to channel his emotion or pressure brought by the helplessness when facing death by a more “spiritual but not religious” way (Green

2008, 27), i.e. depicting or distorting God’s power as playful or even mischievous kids.

By rendering God as small kids randomly harvesting people’s lives as spiritual woods and grass (another space of death), Sa’s narrative lends him a higher position over death, as well as God. Sa managed to dwarf the Great Unknown, overthrow the religious order or the God-Human hierarchy and celebrate the enjoyment brought by the balanced power and soothed tension between him and his supernatural/cosmic counteractor(s). As in the first section of this chapter, in Sa’s narrative Islam as the default religion of the Hui people is again at best diluted, and at worst challenged by the supposed believers (Hui villagers), here Sa and Huq. Islam is a social form (per

Lefebvre’s numeration, forms include “ideologies, institutions, culture, language and constructed and structured activities” 2014, 358), and Sa’s understanding of death is

“unformed,” or spontaneous, “everyday,” it escapes the formality of Islam, and lives in its margins, moreover, it returns to the form, laughs at it, comments on it, and flirts with it.

Conclusion: Landmarks, a Meaningful World and Space of Death

“Spatiotemporal landmarks,” claims Verdery, are “aspects of people’s meaningful worlds; modifying the landmarks is part of reordering those worlds” (1999, 39,

188 emphasis added). Landmarks are to be built and deconstructed, noticed and ignored, mentioned and tabooed …, all the actions about landmarks lend them different meanings in different people’s minds. In this chapter, I analyzed some ordinary and everyday landmarks, either natural or constructed, in the village: arch, public toilet, creek, mosque, spirit screen, aspen woods and grass… I however only chose to address part of the meanings attached to them by the villagers, a “death symbolism.”

The term “death symbolism” is appropriated from the idea of “cosmic symbolism” applied by Lefebvre to look at how people use their everyday objects to experience the reality that they experience, in contemporary society, this symbolism plays its role “on [the] level of existence and consciousness: affectivity, spontaneity… and emotivity” (Lefebvre 2014, 597). I hence extract part of it and name a “death symbolism,” in order to suggest villagers’ use of their daily landscape to understand part of their reality: death. This idea includes both the feng shui way of thinking and people’s understanding of the mosque, wood and grass.

In all the talks I shared, we could observe a death symbolism that explains but simultaneously also nourishes and sustains a Space of Death “beneath a social space”

(ibid, 599) and a physical landscape. This death symbolism is hidden, as it does not accord to Islamic orthopraxy imposed by any authority, such as the mosque and akhonds, and it experienced endeavors to eliminate it: the atheism that tried to eradicate any religion or religious and “superstitious” thoughts in Cultural

Revolution.49 Yet it is expressive, it persists in people’s most profound mind and

49 Of course, just as Lefebvre again pointed out, every revolution destroys a set of symbols but create new ones to replace the old ones (2014, 598-599). Mao’s Cultural Revolution did destroy some “Olds,” however, what it created was not just “News,” rather, it created a cult worshiping Mao, thus a whole set of Mao symbols. This

189 finds itself a way out any time possible. Or rather, it is actually the people who activate it whenever and wherever they see proper or necessary: in my cases for the purposes (which intertwine but not stay isolated in each case) of criticizing existing societal facts, venting pressures and questioning mass social movements.

In his analysis of Tuscany, Italy, Lefebvre (1991, 119) looked at how the region of Tuscany was transformed from a representational space to a representation of space. Specifically, Tuscany was an image, a miniature of the people’s understanding of the world and cosmos, part of people’s “cosmic symbolism,” but when its relation to Florence was changed by urban fabrics and ceased to be a self contained cosmos, it becomes a representation of space, i.e. a reflection of politics and political power.

This transformation can also be found in the village of my fieldwork. The village has been efficiently connected to municipal or even higher leveled political centers and movements physically and symbolically since a long time ago. In this dissertation

I have mentioned some connections such as the viaduct, inclusion of the village into municipality, Sino-Japanese War, the Cultural Revolution and the hygienic city campaign. These urban fabrics have already changed the village landscape and the way villagers perceive their surroundings, or the cosmic symbolism.

However, I have also demonstrated that the village, as part of the urbanization project, is “prey to contradictory movements that counterbalance and combine themselves outside the reach of panoptic power” (de Certeau 1988, 95). This contradiction was observed in spaces of death, where death symbolism is activated as

symbolism even lasts to today, and is still believed by the Maoists. But this is not relevant to the topic of this dissertation.

190 part of their way of understanding and negotiating with This World.

Because a Space of Death is horrifying and asks to be addressed urgently, otherwise it will take the young lives from the village, it will revenge and punish, and it is always arbitrary and comes when you are not prepared. It is due to these features of it, people find it necessary to refer to the “death symbolism” that may help them to avoid, block, or at least understand a space of death. For the villagers whom I talked to, between the lived experience and the space of representation, there is a vacuum, an emptiness that requires to be filled, but Islam cannot perform this task as it has been muted for a long time and now becomes the possession of only a handful of specialists (akhonds and sometimes mosque members, as demonstrated in the previous chapter), even these specialists may blend some folk ideas in Islamic religion, intentionally or unconsciously. For instance Imam Shir and Akhond Su talked about how ghosts reside in the mosque, although they do not necessarily believe in this saying, they definitely share the feeling that the mosque was “gloomy.”

These folk ideas are vivid and linked closely to the villagers’ living space. Therefore, when a Space of Death becomes overlapped with the space that is experienced daily by the villagers metaphysically/metaphorically (as in the wood-grass narrative) or physically (as in the arch case) they promptly grasp the inner logic, the “rationality” that explains away their anxiety. Islam is not for this purpose. Akhonds always repeat during their wacaz (preaching), that any torture is Allah’s test, and do not think Allah dislikes you when you are through some toughness. However, this saying does not penetrate at all. Villagers may not have the intention of criticizing Islam or comparing it to their well beheld folk beliefs, but the muteness of Islam in their conversation is

191 itself a critique and comparison. The folklorization or even dwarfing of Islam in some cases (such as in Tal’s narrative about how mosque protected Kuomintang generals and in Huq’s narrative about how mosque punished the one who tried to destroy it) even more loudly articulates this critique and comparison.

Death symbolism is always a hybridity creatively forged by villagers to reflect

“the needs and aspirations of the peasants’ own way of life rather than that of the hegemonic classes,” it is “a specific way of rationalising the world and real life”

(Gramsci in Arnold 2012, 92). In the Space of Death that it creates, we find a “creole culture,” as Deborah Kapchan and Pauline Strong have argued, is always a “locus of power relations” (Kapchan and Strong 1999, 241), which in this chapter includes state-village, folk belief-Islam, human-God. Therefore, if the Witness Cairn in Avril

Maddrell’s (2009, 689) study is a “democratic vernacular form” of deathscape/memorial space, in my village of fieldwork, the landmarks thereof are all hierarchical form of a space of death. These landmarks allow resistance on different planes to happen.

Another point is worth mentioning here. In the power relations, activities challenging central or stronger powers such as death and the municipal decisions are not necessarily deconstructive but could be “constructive,” such as the arch, which is constructed to suppress an evil power but simultaneously challenges the Islamic ways of thinking; and the spirit screen, which is constructed in order to shield evil but also questions the “good” supposedly brought by the hygienic city campaign. On the physical side we see construction, but on the symbolic side there are deconstructions.

Finally, these fascinating talks made the village landscape attractive and real: they

192 add a poetic rhetoric into villagers’ everyday experiences. Without the talks, the physical world and people’s mind are separated, but these talks offer a connection that links physical landscape, people, society, imagination, memories, … together and therefore create a space for living. The talks may sound romantic or superstitious to many people, but they are part of villagers’ perception of their world, without them, it is no longer real.

193 Conclusion

To conclude, I will discuss the “everydayness” of death, in order to further my examination of the relationship between death and people’s daily encounter with social norms and hierarchies. I approach this issue from two interrelated directions: in the first part I re-introduce death as an actant in social activities, in the second part I discuss death as an everyday experience in people’s life.

Death and Actancy

To begin with, I share another piece of ethnography. Feb 27th, 2015 was a Jumca, a cloudy winter day. After prayer I chatted with akhonds and mosque members for a while, then wandered to the construction debris. Two old men were there, Mr. Drang and Mr. Shou. Their topic was their mutual friends, most of whom are wrestlers.

“Hua, Ming and Liang, the brothers …” Shou recalled.

“Hua and Ming are dead.” Drang said, “… The Big Young, he is dead too.”

“That one was good! So and so’s son, he can strangle you in wrestling! He is dead too.” Shou mentioned another person.

Drang confirmed, “Yes, once he holds you in wrestling, he can force you down anyway.”

“And, Light (nickname) was good, too!” Shou said.

“Light is still alive?” Drang wondered.

“No way…” Show answered.

“He is dead too?! How comes? Hahahaha…” Drang laughed.

…

194 “Biao was a good wrestler too! He had a trick of faking fall-down. Really good.”

Shou praised Biao, another smart wrestler who is still alive.

“Not good anymore. Several days ago? He challenged me, … I threw him on the ground twice, a piece of cake.” Drang was quite proud. …

This conversation is about dead wrestlers, but more about a dying era, in which the deceased and raconteurs were all young and wild. But now, most of the good ones are dead ones, and although Biao is still alive, he was so old that Drang, himself an old man in his 60s can easily defeat him. They were all pillars of their families and strong wrestlers, but now the only way for them to review their heydays is in memory. These old men were recalling the past but at the same time using the past to comment on the present. The Space of Death is not only about the deceased, but about the living as well.

Moreover, as I have been arguing through this dissertation, a hierarchy is also observable in this Space of Death. Drang and Shou also wrestle, but apparently are not among the best ones, or, in other words, lower in the hierarchy of wrestlers. But at the moment when this conversation took place, a new actant: death, sets in to change the hierarchy. This actant is more decisive than other actants such as wrestling skills, physical strength or mental sharpness. Death acts suddenly but also gradually.

Wrestlers started to lose their competence while aging, and when time ultimately takes them away, they can only be competent in memories of the good old days. In the Space of Death, Drang, Shou and actually Death defeated other wrestlers: these two can still laugh, joke, brag and even wrestle, while the deceased can only interact

195 with them in the kingdom of reminiscence. This, is probably the reason that in their talking about their deceased acquaintances, my collaborators did not appear to be melancholic, but used a lighthearted tone and sporadic laughter to decorate their conversation. Besides, there was a comparison: the skillful but dead wrestlers vs. the not so skillful but still alive Drang and Shou. This comparison delivers a message that oddly highlights the living ones’ lively power in a narrative about the deceased, i.e. in a Space of Death. In recalling the past shared with the dead, people are able to celebrate a present which still has an “I” in it.

“Hierarchies” on all the levels in a society are the capitalization of former experiences. In this conversation in particular and in my dissertation in general, these hierarchies are ripe for “events” to disturb them and re-distribute social capitals.

Death as the most severe rupture and uncontrollable actant in any human society, offers such events or moments, in which new capitalizations are realized and social capitals are either consumed or accumulated.

However, although death as an actant disrupt or even cease the flow of everyday life for every individual that experiences it in various capacities, death always performs its actancy within the frame of the everyday. Scholars have pointed out that death is “universal everyday occurrences” (although it is “also extra- ordinary life moments for those touched by the death of a significant person in their lives” see

Maddrell 2009, 677, also in Maddrell and Sidaway 2010). This is of course not to say death happens every day in the community in question (in my case the village), but to claim an “everydayness” of death, an indispensable part of human life. I will detail this argument below.

196

Death and Everydayness

Although death is not an experience that haunts my collaborators daily, it remains part of the everyday life that they live–through rituals, talks, memories … of their own and those of other people.

Firstly, one person’s death may be his/her ending note in this world, but it also initiates another everydayness of his/her life after death. Death, of an individual or in general, also becomes an everyday that is experienced in multiple ways by the living people. For instance, in Chapter 1, Mal’s death becomes a topic for not only the villagers’ chat sessions but also my dissertation; in Chapter 2, the conflicting funerals are discussed, making the deceased a center of social life and an instance that can be referred to when similar situations happens in the future; in Chapter 3, many talks and practices about death help villagers (re)perceive their religion and co-villagers; in

Chapter 4, the deceased are incorporated into local people’s fear of supernatural powers and resurrected in their imaginary village landscape. In the conversation between Drang and Shou cited above, the dead wrestlers keep revisiting the two old men’s memories and this helps them position themselves in the past and also the present.

Secondly, as Lefebvre reminds us, “everyday … is the place where repetition and creativity meet and confront each other” (Lefebvre 2014, 533). Therefore, everydayness does not only consist of routinization and institutionalization: creativity and “spontaneity” should be considered as part of everydayness too. Death, as an

“eruptive event” (see Merrifield 2006, 44) represents an extreme form of creativity

197 and “spontaneity,” a resistance against calculation. Although not in a Marxist sense, it is interesting to fit death into the idea of “spontaneity” in that death violently and randomly offers opportunities for disrupting institutionalized and routinized everyday life. This “creativity” rests (or rather, becomes restless?) in people’s artful talks and practices observed throughout this dissertation on various occasions: in the conflicting funerals “creativity” is the negotiation of a new sequence of funerals; in the talks about death rituals it is the old men’s creative interpretation of religious activities and a way to criticize akhonds; in the narratives about lethal supernatural powers it is the way people change and interpret their daily landscapes to come to terms with death, and also add a poetic rhetoric to the village’s everyday scenes.

Death is like festivals, which “contrasted violently with everyday life, but they were not separate from it” (Michel Trebitsch in Lefebvre 2014, 23). For Lefebvre, revolution and festival are the same, they “mark both a break in everyday life and a rehabilitation of the everyday” (ibid, 24). Although I do not intend to claim that they are all the same, here we can at least appreciate the likeness between death, festival and revolution in terms of their ability of disturbing and rejuvenating everyday life at the same time.

To a society, these practices and talks pose real and concrete “challenges” in

Lefebvre’s sense (about “challenge,” see Lefebvre 2014, 520-5). Although he used this idea to analyze a larger scale of society, say that of the modern world or of modern people in general, it could be appropriated here as he says “challenge appears openly in all areas and at every level of social reality” and of course, we could expand it to more social “realities,” to use the term loosely. The idea of “challenge” is linked

198 to “mistrust” or “fear” and it “puts the solidity of existing structures permanently to the test” (ibid, 522). However, under most circumstances challenge is covert, it

“resembles tolerance and understanding” (ibid, 523) but once put into certain metamorphoses, it becomes explicit: Space of Death is such a context and itself a mediator, where challenge is activated to be considered seriously by various social agents, to form a moment of transformation or at least reconsideration of the current social norm(s), and reify a new possibility or possibilities. Space of Death is everyday, it nonetheless challenges everyday. Death is equal, but it leaves

“inequality” to be understood and solved by the alive.

Noteworthy is, however, after the challenge and questioning of certain hierarchy, the achieved “harmony” is still “unstable” and “makeshift,” as de Certeau warns us

(1988, 86). Daily experienced/lived social norms and hierarchies are not dead and waiting negatively for the critique to happen, they are also lively and most of the time dominant. The norms and hierachies, in turn, criticize the “moments” that disrupt them, and endeavor to render any challenges ridiculous and ephemeral. But it is exactly due to this unstable and makeshift balance between norms/hierarchies and challenges, that everyday life gains its vitality.

Thirdly, death ruptures and disturbs if looking from the perspective of linear time because it breaks one person’s daily routine such as waking up, going to work, leisure after work and so forth. But it actually becomes a quite normal actant who keeps revisiting everyone’s life if positioned into social, and cyclic time scales.

An individual always balances between solitude and community, and death is one way by which personal rhythm intertwines with communal time. Just as described in

199 this dissertation, other than helping people address social hierarchies, a space of death is also where death disturbs the “idiorrythmie:” “the subtle forms of the way one lives” (Barthes in Sheringham 2006, 202); or where talks and practices about death force people reflect on the finiteness of their taken for granted routine.

Cyclic time scales “submerged themselves immediately and directly in the rhythms of nature, in cosmic time scales” (Lefebvre 2014, 343). Any individual lives from birth to death is repeating the rhythms that have and will be experienced by many others, or human beings as a whole.

Fourthly, although death may be something that every individual desires to avoid, postpone or at least soften the suffering of it, it is part of being human, and what “Da- sein” itself requires in order to realize its alternative way of existence:

“[i]t is not a point that Dasein approaches. Rather, it is something that comes to Dasein. Death is not something in the future that is not yet present, but it is very much a part of Dasein’s existence” (Heidegger in Carnevale 2005, 6).

Death makes life possible, not only in the biological sense, but also in the philosophical sense.

Understandably, therefore, “death” as an active actant has also been repetitively visiting my life of academia and memory since my dissertation writing. During this time, I fell several times down a rabbit hole of the time spent in the field, with my collaborators, now dead or still alive. I found a picture I took during the Eid l-Fitr of

2013 for old man Mal sitting on the bench in front of the mosque hall. He liked the picture and put it on his table. Now it serves as “a powerful memory-generating assemblage of signs assuring mourners that the deceased are still present and living in people’s hearts forever” (Green 2002, 1013, on Hallam and Hockey 2001).

200 In the picture, Mal was neatly dressed though he was crooked, an aftermath of hard manual labor in his heydays. With a white goatee, white cap, clean and collared white shirt, and a pair of grey trousers, he could now forever look out of the frame with a peaceful smile on his face.

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211 Appendix: A Partial and Brief Description of Ms. Ha’s Funeral

This description is mainly about Ms. Ha’s funeral, but it also includes experiences from other funerals to give a more comprehensive picture of the funeral scene.

It was impossible for me to attend both funerals, so I chose to go to Ms. Ha’s. On the next day, I arrived at Ms. Ha’s house at around 8:30. Some people had already arrived, standing or sitting in and out of the yard. The south-facing main hall of the flat house was separated from the hustle in the yard by a green curtain. Ms. Ha was lying behind it on the washing bed with the company of some of her close female relatives and the women akhonds. The supervisors set up two tables for collecting cash gift.

I greeted Ms. Ha’s family members and waited there for about ten minutes before

Imam Shir and old man Tal’s arrival for reciting Surah Taha. One belief is that the recitation of Taha can save the deceased from the disturbance of snakes in the graveyard. Sitting on benches in the yard in front of a couple of burning Balan

Incense sticks,50 akhonds told me that Mr. Geh’s funeral was processed smoothly and now akhonds Su, Na and San and mosque members including Yu were at the graveyard. Supervisors ordered the main hall to be vacated, leaving only the Old

Women Akhond and her assistants so that they could prepare Ms. Ha for her final departure.

After about half an hour, mosque members and other akhonds started to arrive too, and Imam Shir and old man Tal soon finished recitation. We started to chat

50 In Chinese Balan Xiang, thin incense sticks used by Muslims in China on occasions like festivals and rituals.

212 pleasantly in the yard, sitting behind the male relatives. Our topics included the Old

Woman Akhond’s slow way of washing the body and overgenerous use of paper napkins, improvement of mosque equipment for washing corpse, and how to deliver a lamb with the lowest risk of catching Brucellosis disease. Ms. Ha’s close relatives, men on the left side women the right, were also chatting about various topics from summer shoes to this morning’s breakfast. People’s voices jointly form a background sound resembling that from a swarm of bees. I saw Ms. Ha’s granddaughters were sobbing for their loss, and wails burst out now and then with formulaic mourning words “never to be seen, my mother (zai ye jian bu dao mian de wo de niang),” mainly from the women although wailing is not encouraged in Islam (for instance see

Halevi 2007, 120).

At around 9:10, the Old Woman Akhond started washing and Ms. Ha’s sons were asked to take turns pouring the water. Each son would wail the words “never to be seen, my mother” once, when carrying the water to sand piles and stopped wailing after their task. Then they were sent to Ms. Ha’s “mother’s family” in the east village to kneel down in front of them, in order to invite them here.

After some ten minutes, mosque member Yu, akhonds Na and San arrived with the vehicle hearsing the dead body. Another ten minutes passed and the Old Woman

Akhond lifted the curtain and asked people to carry in the “dry bier,” a board on which the dead body will be carried down the tomb. Almost simultaneously, the

“mother’s family,” men and women, arrived and started to line up. It was around

9:30. It really takes time to invite them, but it seems that no one of this gang wanted

213 to make trouble this time. They simply moaned for some seconds and stood there, chatting.

Another fifteen minutes passed, the washing bed was carried out. The Old Woman

Akhond ordered mosque members and akhonds to come into the main hall to “pass the incense” meaning to stand at the foot of the dead body, which was covered with green cloth, passing an incense burner with Balan incense burning in it for three rounds, while takbeers (“allahu akbar” meaning “Allah the Greatest”) were chanted by Imam Shir four times as an altered version of funerary prayers over the deceased.

After that some young men came in and moved Ms. Ha’s body to the yard, where all the relatives uttered loud wailings together for about one minute upon seeing the body on the bier, then another ceremony of “passing the Quran” was on. Akhonds stood at the head of the corpse and Imam Shir held a Quran in hands. The supervisor of the funeral called people’s names, from the deceased’s direct descendants to more distanced relatives, and from male relatives to female ones. The one being called would step forward, give the cash gift to the akhond, receive the Quran from him and then pass the Quran to the second akhond, and receive it again from the second akhond and pass it to the third akhond again… till s/he completed receiving the Quran from and passing it to every akhond. The akhonds took turns reciting: “This contribution is to compensate the prayers and fasts the deceased failed to observe, and to redeem him/her from sins in his/her lies and fake oaths.” I could hardly understand this prayer, so I consulted Imam Wang Guanming in my hometown. He told me it is a mixture of Arabic and Persian.

214 This ceremony took about 15 minutes, but normally the time really depends on how many families are present. Ms. Ha has a large family, so her sons, daughters, grandchildren… everyone passed the Quran for him/herself or his/her family but relatives who are more distanced from Ms. Ha only sent family representatives to pass the Quran.

Then the bier was carried on the vehicle waiting outside of the yard, and people started to move to the graveyard via various transportation methods, and when walking toward the vehicle, Ms. Ha’s sons said the formulaic mourning word of

“never to be seen, my mother,” and they kowtowed to the people sending off their mother every couple of steps.

Now it was almost 11:00. Recalling yesterday’s dispute, if Ms. Ha’s funeral were to be the first one, the akhonds would have arrived at Mr. Geh’s at around 12:00, and

Mr. Geh’s funeral would have to be postponed to the afternoon.

It took 5 minutes to drive to the graveyard. The grave was already prepared. Its vertical cross section is “L” shaped, meaning there is a small side room for the corpse to lie in.

A helper of the mosque, Mr. Lu, rode a tricycle to carry some shovels to the graveyard, so that male relatives and akhonds could shovel the soil to cover the corpse. It is a regular job for Mr. Lu. He is quite poor, and this job can earn him some money. He has another way of earning life: every Friday, the day of the Jumca prayer,

Lu wanders in the village streets to “call for Jumca (han zhu ma),” so that people are aware that today is the day for congregational prayer, and some people may give 0.5

215 or 1 RMB (approx.. a dime of USD) to him. He sometimes also begs at different mosques.

All relatives wore mourning garments. Close relatives should wear three pieces: headwear, waistband and trousers (xiao maozi, xiao daizi, xiao ku), distanced relatives wear headwears and waistbands, even more distanced ones wear waistbands. But how to define who is close is difficult, so sometimes if one person does not get proper garments may turn upset, because his/her relationship with the deceased is underestimated. People also ask for more pieces to show their good relation with the deceased.

The process at the graveyard was fast. Akhonds cooperated to place the corpse into the grave. Na is normally the one who jumps into the grave and adjust the position of the corpse, which is put down on the bier by other akhonds and male relatives. The bier has ropes tied on it so people can drag the ropes to hang the bier down and place it into the grave. When the corpse is properly placed with her face to the west, Na ordered the bier to be retrieved. He then used a large stone to block the entrance of the small side room, and climbed out of the grave. All akhonds kneeled down at the grave to recite Quran verses. Male relatives started to grab the shovels brought by Mr. Lu and fill the grave. People wailed, and took turns to place cash gift wrapped in white paper in the plastic bags in front of each akhond.

The grave was soon filled up and people started to return to their own places.

Some relatives and friends of Ms. Ha returned to her house to have a feast. Akhonds returned to the mosque in the hearse, Mr. Lu rode the tricycle back with all the

216 shovels. The whole process took about forty minutes. The next day, the cushions and benches borrowed from the mosque were returned.

217