Challenging Eurocentric Approaches to “Ancestor Worship”: Family Rituals and the Hungry Ghost Festival in China

• In Event: Diverse Visions and Perspectives on the Sociology of Religion

Abstract

A growing body of research has been challenging problematic Eurocentric approaches to research on religious and spiritual practices. Extending these conversations, this paper critically assesses the narrow definition of belief as the motivator for spiritual activity. Scholars have called attention to the persistent casting of spiritual activities in Protestant forms, including the assumption that a confessed belief in a set of cosmological propositions is the primary reason for religious and spiritual undertakings. However, alternative approaches that capture the ontological variation behind spiritual practices remain limited. This paper builds on this critical scholarship and proposes a more inclusive conceptual framework to better understand the intentions and reasoning behind the activities of offering food and paper gifts to the spirits and souls of the deceased, which more than 1 billion people in China practice regularly. By continuing to relate to the dead as social entities, participants hold a theory of knowledge that privileges social realism as much as biological corporeality. We explain why the oft-used term “ancestor worship” is misleading and argue that “family rituals” is a more accurate one. Drawing from field observations and 59 in-depth interviews of residents of a Chinese village ahead of the Hungry Ghost Festival, it identifies four coexisting types of belief underlying the spiritual activity: cosmological, relational, experiential, and instrumental. By doing so, this paper contributes to the expanding research that de-centers longstanding analytic tendencies in the sociology of religion.

Authors

• Becky Yang Hsu, Georgetown University

• Liu Zhuang, Yunnan Minzu University