Introduction: An Outline of a Theoretical Platform

This essay attempts an exploration into comparative iconic cosmography and tries to answer a simple empirical question: if the Chinese visit graves and imply that they are visiting rice fields, do the Shan, by visiting rice fields, imply that they are visiting the dead?Footnote ¹

Any study of symbolism must be informed by a theory of human production and use of symbols. The main idea that advises this essay is that we must allow for shifting positions in terms of ontological perspectives as an analytical strategy for the exploration of a corpus of ethnography. An ontology defines the location system by which things and events in the world are to be individuated. It works as a grammar. The present essay will not argue a theoretical positioning.Footnote ² A few points should be mentioned though, in support of the exploration conducted in the following pages.

The account will take as its starting point the proposition that the study of human activities can usefully employ three essentially different and yet equally valid scientific perspectives. These three ‘orders’ each call for an approach of their own. One province to be so explored is the ‘discursive order’. It concerns intentional performative acts of men and women in a society, and their on-going conversation about themselves and the world, including arguments, comments, explanations, exegeses and nonsense. Discursive analysis implies an accounting for human acts within an ontology which is a pragmatically construed universe emerging in the communicative interaction of an array of people using language and language-like types of codes.

Another perspective would concern activity in accordance with human iconic codes in the visionary building of possible worlds, forming an imagery understood by cultural intuitions. In this little known field of “thinking in terms of pictures”, we are dealing with symbolic displays of strong expressive force, but with little communicative value. This is a realm of symbolism working outside language and thus without truthful reporting and referential meaning. What we deal with is pictorially encoded information, well beyond what can be retrieved introspectively by a speaker's or thinker's verbally carried thought and linguistic competence. Language and iconology are entirely different sorts of codes, neither being instrumental for reaching into the other.

Iconic images as used in social life make manifest people's intuitive cognizance as to what ultimately conditions social and personal existence. Such manifestations bring about visions of alternate existences and their construction allows an exploration of realities otherwise unknown. Iconic images are essentially separated from the world of everyday living in that, as they become composed, they create their own realities—they are grounded only in themselves and in their construction: symbols will be used to buttress symbols.

This sphere of activity suggests studies into how textures of complex imagery are accomplished by an integration of less inclusive icons into ever more comprehensive clusters. The grammar of such image-making is one of architecture rather than syntax, and works largely independent of mundane facts. The study of the iconic order then, presupposes an ontology which is a visionary construed universe emerging in the communicative interaction of an array of people using codes that employ pictures. The iconic order is characteristically modal, producing many possible worlds, some between them harmonising, others in stark contradiction.

The third ‘operational order’ of the anthropological vision is a realist one in which facts are detected, causality reigns and truths are linked by linear time. In our present concern this dimension will be only subsumed.

We must always keep in mind that the orders discussed here form dimensions of the indivisible person producing expressive symbolism. Needless to say, what is suggested is in the nature of research strategies. We cannot expect unfolding empirical events to be clearly tagged for easy classification in accordance with this or any other preconceived scheme.

So, iconic image-making manifests people's intuitive insights. By its manifestation (temporarily or permanently), such imagery suggests meaningful ‘readings’ which, in a sense, have neither beginning nor end, because what we see are glimpses of something more comprehensive, quotes from a narration of eternity. It is true, of course, that from the perspective of a realist universe, images occur in linear time. In terms of an iconic universe this is of little importance, its phenomena having their own time dimensions. Just as actual births and deaths are temporal instances of constantly continuing processes of generation and extinction, imagery makes known at points in time what exists forever.

The messages produced in an iconic code are dramatically suggestive rather than textually narrative. As mentioned, iconic symbolism carries messages that have no truth aspect. Referring only to other images, they do not connect with the realist world and so do not report in a true or false way. Veracity in the world of images is established by way of repetition; it is in the lack of corruption through change that authenticity is established. Complete repetitiveness appears as permanence and what is permanent has veracity because of its very permanence.

The symbological method can never lead to finally ‘proven’ results; rather, what we gain are appropriate suggestions, a kind of simulacra of the cultural intuitions that members of a society are believed to have. The symbologist's difficult task is to translate motifs from non-verbal iconic codes into messages of linguistic accounting, from texture into text.

It was said above that the iconic order is modal. There is no reason to assume that a cultural tradition is a homogeneous affair in the sense that customs and conventions could be expected to form one single integrated logical pattern giving structure to and control of a society. Rather, there is much that indicates that a cultural tradition embraces a number of ‘modalities’, each with its own given presuppositions. A culture—in the sense of a corpus of symbols—is an agglomerate of construed potential universes. Human beings live, not in one homogenous society, but simultaneously in many possible worlds. In this essay data formed under different circumstances and at different times will be read anew in the light of symbological analysis and synthesis.

Some Glimpses of Historical Anthropology

Historical anthropology is different from anthropological history, or ethno-history. The latter branch studies the factual history of various peoples and ‘tribes’. Historical anthropology is the endeavour to approach data from the past in terms of anthropological thinking. Historical anthropologists try to reach an understanding by cross-relating the items of a corpus of ethnographic data. A main historical flaw in historical anthropologists’ accounting is that they flatten time, reading together reports well spread in time. And yet, there is purpose in this in that such a cross-reading over a span of centuries will provide us with yet another dimension of telling variation—we achieve an ‘intercontemporality’. By a holistic approach they draw together ecology, production, social system and iconic expression into an all-embracing exploration of the cultural semantics of the events they study.

When anthropologists approach a people of the past to learn about their society, they will not be looking at them primarily as involved in an on-going chain of causality, but rather as somehow enacting a dynamic system. An anthropologist will search out a theoretical position enabling him to make data spring alive. He will allow a generalised, synthetic knowledge to inform his speculation around the specific data. The way the anthropologist will read the pieces of evidence over which he broods, will, in the end, relate to the structure of his theory. The fragmentary and disparate character of what is historically known stimulates anthropological speculation. The basic question asked is this: how would that society look which has generated the untidy bits of scattered evidence which are available in the given set of sources that report on that society?

Anthropologists are inquisitive about pragmatic phenomena, but they may be somewhat less concerned with how the various findings relate in terms of chains of causality. They will look for patterns. They will assume that phenomena like celebrations and architecture are rebus-like exhibitions conveying imaginary messages. In processes of deconstruction they will lean on procedures of identification of recurring elements, contextual examination, juxtapositions of varying contextual significations—and finally return to where they started, proposing a new reading of the original event. So a set of iconic messages will emerge. Iconic studies provide us with often unexpected insights into the symbolic foundation and underpinnings of a society. There is one paradox here—what we will encounter in the historical material is a finite set of possible answers to which we have to find the right questions.

Symbols, so far we know, occur in clusters with systemic interrelationships. The systemic nature of iconic symbolism (which we must take for granted—in fact there is not much option) allows us to impute retrieved cultural significance into the given data. In this way anthropologists will produce a vision of a possible society and does so by borrowing the historical realist fact and dressing it up in their own special knowledge of cultural processes. The explanatory force of this narration will rest on their ability to account for all the given data, leaving aside as few inexplicable ‘exceptions’ as possible. What is requested is that they should not only account for all the given data but, furthermore, their suggestions must also be capable of accommodating all possible new data that might emerge from future diligence in the historical field. The more data that the explanation accommodates, the stronger is its exegetic power. The present essay in historical anthropology will explore the symbological methods. It deals with complex materials from two different societies and could be characterised as a study in comparative iconic cosmography. It aims at an explanation founded in contrast and variation.

What can refute one such anthropological hypothesis concerning the features of societies of the past, is a more comprehensive suggestion that can better account for all available data.

The Empirical Setting

In this essay, I wish to discuss the prospect of comparison in anthropological reasoning, in particular comparison between certain features of ‘traditional’ southern Chinese society and some conventions that were to be found, a long time ago now, in the former Shan States, in the northern parts of Burma. The Shan are thought to have originated in the Chinese province of Yunnan and other domains in the Chinese south, where many still live.Footnote ³ What we know for sure is that Tai-speaking populations have existed in the China border areas and further north for a very long time. The phenomena on which I wish to focus here belong predominantly to the iconic sphere of human action, characterised by visual expression and intuitive knowledge. The main question to be raised by way of juxtaposition refers to a cluster of rice-sowing rituals in China known as Qingming. I show that this vernal Chinese celebration bears some family resemblance to the festival that introduces the annual cycle of rice cultivation in the Shan states.Footnote ⁴ What I shall examine are two conventional clusters of symbols that recur annually in their respective regions and that seem to play analogous parts in their relevant universes of iconic meaning-making. On a more ambitious level I am seeking some kind of transformational iconic grammar. This essay is admittedly just a sketch—a more elaborate plan would involve an empirically much wider corpus of data drawing on various parts of Southeast Asia as a whole. However, a grand project of that kind must be deferred for the time being, as for the present it seems more productive (and realistic) to work step by step towards making broader suggestions as to the formation of the Southeast Asian world. The path leading in that direction will certainly be both circuitous and full of traps, though anthropological curiosity invites us to follow its winding course. To avoid the lure of frivolity and bring a measure of orderliness to the associative procedure involved in doing this, a limited ‘experimental’ discussion of the kind suggested here may be appropriate.

Qingming in Southern China

There is thus one basic similarity in iconic imagery that associates the Chinese celebration of Qingming with the Shan festivity of Tabaung. In China on certain days in the spring season people set out from their homes to penetrate ‘Nature’, or, at least, they move away from the built-up areas where they live and search out places which stand in some visual contrast to their everyday environment. In southern China people walk out to the family graves that are always in a peripheral area but are clearly marked in some distinct way to tell the visitor that these sites are different. Burial sites are always separated from residential areas in various ways. Graves are often placed high up on the hillsides—visits may require long and strenuous walks—or at the edges of cultivated fields. Sometimes they are laid out singly and sometimes they form clusters. Often the dead are buried in special cemeteries, removed from villages and towns. However, should such a graveyard be located in the vicinity of a residential area, it is always very clearly demarcated, and people do not go there. Graves may be dug out from the ground, or they may form raised tumuli, all according to a multitude of local conventions.

When the Chinese visit their graves in the spring, what is symbolically implied is that they pay social visits to their dead forbears, who are the residents of the graves and in the earth. The graves are cleaned, weeded and swept. Picnicking at a grave implies commensality with the dead, food and eating together being a cement for the building and maintenance of kinship relations. In a sense, such ritual situations transgress and deny the progress of time, connoting completeness. Rice in various forms and transformations is given to the dead, and it is expected that the ancestors will respond in a reciprocal way by giving rice also, that is, rice emerging from the earth.Footnote ⁵

In southern China social continuity over time with regard to houses, land, production and offspring is organised in terms of a kinship system implying a clustering of persons around the principle of agnation. People live and work within patrilineages that extend back in time to include several generations of dead forebears. The dead are revered in residential houses, special ancestral halls and at their gravessides, connected with cults that have different implications.Footnote ⁶

In practical life, as spring approaches in southern China, people become increasingly involved in the new agricultural season and the planting of rice. In the first phase the irrigated seedbeds are prepared for sowing, then sown with grain. Furthermore, irrigation systems have to be examined and repaired in anticipation of the later stage when the large paddy fields will be flooded with water in order to receive transplants of young green shoots later on; this happens towards midsummer, when the monsoon rains arrive.

Qingming is a cardinal feast of the calendar in these southern areas of ChinaFootnote ⁷ and takes place soon after the vernal equinox. The major calendar date for the opening of this ritual season is the beginning of the solar term (in the Chinese annual cycle of twenty-four such terms) called Qingming or ‘Clear and Bright’, which usually falls on 6 April. This is the time when the graves of dead family and lineage members are visited. The catastasis of the cluster of symbols brought together in the ritual events seems to express a concern with agriculture in that the story line of the iconic symbolism implies, figuratively, the practical preparation and sowing of the seedbeds.

Thus, in the Qingming festival offerings are made to the ancestors at their graves in the form of food, wine, paper money and incense. In the sweeping and mending of the graves, we encounter a trope on the cluster of acts relating to sowing. Just as the graves are cleaned and repaired, so the seedbeds are weeded and mended. An offering of food and wine, and (as in the Lake Dongting area) the placing of an image of a rice plant (a bamboo twig with paper money), take place on the grave. The sowing of rice in the nurseries is also a kind of parallel offering, but it is made to the dead in the earth, in the seedbeds. Essentially, the spring offerings on the graves and the sowing of rice in the seedbeds are two complementary expressive forms that combine in providing the ancestors buried in the earth with gifts of rice.

In southern China, rice is ‘agnatic stuff’ that emerges from ancestors buried in the earth. Rice plants—and later ears of grain—form a counter-presentation to the gifts of rice that their living progeny have given them at the Qingming offerings. The ancestors supply the vegetative power of rice and generate the plants and their ears of grains. Rice mediates between the living and the dead in both directions and substantiates both. In the iconic understanding of the world, eating the rice that has emerged from the ancestors creates agnatic kinship. Rice is a key, central factor in social life, whether in the comprehensions of factual realism, social discourse or imaginary iconology.

About Chinese Ancestors

An excursive note on ancestor worship is in place here. The cult of the dead in southern China has taken three clearly separate forms. As we have seen, one set of rituals treats the ancestors as a set of physical remains, mainly as bones in graves and soft tissues that have seeped into the earth. Another set is centred on the ancestral representations known as ‘ancestral tablets’.

Wooden tablets to memorialise the dead are, as a matter of broad principle, individual, each deceased male (but often also incorporating a deceased wife) being represented by one tablet. There are tablets for domestic worship and tablets for special ancestral halls. On occasion we find that many of the deceased share one large tablet, but then the usual practice is for the tablet to provide the names in different parts of its surface so that the notion of single person is maintained. There are cases when agnatic links are reduced to a sequence of generations, and then the dead do indeed appear superficially together as a collective representation, but even then there is the important implication that this representation of a lineage contains a structure of generations, incorporating individuals.Footnote ⁸

There are also graphic ways of depicting the chains of agnatic relationships through history in the form of written genealogies and diagrams. Ancestral painted portraits are important on certain ritual occasions in several regionsFootnote ⁹ The distribution of ownership of land in the landscape is also an indicative map of the composition of a lineageFootnote ¹⁰

For our present purpose this very crude sketch must suffice. Let us now turn to the Shan States for some further ethnographic information.

About the Shan

The Shan populations of Burma, Thailand and China occupy the river valleys, where they cultivate rice in irrigated fields. Rice land and rice cultivation are to them essential to notions of basic belongingFootnote ¹¹ In Shan local organisation, it is the land holding itself that forms the element of structural continuity. The land-owning group is conceived as all the descendants of the first owner, who usually acquired his tenancy either by squatting or by being granted it by the ruling king in return for services rendered.Footnote ¹² The Shan have an open bilateral kinship system. In practice, ownership and control of land is confined to those descendants of the original owner who continue to reside on and draw a livelihood from that land. Strictly speaking, rights in land cannot be sold.Footnote ¹³ The residents in a rural settlement relate to each other through their similar relationships to the land they cultivate.

Another, most important criterion of group ‘identity’ is that all Shan are Theravada Buddhists. The religious environment in the Shan States is intensely Buddhist and has been so since the early centuries ce.Footnote ¹⁴

Omitting the former category of slaves, there are nominally two main castes in Shan society. The nobility should in theory include everyone who can trace any genealogical connection with the ruling saohpa or king. In view of the principle of bilateral descent, the total number of people who might be able to claim such a kinship connection is large. However, patrilineal connection is more important than matrilineal in these circles, the king being descended from an agnatic lineage of divine origin. The nobility is thought of as a hereditary caste. Wealth is also an important factor in the maintenance of patrician status. The ordinary class of farmers till the fields, and their main interest is in their land. Numerically these farmers form the largest element in the population.Footnote ¹⁵

The saohpa, or king, is himself the residual owner of the fields in his realm, and his right to control territorial forces is made legitimate and authoritative by a set of politico-symbolic contracts established in a series of myths. This is important, as the king himself, as a person, is alienated from his territory by being divine in nature and celestial in belonging. His rule in the mundane world is based on violence, contract and Buddhism. When a king dies, his body is not buried, as is the case for other people, but cremated. His ashes and what is left of his bones are placed in a personal royal tumulus, well above the surface of the earth, its architectural form indicating an upward, heavenly direction and the final distancing of kingship from the earth.Footnote ¹⁶

Ordinary Shan, both men and women, are thus not cremated, but buried in the ground. I return to this later.

Tabaung in the Shan States

The material from the Shan States concerning agricultural rituals is fragmentary in character, even more so than the data from southern China, and can only lend itself to a sketchy account. The Shan ethnography with which we deal here comes mainly from the kingdoms of Kengtung and Hsen Wi.Footnote ¹⁷

When a Shan farmer starts the season by sowing the paddy seed in nursery beds, he also makes an offering to the spirit of the nursery, asking for protection for the tender shoots. Later on, when the grown rice shoots are transplanted, another offering is made, this time to the guardian spirit of the rice field. We learn that one may see numerous poles stuck into the ground in the fields, which are usually situated at the centre of the cultivated area. To these tall poles are attached offering cups in which are placed gifts to the guardian spirit of the rice field.Footnote ¹⁸

The festival that opens the agricultural year in the Shan States is called Tabaung. The festival falls at the full moon in March and lasts four or five days. On this occasion in Kengtung the king and all the townspeople go out and camp in the dry paddy fields for a few days. Paper pagodas, or pya-that, are brought along. Rockets are fired and temporarily legalised, and gambling is indulged in. Also in town there is a great outdoor festival, where boisterous parties eat meals at little tables in Chinese ‘eating-booths’, presumably small open-air places for eating meals. In Buddhist Burma at large, this festival is one of visiting temples, as is the case in Kengtung. During this time many temporary booths are erected adjacent to the brick pagodas at the end of the Kengtung plain in the district of Nawng Hpa. People excitedly dance and shout during both day and night to the rhythmical beating of drums and the clanging of cymbals.Footnote ¹⁹

The king's participation in and leadership of this demotic celebration in the fields points to the overall importance of the event and the general request that his personal blessings are absorbed by the vegetative forces of the land under his sway.

Similarities and Differences

On some special days in the early spring each year, the southern Chinese and the Shan, each in their own regions, both leave their built-up areas and go into ‘Nature’. These outings are in both cases connected with picnics and are pleasant social occasions, the social eating of food being a central point in the celebrations. Nonetheless there are differences.

The Chinese go out to visit the graves of their ancestors, to worship and to celebrate a commensality that includes the dead. A symbological way of reading this ethnography is that, by visiting the graves, people are also implicitly visiting the seedbeds among the fields. Graves and seedbeds mutually imply one another. Making offerings to the ancestors and sowing the seedbeds are much the same thing. The ancestors are in the earth, and they are evoked to produce the new rice. The outing is a social visit to the deceased in the earth and also an invitation for them to make a return visit to their living progeny in their old village at some point in time. This return visit takes place in the fifth moon of the lunar year (around midsummer) at the time for the so-called Dragon Boat Festival (Duanwu), a period connected with the transplantation of the young rice shoots into the large fields.

At Tabaung, on the corresponding occasion, the Shan do not visit their ancestors’ graves, but instead they go out to the dry rice fields to camp and commemorate there. There is no obvious connection with the dead, but there are some Buddhist features, among them the taking along of models of pagodas made of paper. Given this contrast, the question arises: if the Chinese visit the graves and imply that they visit the rice fields, do the Shan imply that, by visiting the rice fields, they are also visiting the dead?

Death and Ancestry among the Shan

We have learnt that the Shan—unlike, for instance, their neighbours the Lao—bury their dead as a rule in a grove near the village or out in the jungle, and only cremate very exalted personages.Footnote ²⁰ More generally, groves adjacent to villages are sacred to the Shan, within whose quiet and silent woods dwell spirits that protect the best interests of the community. In the sacred grove the Shan pray and make offerings to the guardian spirit.Footnote ²¹

When a death occurs, the dead person is placed in a coffin, an oblong wooden case decorated with brightly coloured paper cut into geometrical patterns. An offering of a silver or copper coin and, if it can be afforded, of gems like rubies is in all cases placed on the deceased's tongue, being passage money for the boatman who ferries the spirit across the river of death. Gold and silver pieces also occur.Footnote ²² The coffin is taken out of the house and a procession is formed to bring the bier to the cemetery, led by monks. The coffin rests beneath a large canopy, sometimes in two or three tiers and decorated with coloured paper like the coffin. The canopy covering the coffin seems like a mobile pagoda. The feasting may go on for several days. Unless the dead man was an important member of the king's family, no tombstone is raised to mark the spot, and no one ever visits the grave.Footnote ²³

Burial may not be conducted immediately. An account from a visitor to the State of Manyuen tells us that underneath the ‘city temple’, through the gaping boards, one could see a number of ‘coffins freighted with dead’, waiting for a suitable occasion for interment. Heavy stones were placed on the lids to keep the dead more securely at rest. The lucky day for burial would be determined by the monks.Footnote ²⁴ We also learn of the Shan belief that during the days after a death the ‘soul’ is formless, but that afterwards it may assume a human or spirit form. One class of spirit is considered to be the ghosts of the departed dead, which either reside or hover about in the vicinity of abandoned places, particularly temples, which were once regarded as sacred and used for purpose of worship. These ghosts are regarded as malicious.Footnote ²⁵

These notes are of some help, but only some. Practices in the various Shan States may vary according to both local circumstances and Chinese, Burmese or Laotian influences. What I am aiming to arrive at in this particular context is a synthetic picture, which, however weak, may serve to provide pointers to further symbological comprehension. This idealised, constructed picture may, of course, cease to be appropriate should it be confronted with new empirical evidence that contradicts it. As pointed out in the introduction, this essay is in the nature of an experiment of thought.

According to the exordium of the rites, the deceased are supposed to traverse a river of death, and there is a fee to be paid for this. From this it may be deduced that across a river there exists some region of the dead. We also learn that the ghost of a dead person remains on earth out of the body, but near it, for three days during which it is shapeless, before acquiring either a human shape or a spirit body. But it is also said that, once the coffin has been buried, the spirit of the dead person begins his journey to Mount Meru, the great spirit mountain, which lies north of the world. We also know that there is generally a feast on the seventh day after the funeral, on which occasion the spirit returns and is present. There may also be an anniversary feast, but it seems that the spirit no longer returns thereafter.Footnote ²⁶ The Shan, as staunch believers in the transmigration of souls, say that the soul of the dead may be reborn in an infant.Footnote ²⁷

It was mentioned above that the graves are never visited. No rituals of individual remembrance or other acts of worship are held at the graves in these cemeteries. The graves, once covered up, are no longer acknowledged as being connected with particular persons, as there are no markers. The dead lose their individuality. The deceased in their graves are no longer social persons. Who you were in your former life no longer matters. The dead form an anonymous collective, a nebulous and evasive cluster of largely unknown forebears.

Such unstructured death finds its correspondence in unstructured bilateral kinship reckoning, only royalty and high nobility vesting an interest in a line which particularly stresses the chains of fatherhood. Rice farmers have no such interest in ancestry.

Contrast and Similarity: Death in China

From our present perspective, favouring juxtaposition and comparison, what can we glean from this exposition of fragmentary data? Starting with the (synthesised) Chinese case, we have noted that being dead in China is something that is highly individualised. The process of building social continuity back in time singles out individuals and chains of individuals where the links are those of fatherhood. This is not always without modifications, but as a general principle guiding Chinese cultural intuitions, as well as the informing and framing of social discourses, the proposition seems to hold. The Chinese dead are interred in individual graves,Footnote ²⁸ even when these are placed together in cemeteries or in specific sites on hillsides.

What I suggest is that the strong trend in China is—and has been for a very long time—to see death as a continuance of the individual's existential career. Having stated this, we must immediately modify it to allow also for other notions concerned with death, notions that bring out local belonging as a formative force in demotic eschatology. One cultural complex pointing in this latter direction is found in the cult of the Earth in its various forms in southern China.

Around mid-March (in the second Chinese lunar month) a festival is held called She Day. The She is a sort of earth god, the object of a former imperial cult, but also an important figure in local symbolism and cults. In some areas in the south, present-day villagers tend to see the She as a chthonic registrar of deaths and births, an earth god who is thus associated with both death and human fecundity.Footnote ²⁹ More generally it appears that in many areas the She signifies a notion of location. There is also a strong link between him and agriculture. The day of the She and its various celebrations are connected with the new planting season of rice, the breaking of the earth in the spring and the sowing of grains. Nonetheless, the rituals for the She do not mirror the acts of the cultivation of the earth.

In the Lake Dongting area, shamanistic activities are common in connection with this day. What kinds of spirits that are invited by the officiants in these rites is not clear. It may be the She himself, or it might be spirits in general, or, perhaps, the spirits of the dead, who are associated with the She. We have seen above that the She connotes death and the dead. Invoking and inviting the deceased—should this reading be correct—may have further agricultural connotations. In many places the She Day is also associated with visits and offerings to the graves of the dead, Qingming style. The day seems to be one of merriment, parties al fresco, and social games and competitions.Footnote ³⁰

The She Day is a day of agricultural renewal with offerings on the altar of the She. Like the dead, the She is a chthonic phenomenon. God and the ancestors are both active forces beneficial to the sowing of rice. How the dead relate to the She, directly or indirectly, is not empirically clear. The rituals devoted to the god of the soil solicit blessings for the coming season by means of offerings and prayers, which are sent in a downward direction to reach the divinity of subterranean domains. The underworld is also the universe of the dead in their graves. In a sense, the altar, or shrine, of the She may be intuited as a symbolic epitome of the collective of local graves, but that would imply a synthesis of death and the dead with a difference. In grave worship it is explicitly dead individuals who are addressed, and possibly also a multitude of such individuals, all of whom are brought together by a discursive grammar of agnatic kinship. We may hypothesise that the She is a manifestation of the collectivity of the dead in a particular area, an aggregation of ‘death force’ without discrimination in terms of agnatic kinship. The She brings his worshippers the blessings of vegetative power emanating from the underworld and its inhabitants for the coming crops, especially for the production of rice and the reproduction of society. Thus the cult of the Earth makes manifest a cultural modality that is different from the universe as expressed in the cult of the graves.

Contrast and Similarity: Death among the Shan—but also some more about China

Turning now to Shan society, it is striking that death is associated with a nebulous collectivity of dead and that there is no worship directed to individual deceased persons. This does not mean that the Shan are concerned neither with death nor with the deceased. Their understanding of mortuary questions is articulated through the idioms provided by the Theravada canon, a system of expression and a set of existential ideas that frame all aspects of life in the Shan States, as elsewhere in Buddhist Southeast Asia.

China has Buddhism too, in the form of the northern Mahayana canon, with its many prevailing schools of thought. Here Buddhism co-exists with a plethora of demotic cults, and also with Daoism and its many branches of teaching. At one time, in the Tang dynasty, Buddhism was something of a state ideology, but since the early Song imperial regime, from the eleventh century onwards, the Chinese state has been symbolically articulated predominantly in terms of neo-Confucianism, which has no counterpart south of the Chinese border (with the important exception of Vietnam). It is official Confucianism that has set the moral tenets for Chinese political administration.

In the Shan States, as in China, there are also local cults relating to various spiritual beings of the territory. Such demotic notions reach forcefully into the symbolic structures of the state. In neither area of concern do state doctrines have a complete monopoly but, among the Shan, Buddhism has a special status, being truly an official, all-encompassing religion with profound political implications. The king is an apical figure in this symbolic universe, though royal ideology also draws on Shaivite Hinduism.

The southern Chinese venerate their dead by practicing ancestor worship. They seek out the dead at their graves, in ancestral halls or in the main rooms of their residences. They ask the dead to partake of food and drink, and they signal and convey their sacrifices by way of the smoke of incense. On certain occasions gifts are also given to the dead in the form of clothes, utensils—even motorcars—all manufactured in paper and transferred out of this world by way of fire. Money is also conveyed this way, bank notes of large denominations drawn on the Bank of Hell. Sometimes dead relatives are married off to other dead people.

Somehow the dead carry on. It is certainly a complex matter to account for why the southern Chinese (and, with modifications, all Chinese) devote so much energy to ensuring that ancestors are benign, or at least neutral. Two reasons for this are related to the power of the dead to influence, and both reasons are connected with the social construction of long-time continuity—the birth of children and the abundance of future harvests of rice. The major calendar festivals solicit the blessings of the dead for these twofold benefits to the living.

The Chinese support their dead with food. Food is in many ways the social cement in pragmatic life. Cuisine and eating form a major cultural idiom in the symbolic construction of families and lineages in the iconic world. Ancestors must not go hungry because hunger makes fiendish ancestors turn into ‘hungry ghosts’ prone to demonic attacks. Taking a synthetic view of the cults of the dead we may say that, in terms of the discursive order, the family dead are figures of ambivalence in the domestic sphere. They also offer symbolic justifications for claims to territory and power in the public and political domain. In the iconic order the dead are perhaps more distant but providing blessings, their acts made manifest through dramas of liturgically staged tableaux vivants.

The Shan venerate their dead, not by worship but by a generalised commemoration. They do not reckon individual ancestry in the sense prevailing in southern China. We lack ethnographic detail, but it is likely that, like other Theravada Buddhists in Southeast Asia, they recognise dead parents and elders as sort of familial spirits. As already mentioned, the ‘soul’ survives after death and may take on human or spirit forms. We may safely say that there is no firm genealogical structuring or individual remembrance of dead persons much beyond the parental generation. We must understand that the Shan in no way ignore their common dead, but they venerate them within a Theravada Buddhist frame of thought, meaning that the dead move on to new existences. People do not convey offerings of food, but instead transfer merit to the dead in order to improve the status of the deceased in their future lives.

In the absence of direct evidence, I shall assume that the Shan population of northern Burma, like all other known Buddhists in Southeast Asia, are much concerned with the making of merit and do merit-making acts. Such acts include the donation of gifts of food to the monks. Most ceremonies performed in homes, in temples and at funerals are merit-making, especially those to which monks have been invited; we may expect that such merit-making is enhanced whenever the monks reward the donors with the blessings they chant.

The idea of merit is to accumulate the effect of beneficial deeds in order to enhance one's existential career, particularly in the next allotted life, when one has been reborn into the ‘real’ world. But this merit, which people gain by doing good things, is also shared by transferring some of it to the gods and to other human beings. An important aspect of this is that merit-making is also a gift to the dead. A common ritual transfer of merit to the deceased takes the simple form of pouring water on to the ground. At a funeral women offer water in the name of the dead to anyone who may be thirsty. This is to provide the deceased with merit.Footnote ³¹ Grace so transferred is then intended for the dead to convert into better chances and increasingly favourable conditions for their coming material welfare in the new phases of their existence. Merit-making through giving water is especially marked at the Tagoo festival in April (which is also the Burmese New Year). This is the time when the annual drought ends with the first showers of the monsoon rains. The Tagoo is the ‘Water Festival’. People energetically drench one another with buckets of water. This obsession with water is everywhere.Footnote ³²

Especially elderly people have come to concentrate on doing meritorious work. Women cease to wear colours in their clothes or to use ornaments. They spend much of their time in the monasteries, where they sweep the floors with brushes of peacock's feathers and see to it that offerings of fresh flowers are always present. Old men also go to the temples, often remaining there the whole day listening to the monks.Footnote ³³ Both men and women become more detached, being drawn into the circle of the temples, becoming increasingly similar to monks and nuns and, by implication, becoming increasingly dead. As ‘nearly dead’ people, they are specially venerated.

There is yet another Shan convention which is of interest in connection with agriculture: a great festival in October, which in Hsen Wi is celebrated at about the time of the rice harvest. This is a festival of renewal when everyone must have new clothes. On that occasion women prepare great streamers, which, attached to bamboos, are raised in remembrance of dead relatives or friends. These streamers are from 30 to 90 centimetres wide, and are often many metres in length. They may be of plain cloth, but some are ornamented with geometric designs cut out of gold paper. Others consist of thin white cotton cloth, covering many small hoops of bamboo so that this kind of streamer has the form of a very long, narrow cylinder. They carry no texts and no names.Footnote ³⁴

Sometimes the streamers are not simply white, but are embroidered with elaborate designs. Pagodas and birds are represented. There is generally a boat in which one or more boatmen are rowing a passenger across a river, and the water is full of fish. The women who do the needlework provide the exordium that the man in the boat is a monk. This exegesis seems discursively to bring a death aspect out of the iconic order, monks being associated with death. We saw earlier that coins and valuables are put into the mouth of the deceased to serve as passage money for a ferryman taking him or her into the realm of death, and certainly the embroidered figure on the streamer depicts this transfer.

The poles and streamers are raised in memory of the dead, and it is believed that the latter will in some way benefit from this ritualised remembrance of them. A likely implication is that this display gives merit to those who raise them, but above all for the dead who are thus remembered.

When the bamboo with its streamer attached is to be raised on the day of the festival, it is carried by men to an open space near a monastery. Women walk behind and assist by supporting the streamer. They carry fruit and small baskets full of rice, to be attached to the pole. A deep hole is dug and the thick end of the bamboo is inserted in it, the earth being well beaten around it in order to fix it in place. The baskets of rice and fruit are then fastened on, the people give a joyful cry, and hundreds of birds that have been waiting fly to the baskets to eat the grain. This is possibly as close to something akin to ancestral worship as the Shan discursive mind will admit.

The foot of the pole is then decorated with banana plants, which are tied around it. Then people kneel in a long line, one person behind the other, the men in front, the women behind. They all place their turbans on the ground, while an old man recites a passage on ‘the uncertainties of life’ containing reflections on the transitory nature of existence—in the country of man, in the country of the spirits and in the higher world. The man encourages meditations on the evil consequences of sin and on the approach of death. One impression here is that this last phase, the recitation, is a discursive device to negate the implied cultural intuitions of individualism that characterise the whole ritual affair.

Before evening, forty or more bamboos may be raised on the village green, each with its long strip of cloth streaming in the wind. When the festival is over, anyone who requires bamboos may take them, and children play with the long streamers. They have served their purpose—the dead have been remembered.Footnote ³⁵

It is clear that demotic Buddhism in upper Burma is part of the sphere of death. For instance, there do not seem to be any Buddhist connotations connected with the celebration of a marriage, and no monks participate in the nuptial processions or rituals involved.Footnote ³⁶ Monks play a part in social protection dealing with matters implying death, as in cases of epidemic disease, when ‘the magical services of the Buddhist priests’ are called into action. For instance, in Kengtung yellow-robed monks may be seen digging holes in the ground with bamboo sticks in a main road to drive death-dealing spirits underground.Footnote ³⁷

One rite connecting death, monks and agriculture is reported from Kengtung, when the corpse of a Buddhist monk becomes an object handled in a ceremony that takes place in the paddy fields and so is likely to be intuited as promoting the cultivation of rice:

This ritual is fairly frequent and a source of play and amusement.Footnote ³⁹ Unfortunately we do not know how the competing teams are formed—perhaps based on village belonging, or else on some other conventional constellations, or ad hoc. It seems that the very energy displayed in the tug-of-war on such an occasion is beneficial, and we may guess that the prize of the corpse of a monk about to be cremated includes a blessing that relates to the agricultural fields where all this takes place. We may also assume that to cremate an important monk is an act which generates immense merit and that this merit is transferred also to the dead as an act of commemoration. Funerals are generally merit-making occasions, and this ritual in the rice fields is a device along these lines, since it involves a very potent Buddhist symbol and transfers merit to the dead. It also has a particular reference to the growth of rice in these fields. It should be mentioned that, in contrast to ordinary men, monks are cremated, this indicating that they are different, being alienated from the ground like high nobility and kings. Their difference lies in their encompassing the alienation of death—in the iconic order, they themselves appear as almost dead. Another ritual that links monks and agriculture is when the rice of the first ears to be threshed is cooked, not as usual by boiling, but by steaming, and then carried to the monastery and offered to the monks.Footnote ⁴⁰ This seems like a thanksgiving to the (almost) dead, perhaps as intermediaries with the truly dead.

We need now to take a more general view, linking these phenomena to the broader perspective. The monks seem to have an intimate association with the growing of rice. Monks are the managers of death and future lives, in parallel to the farmers’ cultivation of grain and their management of vegetative life. The monks mediate between life and death; they represent death in life, and the beneficial forces of the dead flow through them. The association [water ⇔ rice ⇔ death] forms a basic cluster of imagery propelling the construction and management of more elaborate and comprehensive symbolic expressions.

There is a further link between the sphere of death and the growth of rice. When the fields are planted there is a great feast called the Sha-hta, when offerings of cooked rice are given to poor old men who live at the monasteries.Footnote ⁴¹ Something similar to the position of monkhood applies to the very old. My reading of this is that offerings of food—typically life-giving cooked rice—are given at the time for the transplantation of rice to men who are close to death or almost dead, and who are within the sphere of the Buddhist temple, making merit for a future life. The elderly mediate the gift to those who are already fully dead.

Discussion and Tentative Conclusions

In this essay I have explored the similarities between the Chinese spring practice of visiting the family graves situated in ‘Nature’, and the Shan custom at about the same time of the year of leaving their homes to visit the dry paddy fields. Ethnographic resemblances are seldom total and may also highlight those features that are dissimilar. At times the latter seem to negate the likenesses. In the ethnographies that have been discussed here, there are a number of striking resemblances, but also puzzling, but perhaps superficial, divergences. The main question of this essay, arising from a comparison of two different collages of ethnographic data, is this: if the Chinese visit their graves and imply that, in doing so, they are visiting their rice fields, are the Shan, by visiting their rice fields, implying that they are visiting the dead?

The southern Chinese venerate their dead by worshipping them. This may be carried out on a daily basis, or at least at new moon and full moon. Gifts conveyed to the dead consist of dishes of food, cups of wine and the smoke of incense. The deceased must not go hungry. The dead are defined as ancestors (or otherwise as irrelevant and demonic) by the use of a discursive grammar of agnatic kinship.

The Shan of Upper Burma venerate their dead by commemorating them. Death is to them a passage from existence to existence and only a temporary state. Once a person has been buried, his or her social being fades away in the world, first into remembrances, and then slowly into social extinction. Active commemoration of those who have passed away takes on the form of a transfer of merit—the departed are provided with socio-religious merit through the conduct of meritorious acts, and these enhance the chances for improvements in their coming existences. Acts of merit always have some reference to the world order of Buddhism, and their very performance generates blessings of merit to be absorbed by the dead.

The Chinese dead will stay dead for ever. There are Buddhist ideas also in China—of the Mahayana schools—and thus vague notions of possible rebirths circulate. In some areas Buddhist influences are rather strong. These ideas, however, do not seem to influence the threefold notion of death that is everywhere articulated in expressive imagery. We will recall that there are two sets of ancestor tablets representing the dead, both targeted in regular sacrifices. One set is domestic, and generally these tablets are kept only for a limited period; the house tablets are each, in course of time, taken away, destroyed and replaced by a new one introduced into the ancestral hall. This transfer occurs after the lapse of some generations. The set of tablets that finds a place in an ancestral hall is thought to be timeless and for ever, reaching back to the founder of the lineage and in principle embracing all the founder's male descendants and their wives. There are also the graves, each containing an individual or married couple and given some sort of monumental appearance, indicating that it is there for eternity.

Chinese acts of worship are directed to all three manifestations of the agnatically related dead, and these provinces of rituals have differing implications. In an iconic perspective they are instrumental in keeping apart separate cultural universes, each with its own presuppositions. The cults going along with these different worlds are each built around topoi that express social continuity. These matters are beyond the scope of the present essay; suffice it here to point to the diversity of symbolic games in southern China. Agriculture, that is, the cultivation of wet rice, is linked with the cult of the graves, as is highlighted at the Qingming visits.

Turning to the Shan, we find that there is no clear focus for the veneration of the dead in liturgical terms, something we might call worship, except for the local wat, or temple, which is strongly associated with death. Physically the dead are forgotten in a cemetery in a grove or in the jungle, where they have no recognisable graves. And yet, and in some remote similarity to China, we may discover the co-existence among the Shan of several fates in death, or, in other words, several separate cultural modalities relevant for the anthropological comprehension of the phenomenon of death in the Shan States.

The dominant major cultural modality has Buddhist presuppositions. One life is followed by another in a series with no definite end. This chain of existences offers opportunities for enhancement, and the mechanism for betterment in the next or coming lives is the accumulation of merit. Merit is produced by good deeds like taking part in temple rituals, funerals and ceremonies presided over by monks. By gaining merit people draw benefits for themselves, but they also transfer merit on to the dead, thereby contributing to their state of welfare and their possibilities for a better future life.

As with the Chinese, among the Shan the living give gifts to the dead, but these are not material, like food and money, but abstract and qualitative, the products of conventional decorum. The Chinese wish to keep their ancestors comfortable, content and possibly benign. Their forebears are indispensable for maintaining continuity in production and social life. This concern is expressed in terms of the iconic idiom of food, satisfaction and hunger. Dead people who are without personal worship, and thus hungry, are regarded as dangerous and demonic. In acting on their social doctrine, the Buddhist Shan do not seem to expect anything from their dead, but rather try to help them along through chains of existences.

Again, the Shan do not single out the dead as individual persons. Instead, from the perspective of the ‘existence at hand’, all the dead are intrinsically anonymous and within a nebulous collectivity of death. Furthermore, in the grander perspective most of them are no longer dead. And yet, despite this canopy of thought, merit-making may be targeted in acts of individual memorialism for a deceased father or mother or another close relative, reflecting the sentimental intentions of the merit-makers. But this is vague and, it seems, largely unsystematic, and happens apart from the more general beneficial effects of the making of merit. Otherwise there is nothing there to mark the remains of the dead or to conserve his or her remembrance over an extended period of time.

The main difference between the two symbolic universes of southern China and the Shan States emerged in the introduction in upper Burma, at some point in its history, of a dominant Buddhist eschatology, which erased any tendency towards ideas concerning individual post-existences in an eternal and static realm of death, instead offering an endless number of new and possibly better mundane existences. The idea of dead persons as eternal and as for ever socially interacting ancestral figures is a building block in the construction of social continuity over time in the Sinitic world, but any tendency in this direction that may have existed among the Shan, whether living in China or in other environments in Southeast Asia, was expunged by missionaries preaching the Theravada canon. The Shan were left with nameless dead and a multitude of transmuted lives. Their remembrance of the dead moved away from ideas of, and developments into, worship; their reverence was reduced into a general commemoration with no specific ritually targeted forebears.

And yet, this crude description does not exhaust what the ethnography tells us. Other data suggest another parallel Shan cultural modality with differing presuppositions. One demotic version of the afterlife contains a notion of some special terrain across a river, whither the newly dead have to be ferried by boat. We have also been told that the Shan believe that in the days after death the ‘soul’ is formless and then may assume a human or spirit form, the former indicating transmigration. Another note tells us that the spirit of a dead person remains near the body for three days.

Furthermore, some spirits do not reincarnate at all but remain spirits, at least for some time. Some of these spirits do not seem to reach the trans-riverine country, but instead they reside in, or hover about, the vicinity of abandoned places, particularly ruined temples that were once sacred grounds for devout acts. These spirits are ghost-like and are regarded as malicious.

In the remembrance feast some days after the burial, the deceased is supposed to return to the living. Whence it arrives is not clear, but this is supposedly the last time the spirit interacts with the living. Later there are anniversary feasts for the dead, but then the spirits do not take part. The only traces of the dead as individuals are found in such acts of ceremonial remembrance, which only concern dead parents, perhaps also some other deceased relatives and elders. The rituals of commemoration imply giving them attention and, above all, merit. Specific memorialism seems to fade away with the passing of generations.

What connects the cultivation of rice with death in Shan society? We know that local belonging is defined by participating in the local production of rice. The possession of land is taken as essential to social continuity. But whereas in southern China possessing rice land is the same as possessing agnatic ancestors, the Shan lose their potential ancestors into a Buddhist realm of endless new existences. Their rituals that accompany the cultivation of rice are devoted to territorial forces, regarded as ‘spirits’. The rice nurseries have their spirits and, when one sows, one sacrifices to them for the protection of the tender new plants. When the rice is being transplanted new sacrifices are made, this time to the guardian spirit of the rice field. We have learnt that numerous poles are stuck into the ground, usually in the middle of the fields. To these poles are attached cups containing offerings to the guardian spirits. However, we have no particular characterisation of these spirits, which seem to be of ‘Nature’.

What connects Buddhism with rice cultivation in Shan society? We have already described the wat temple as being where the monks are. It also offers a place for old people waiting for death. In appearance the monks are markedly different from ordinary people, since they shave their heads to display an almost cranium-like form. The growth of hair seems to be a counterpoint to their devotion to matters of death. They do not wear ordinary clothes. The monks are ‘almost dead’ people. We have observed that the wat and its inhabitants—monks and elderly peopleFootnote ⁴²—are ritually presented with the rice of the first ears to be threshed. When the larger fields are planted, there is a feast when offerings of cooked rice are given to poor old men who live at the monasteries. We have learnt that the corpse of a Buddhist monk becomes a ritual object handled in a ceremony that takes place in the paddy fields and so is likely to be intuited as powerfully promoting rice cultivation.

A review of what has been said in earlier pages reminds us that the Shan deceased are disposed of in a grove of trees or in a cemetery in the forest. The assembly of deceased lying there are completely anonymous. No rituals, besides burials, are carried out there. Ceremonies concerning the dead take place elsewhere. Rituals that transfer merit to the dead through participation in them are carried out in the wat or its near surroundings. We have also seen that coffins awaiting burial may be stored beneath the floor of a temple. The wat is the arena where the living communicate with the dead, this being where ‘almost dead’ monks mediate between life and death, and where the elderly await death. The realm of death in Shan society takes on two iconic shapes which are each a transformation of one denominating semantic cluster, one a place in ‘Nature’ spatially removed from the sphere of human life, the other the temple situated centrally in a built-up area. By being buried in the ground in the wilderness, the dead are entombed in the village house of worship.

This connection, or sameness, is given a further iconic expression in the imagery of the funeral procession, mentioned above. When the coffin containing the dead body leaves its house to be taken to the cemetery, it is carried on a bier, which is covered by a ‘canopy’:

What happens here, I think, is that the coffin is placed inside a mobile wat and that this temporary temple and its contents are carried in procession, led by a number of monks, to the funeral in the cemetery. In this way the combination of components [death ⇔ coffin ⇔ wat ⇔ cemetery] is united into an imaginary expression that the dead are in the wat. Social continuity hinges on the Buddhist house of worship. Also, when the feast of remembrance is celebrated at the time of the harvest, this is not done in the cemetery, but outside the wat on the village green. This supports the assumption that, in terms of iconic imagery, the village temple is the collective tomb of the village dead.

In terms of the exordium of one cultural modality in Shan society, the deceased move on in a chain of new existences through the ages. In another, found in a catastasis of symbols, they remain enshrined in the temples and in contact with their living progeny. The two propositions are not necessarily contradictory. In the temple the living commemorate the dead by providing them with merit, and it is the accumulation of merit which helps the deceased proceed and thereby better their conditions in a coming life. There may be time-scales involved in this double aspect that we do not know.

How the spirits of the dead relate, if at all, to the spirits of ‘Nature’ is not clear. In the ‘actual’ universe the dead are in the ground, a circumstance which may be translated into the imagery of the Shan iconic order. The dead in the ground, being part of the earth, may have an influence on chthonic vegetative power. Perhaps the border is fuzzy here, and it may be that those spirits who are worshipped in the fields with the aid of the bamboo poles are imagined to be the dead who earlier tilled the same land, but are now in the earth. This speculative reasoning receives some support from an ethnographic note that malicious spirits of dead people live or congregate at ruined temples, having been displaced to localities that are negatively connoted with positive forces. If malicious spirits of the dead are dreaded, it may well be that the benign spirits of former relatives may be helpful in the cultivation of the fields, although this is apparently not part of the Shan discursive order.

The Tabaung feast in March is a day, or days, of visits to the temples. In the iconic universe the implication seems to be that people visit their dead on this day as an act of merit-making remembrance. But there is also an alternative line of action, and that is to bring the wat to the fields by bringing paper pagodas on to the still dry rice fields. In this way, I suggest, the collective tombs are brought out to the fields, while the presence of the dead there, in this form, activates the vegetative forces of the earth at the beginning of the agricultural cycle. Perhaps these paper pagodas used in Tabaung are similar in style to those used as canopies at funerals. Also townspeople take part in these outings. The picnicking in the fields becomes a commensality involving the dead, which is beneficial for all.

Before we leave this discussion, we must pay further attention to the presence of the Kengtung king and his court in the fields. The king, by nature divine, has no ancestors in the ground, as his ancestors, once descended from Heaven and at death returned there by way of cremation, are not part of the territory. The king is by his intrinsic nature alienated from the several dimensions of the territory he rules—the earth, the underworld and waters, and the air in between. His relationships with the forces that dominate these spheres of his realm are based on a series of mythico-political contracts that provide him with authority and legitimacy in the dominance he exercises. What the king can do for his realm and his rice lands is to mobilise all beneficial forces surrounding it. He is a synthesiser, bringing the powers of the underworld, the ground, water, air and Heaven together in his person.Footnote ⁴⁴ By his very presence, his camping in the fields at Tabaung activates everything beneficial for the rice fields.