335
I wrote (p. 35) that 'Rather than religious beliefs, it is lineage and ancestral place that are affirmed in non-Christian Chinese cemeteries. In contrast, in Chinese Christian cemeteries, the dead are gathered not into a secular fold but into the fold of the Church, and they affirm a very different concept of the meaning of human existence'.
graves
Teather, E.K. and Chow, C.S. (2000). The geographer and the fengshui practitioner: so close and yet so far apart? Australian Geographer 31(3): 309-332.
This paper isn't about cemeteries but grew out of my efforts to understand them. I was infuriated with the dismissive attitudes of western academic geographers to fengshui, so we somewhat provocatively took one of the most influential French spatial theorists, Henri Lefebvre, and compared the spatial principles of fengshui with his 'moments' of spatiality. In 1995 or 1996 I'd gone on an RAS field trip to Wo Hang village in the NE New Territories with Patrick Hase. Clearly, that village was typical of countless hundreds of others in China. Patrick himself had written about it in R.G. Knapp's Chinese Landscapes: the Village as Place (1992), which contains other detailed examples of the pervasive influence of fengshui on the siting and layout of villages. Clearly, one cannot begin to understand the landscapes of which such villages are part without an appreciation of fengshui. Dr. Chow and I gave a talk about this theoretical approach to analysing fengshui at an RAS meeting in 1999.
While we were developing this paper, James Hayes told us about the eighteenth century Korean Yi Chung-Hwan's Taengniji: the Korean classic for choosing settlements, newly translated into English by I.C. Yoon (1998). This book describes the geography of Korea and accords prime consideration to fengshui. By a wonderful coincidence, the International Geographical Union met in South Korea in 2000. I went on a four-day post-conference field trip organised by a Korean cultural geographer who - to the bemusement of many non-Koreans on the trip, but to my great delight - spent a lot of time pointing out how fengshui had shaped human geography in the heartland of South Korea, Andong Province.
Teather, E.K. (1999). The Heritage Significance of Hong Kong's Chinese Cemeteries, Proceedings of International Forum UNESCO, University and Heritage, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia,