[
    {
        "id": 210545,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1985",
        "page_number": 152,
        "title": "RAS-1985",
        "content_text": "133\n\nthe manes derived pleasure from flowers strewn about their graves; whether the tradition of providing them with a meal on these occasions was equally long-standing is unclear, but it was certainly well-established at the outset of the Empire.\n\nInterpretation of the Cult Practices\n\nSince the late nineteenth century, a series of exceptionally competent classicists, notably Attilio de-Marchi, Franz Bömer and Jocelyn Toynbee, have focussed their attention on the cult of the dead in the Roman world. Each has compiled the relevant evidence with painstaking thoroughness, but without attempting to explore similar institutions in other cultures. In the absence of such an analytic framework, however, historians of Greece and Rome have not been able to generate a set of meaningful questions against which to test these accumulated data. The major advantage of the comparative approach employed here is that it locates this mass of information in a broader anthropological setting, where pertinent questions are already to hand. These have been raised by anthropologists with a specific interest in mortuary practices, whose work in contemporary societies, including the Chinese, has grown increasingly sophisticated over the last thirty years.\n\nAt the outset, it must be emphasized that the concerns of the modern anthropologist cannot be blindly grafted onto the ancient material. Because classical scholars will always be restricted by the deficiencies of their evidence, there are several interesting questions that cannot even be attempted. One brief example will elucidate the point. Anthropologists at work in Taiwan and the New Territories have frequently examined the generational depth of the ancestral cult in the villages in which they have conducted their field studies. At what point, they ask, does an ascendant cease to receive offerings as an individual on his death-day anniversary and become instead an undifferentiated member of those distant ancestors who are honoured collectively on other occasions? In a land-poor village, for example, Steven Harrell determined that ancestors \"more than one or two generations removed from the eldest living family members” received combined offerings at the Ch'ung Yang.\" Ahern found",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1985.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 210547,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1985",
        "page_number": 154,
        "title": "RAS-1985",
        "content_text": "135\n\nout of the family.\" She goes on to contend, however, that in every other conceivable circumstance a village couple without sons must utilize their property to secure sacrificial offerings for themselves. A man with an only daughter, for example, in some regions of China may contract an uxorilocal marriage for her. At the heart of this arrangement is an agreement that one or more of the sons born to this union will continue their maternal grandfather's lineage by assuming both his name and property. In so doing, of course, they also acquire an obligation to see to his needs after death — an obligation that instantly ceases if for some reason the property should be withheld.\" In contrast, a man without natural heirs may adopt one of his collateral kin, or someone completely outside his clan; alternatively, he may effect a transfer of property to a kinsman or stranger without resort to adoption. In either event, the outcome will be the same: “just as property inheritance accompanied by descent entails the obligation to worship, so also may property inheritance in the absence of descent require worship.\"2 Indeed, the link between property and the cult of the dead is so strong in Ch'i-nan that one can acquire responsibility for the spiritual well-being of a deceased person merely by making use of his property, while a father who disinherits one of his sons for any reason thereby absolves him of all responsibility for his maintenance in the afterlife.63\n\nAhern's interpretation of the role of property in uxorilocal marriage has been confirmed by Arthur Wolf in his own field work. One of his informants in San-hsia acknowledged the obligation that the arrangement creates with the matter-of-fact comment that \"you have to worship your mother's father because he gave you his property.'64 The rest of her findings, however, have generated considerable controversy. Steven Harrell has countered with an argument that property does not play even a marginal role in fixing responsibility for the dead in the village that he investigated. Most villagers, he says, readily admit their obligation to care for everyone in their primary line of descent.“ Arthur Wolf has further complicated matters. Working in a village not more than a mile away from Ch'i-nan, his research has induced him partially to agree with both of his colleagues, thereby generating a third point of view! He has concluded that “both descent and inheritance create an absolute obligation to the dead.”",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1985.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x",
        "rank": 0
    }
]