A Family Reunion The Anthropology of Life, Death and New Year in Soochow

For a long time students of China have held the view that ancestral cults formed one of the pillars of the Imperial state, that they were the backbone of family life and provided the ideological source for the political class.1 In a vague and general way this is no doubt true. However, from an anthropological perspective, the position of the dead in Chinese society is not well known. China is a vast country with a great variety of ecological circumstances and ethnic substrata, which have contributed to differences in ritual articulation. The most important of the regional differences may have been the divide between the rice-producing areas in the south and those producing wheat and millet in the north. China was sinicised in a slow process by the acceptance of hegemonic influences under shifting political conditions, and we must expect rich and diverse strands within the substrata lingering in the mix that we sometimes superficially designate 'traditionally Chinese'. Furthermore, we must realise that there have been shifts in these ancestral cults through the ages, and that what was conducted in earlier dynasties might in some important aspects have been rather different from what went on in the later days of the Empire. In this article I wish to continue earlier work on the Chinese cult of the dead in terms of time cyclical, calendrical and linear. Soochow (Suzhou M')M) is situated in the vast delta of the River Yangzi to the south, in an area generally referred to as Jiangnan lM or 'The Riverine South'. About fifteen per cent of this alluvial plain is occupied by lakes, of which Lake Tai Adjust outside Soochow is the largest. Intensive cultivation has long been a characteristic of the area, with rice, and from the fourteenth century onwards cotton, as the most important summer crops and wheat and broad beans predominant in winter. Throughout history a network of canals has supplied