The Interweaving of Rituals: Funerals in the Cultural Exchange between China and Europe by Nicolas Standaert (review)

• Published in: Journal of Chinese Religions Vol. 36; no. 1; pp. 190 - 192
• Main Author: Sutton, Donald S
• Format: Journal Article Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Atlanta Johns Hopkins University Press 2008
• Subjects: 17th century; Death & dying; Funerals; Intercultural communication; Missionaries; China; Europe
• ISSN: 0737-769X; 2050-8999; 2050-8999
• DOI: 10.1353/jcr.2008.0030

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: 190 Journal of Chinese Religions claims for the pioneering nature of this book need to be taken cum grano salis. KAI FILIPIAK, University of Leipzig The Interweaving of Rituals: Funerals in the Cultural Exchange between China and Europe NICOLAS STANDAERT. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2008. viii, 328 pages. ISBN 978-0-295-98823-8. US$30.00, £16.99, paper. This is a learned work, reading Latin and European texts and classical Chinese documents closely against each other; but Nicolas Standaert bears his learning lightly. Drawing fully on recent secondary work in the West and China, he sets out some clear yet sophisticated analytical and theoretical perspectives to guide him. While restricted to the seventeenth century encounter of European missionaries with China, his case study is an important contribution to an understanding of intercultural communication and the dynamics of ritual in other times and places. Why the seventeenth century? Because external power was weak, missionaries were obliged to adapt to the host country, filtering their ideas through Chinese language and conceptions; and European and Chinese “cultural reproduction” (printing and education) were at similar levels. In that period, good, but not too voluminous evidence exists for grassroots activity (humble missionaries and Chinese Christians) as well as the Jesuit leaders and court officials that earlier studies have concentrated upon. Why funerary ritual? Its importance in Chinese society and identity amply justifies the book’s focus. It was of deep concern to the Jesuits, too: the book begins dramatically with a letter from Ferdinand Verbiest describing his interested participation in 1681 in the opulent and noisy funeral cortege of two of the Kangxi 康熙 Emperor’s empresses (p. 3). The book’s seven central chapters deal exhaustively with key aspects of the topic. Chapter 1 presents basic Chinese and European funerary rites not as if frozen in time but over a six-century period of evolution, starting in the tenth century. Chapter 2, examining seventeenth century proto-ethnography, sets forth what Europeans knew of Chinese funerals. Chapters 3 and 4 discuss changes in funeral rites from the 1580s to the 1680s; chapters 5 and 6 deal with the formation of the Chinese Christian funeral and the accompanying tensions of Chinese practice with European concepts; and chapter 7 focuses on imperially sponsored funerals for the missionaries themselves. For the final chapter Standaert reserves a lucid Konzepte und Prinzipien einer Bewegungskunst, Analyse anhand der frühen Schriften (Hamburg: Schriftenreihe des Institutes für bewegungswissenschaftliche Anthropologie e.V., 2002). Book Reviews 191 analysis of the process of cross-cultural communication, spelling out what he owes to earlier approaches and how he departs from them. Throughout this book, Standaert demonstrates that effective transmission of ideas and practices across cultures requires adaptive changes on both sides, often resulting from bottomup experimentation. Each society had its own “elementary structure” (a concept borrowed from the China anthropologist James L. Watson) of the proper funeral, forming a sort of “cultural imperative” (a term applied first by Erik Zürcher to Jesuit accommodations in China). Mutual compromise is facilitated by different priorities, for example, the usual European stress on orthodoxy and the Chinese concern with orthopraxy (but there are fascinating departures from these general rules). To explain progressive adjustments he favors three metaphors: “embedding” for the gradual introduction of the Christian funerals in the first half of the seventeenth century; “grafting” (of European scion to Chinese stock), in which a transposed element modifies its original form; and “weaving”, which describes the eventual pattern of cultural intermingling and patching in which neither side is necessarily dominant. The agents in this process belong to neither and to both sides because identity is formed through the acts of cross-cultural communication, including ritual. The transformation was the result of a slow adaptive process in which locals, notably (he infers) women, played a key role, but missionary leadership in China did not in the end oppose it. Missionary tolerance was influenced by the paucity of priests and the use of Chinese written and spoken languages in proselytizing. At first, Jesuits leaned toward purism, and Christian communities who shared the sacrament together tried to follow European forms, but if their dead had many non-Christian acquaintances...