Harrell and Wolf

I found the Wolf article and the intricacies of the Ancestor Worship system very interesting. I thought it gave an excellent overview of the research in this area and gave a very dynamic look at the system. To quickly summarize, in Chinese culture individuals are required to worship their ancestors, parents and grandparents. It is a patrilineal system meaning that women who die before marriage are considered problematic and therefore a post-mortim marriage must sometimes be arraigned. Parents cannot worship their dead children, parents can infact get angry at children who die before them. Individuals while alive must look out to ensure that they will have descendants to worship them after they die, meaning that they require a male heir.

We however realistically know that not everyone will marry or have a male heir. Meaning that they have some very complex and non-universal rules about how these situations will work out. Some believe that unworshiped ancestors may cause harm in to living family members, this can be rectified with worship or a more honoured position for worship. Consultation with spiritual experts, Shamans, may occur. There was not universal beliefs about these religions or definitive codes of what to do in certain circumstances. There was no mention of an exact central authority of spiritual expertise (like a head priest).

The Harrell article was also rather interesting. It was an exploration of work ethic in Chinese culture. It was noted that not everyone does have the famously noted work-ethic, for example unmarried women. The unmarried women did not view themselves as economic members of their current families and did not feel as motivated to contribute. However sons and fathers felt strong needs to contribute, these values were instilled at young ages.  Economic and social mobility was often a possibility, but it was a competitive scenario, therefore people put in considerable effort. They did not see this as something that benefited just themselves, but something that could benefit their children.

Interestingly when the communist party came to power, individuals in the agriculture sector felt very motivated to contribute to collective work and not work that just contributed to the families economic well being. They saw general economic advantage to collective work.