Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: an anthropology of separation
- 1 Two festivals of reunion
- 2 The etiquette of parting and return
- 3 Greeting and sending-off the dead
- 4 The ambivalent threshold
- 5 Commensality as reunion
- 6 Women and the obligation to return
- 7 Developing a sense of history
- 8 Classical narratives of separation and reunion
- 9 The politics of separation and reunion in China and Taiwan
- Conclusion: the separation constraint
- Notes
- References
- Index
2 - The etiquette of parting and return
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: an anthropology of separation
- 1 Two festivals of reunion
- 2 The etiquette of parting and return
- 3 Greeting and sending-off the dead
- 4 The ambivalent threshold
- 5 Commensality as reunion
- 6 Women and the obligation to return
- 7 Developing a sense of history
- 8 Classical narratives of separation and reunion
- 9 The politics of separation and reunion in China and Taiwan
- Conclusion: the separation constraint
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
During the ‘turning of the year’ in Dragon-head and Angang, moments of separation and reunion are very numerous – but they are also obviously of different kinds. For example, ‘inviting’ the ancestors to leave their graves and to return home (qinghuilai) is a relatively sombre and formalised business, while many post-new year reunion banquets are informal, and often even drunken and rowdy, affairs. In the case of ancestral visits, the exact moments of their ‘arrival’ and ‘departure’ are matters of considerable concern, but their actual presence in homes is usually marked rather simply and not much commented upon. By contrast, the arrival and departure of friends and guests may, in certain (although by no means all) circumstances, prompt little obvious reaction, whereas the time actually spent together with them is normally a focus of much greater interest and attention. More generally – and of course not only during festival periods – the arrivals and departures of different kinds of spirits (gods, ancestors, ghosts) and different kinds of persons (kin, friends, guests) are handled in strikingly different ways.
In this chapter, I'll begin to unravel the complex Chinese etiquette of parting and return, starting with the ‘greeting’ (jie) and ‘sending-off ’ (song) of guests. Then I'll turn to the ways in which people who either live together, or who know each other very well, handle such matters.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Separation and Reunion in Modern China , pp. 55 - 69Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000