The Burning of Paper Money and the Religious Work of Transduction
Burning of Chinese Paper Money also known as Ghost Money is an ancient tradition that goes back thousands of years and one that is held to this day when honouring the ancestors. Paper offerings can be transmitted by burning and emit sacred light, which is considered to be the manifestation of the sacredness of the spiritual world.
From the burning of paper money, we can see how things achieve value circulation through mutual sublimation between materialisation and spiritualisation. The practice of burning paper money, located at the intersection of materiality and spirit in Chinese people’s daily life, helps us better understand how Chinese people organise their daily life and position themselves in relation to other beings, thus mirroring Chinese people’s cosmology. In short, transduction as a process of linking up production and value creation in different worlds, mystification is an inherent property, but it is also an empowerment process and self-reference system.
Through the burning of paper money, we project our imaginations into a more complete continuity-a continuity between ourselves and our relatives or ancestors and a continuity between our past and future. Here we can find the differences between the East and the West in their imaginations of “others”. Western imagination of “others” is isolated, immaterial and discontinuous, while Chinese imagination of “others” is continuous and even self-referential.
In addition, with the intensification of commercialisation, paper offerings have been developed into various forms and types. Not merely restricted to paper money, there are also many creative paper replicas. Rather than pay attention to what Tambiah said-commercialisation damages amulets’ spiritual power, what we really should pay attention to are the cultural implications of the emerging variants and practices in the context of commercialisation.
Please check the following links for more information:
https://www.hong-kong-traveller.com/chinese-paper-money.html
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/peoplesdaily/article-3515806/Laptops-mansions-helicopters-weirdest-paper-offerings-Chinese-people-burn-deceased-ensure-happy-afterlife.html
Contributed by HongshanWang on 28/01/2019
