Tag Archives: funeral customs

Tomb Sweeping Festival

Informant: N.N

Nationality: American

Primary Language: English

Other Language(s): N/A

Age: 19

Occupation: Student

Residence: Burbank, CA

Performance Date: 04/26/2024

N.N is 19 years old and is from Burbank, CA. I am close friends with his brother, so N.N is an acquaintance of mine.  I asked him if there are any festivals or rituals he participates in regularly. He tells me about the Tomb Sweeping Festival that his family participates in every year as well as the funeral customs they do during the festival. 

“Every spring break, around March or April, my family and I go to Thailand to celebrate the Tomb Sweeping Festival. It’s a tradition that’s been part of our family since I was thirteen. During the festival, we visit the altars of my great grandparents and clean them meticulously. It’s not just about tidying up; it’s a whole ritual. We bring offerings for my ancestors—my grandma’s parents. These offerings usually include their favorite foods and flowers. One of the most vivid parts of the festival is when we light firecrackers and sparklers on their altars. We then pray in Thai because our ancestors, grandma and mom used to live in Thailand. My mom and grandma always remind us, “If they weren’t alive, you wouldn’t be here”. I think they say this to instill a sense of respect and gratitude towards our ancestors. To them, and now to me, it’s important that we acknowledge and remember where we came from. Honestly, I think it’s a beautiful way to remember and pay respects to those who have passed away.”

Their Tomb Sweeping Festival reflects deep cultural values of respect, remembrance, and family ties. It emphasizes the importance of honoring one’s ancestors and acknowledging their contributions to our current lives. This ritual also shows the value of continuity and connection across generations, which reminds us of our heritage and the cycle of life. It’s a way for them to bond over shared history and instill a sense of gratitude for the past even in younger generations. The festival also embodies Chinese cultural values such as filial piety, showing their cultural roots.

Indian burial ritual

Text:
AS-“It is a weird burial ritual. Well, weird for other villages near my town, because no one except our village does this.”

Interviewer-“Has your always been doing it or did something happen in the village for everyone to shift from the ‘traditional’ burial rituals?”

AS- “I don’t know. It has always been like that. Maybe it was because my village mostly houses farmers and their land, and the rituals just symbolize their connection to their land. Anyways, coming back to the ritual. It is not something extremely groundbreaking but, in our village, instead of cremating out dead near a river and throwing their ashes into the water, our dead are cremated on familial ground and buried right there.”

Context:
AS is a middle-aged woman born in a small village in eastern parts of India. She spent most of her childhood in the village that she talks about, but moved out to attend school in a different city. Her father was buried following the same burial ritual that she describes in the above text.

Analysis:
In the above burial ritual, we see the impact of local sentiments into a more widespread cultural practice. By shifting from the widespread tradition of cremating beside a river, the village tradition of burying the dead on familial grounds integrates a smaller community’s culture with that of a bigger one. It is an example where we can see social norms and meanings (here, a farmer’s connection to their land) integrating with religious customs.

Funeral Headbands

Context:

H is a pre-med Biology major at USC who grew up in Vancouver, Washington. His parents immigrated to the US from Vietnam.

Text:

H: “For funerals, you have to visit every day for the first week after the funeral and then once a week for seven weeks. And then, on the hundredth day since the funeral, everybody comes back to the temple. It’s like, the biggest day for them (the dead). You pray for them, wish them well at the temple. The hundredth day is when you have everybody together and you have a big feast. You have these white headbands that you wear and on the hundredth day, they chop off the headband.”

Analysis:

Since H was raised in a Viet-American household, he and his family’s celebration of weddings is similar to an Irish wake funeral, but also adds cultural specificity to Viet customs. For example, it is common in Irish funerals to throw a party on the deceased’s behalf, not only as a celebration of the deceased when they were alive but as a re-engineering of the domineering sorrow of a funeral. H’s feast on the hundredth day pays homage to the one who died without inviting negative emotions into the celebration of the individual.

Funerals are a liminal space, as Von Gennup puts it, lingering between the stages of life and death in a person’s existence on Earth. Rather than using funerals as a chance to mourn, H and Irish funeral traditions connect with members of their community and pray for safety into the next part of existing for the dead. This acceptance of death, the massive respect and commitment to the dead after the funeral, seems cultural, as does the white headbands and time. There is an acceptance of death as time marches on, not a denying of it. Rather, H’s family seems to come to terms that nothing can get in the way of death but glimmers for an appreciation of life and the one the once dead led.

Washing One’s Hands After a Funeral

Nationality: American
Age: 51
Occupation: Attorney
Residence: Bethesda, MD
Performance Date: May 2, 2021
Primary Language: English

Main piece: There’s a tradition of washing your hands after a funeral so you don’t bring death into the house. If you’ve been near a dead body, you want to get the death off your hands. You don’t want to bring death into your house. Even after my dad’s funeral, friends of my mother, who had stayed back to help with the catering and the flowers, they put a pitcher outside. I was impressed by all that actually. It’s what you do. Some cemeteries have a water fountain. Outside Jewish funeral homes there’s a place to wash your hands. 

Background: My informant is a 51 year-old Jewish woman. The majority of the funerals she has attended have been in Jewish cemeteries with Jewish burial practices. She doesn’t remember where she learned the practice exactly, but she recalls vividly seeing the pitcher of water outside a Jewish funeral home at her aunt’s funeral when she was fourteen. The logic makes sense to her, and she has partaken in this ritual many times before. 

Context: I was talking to my informant about Jewish traditions, and this was the first one that occurred to her. 

Analysis: This practice makes a lot of sense. A funeral is a liminal space, as it is the final celebration of the life of someone who is now deceased. With that comes a lot of uncertainty, and fear that death can come for anyone else next. By washing your hands before entering a home, you don’t cross the doorway between a graveyard or a cemetery – a place of death, and your house – a place where you live/where life happens. This also promotes the idea that death can linger/cling to a live person, and having a ritualistic cleansing of death from your hands encourages a sense of protection, and that it won’t come for you next. 

“Then we burn them and it is thought to go to the afterlife”

Nationality: chinese
Age: 26
Residence: LA
Performance Date: may 2 2021
Primary Language: English

Context: My informant is a 26 year-old woman who is of Chinese descent. She grew up in Hong Kong and lived there until she moved to Pasadena at the age of 7. She described common practices for her family over holidays and how those were carried out at her buddhist grandfather’s funeral. She knows and loves these stories from personal experience.

Informant:

“For every holiday, we never celebrated like “Christmas”, we would celebrate my grandma’s lunar birthday or a special dragon boat holiday like all these random holidays that I grew up with. A lot of Chinese people will have an altar to honor their ancestors consisting of a little red box and red candles with a little sign. Sometimes there are little figurines. Before everyone eats you put out a table in front of it with specific dishes (tea, wine, chicken, rice, fruits, vegetables) and incense. You pray to your ancestors at the altar. They sell these papers that have gold foil and you ball them up then burn them to help the things get into the afterlife. This would happen on every Chinese holiday. Then when my grandpa passed, he was Buddhist, so we had all these traditions of when you go up and honor the body you go up in generations and bow a certain number of times, eldest to youngest. There would also be all of these elaborate paper items like iPhones or houses. Then we burn them and it is thought to go to the afterlife. There’s all these different chants that we would recite at the end as well.”

Thoughts:

I found this story really beautiful and moving. The symbol of burning these paper items in order to send them to those in the afterlife is one of the biggest things that stood out to me. Even the concept of having ancestors in the afterlife that you can easily access is a really intriguing concept that I had never thought of before. I also loved the idea of having this spread of different foods to offer as well. This shows how important food is in their culture and how much they honor and acknowledge those who have passed.