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Notes on videotape used in FC-62 funerary ritual section.

The videotape used in section was recorded July 1995 in a Hakka village in northern Guangdong. Like the Cantonese, they practice the system of double burial (erci zang) that J. Watson describes in the articles that you have read. The videotape are unedited excerpts from a funeral that took place over two days.

The death of the 80 year old man was announced early one morning by the setting off of firecrackers. It was "nong mang," the harvest season - people have been working day and night to gather up the rice, thresh, dry and bag the rice in order to beat the rains - and it was a most inconvenient time to have a funeral. By the time I arrived at the house of the deceased, people were bustling about preparing food, making banners, etc. We [me and my cadre-host] asked the deceased's wife if we could observe, and we sat with her, gathered family, and the li shi (person in charge of all the preparations, etc) where I was introduced. There were many helpers (over twenty) preparing food and other trappings for a funeral that expected over eighty friends and relatives. At this point, they took me over to the "xiao tang" (mourning hall); where the deceased lay in state. Family gathered in the room and started mourning; in the video you heard these women lamenting -- what you read in Elizabeth Johnson's article on the "laments of the Hakka women."

Let me tell you some background information about the family. The wife of the deceased had already had a daughter when the deceased married her, and together they had five other daughters (for a total of six girls). All the daughters married out patrilocally, except for the #5 daughter who was married uxorilocally. [The deceased was friends with the father of the in-marrying son, and since the friend couldn't afford brideprice for his son, they agreed for the son to marry uxorilocally.] The uxorilocal husband served as the chief mourner during the funeral service for the deceased; he is the one man that you will see "scraping the ground" when the paper gifts are being burned (he is also carrying the spirit tablet [they used incense sticks, and I think I remember a piece of paper that was dangling] and is the first in line after the casket during the procession). The son of the uxorilocal son and the #5 daughter (took same surname as the deceased) is one of the three main mourners, as is one of the other husbands of one of the deceased's daughters (but did not live "patrilocally").

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