Northern Vietnamese Reburial Rituals
From: Michael Digregorio
Date: Wed, May 12, 2010 at 8:32 PM
Dear All,
I am in need for some information about the history of northern Vietnamese reburial rituals. Most of what I have learned over the past few years has been somewhat contradictory.
Like many historic traditions, there is a belief in popular culture that reburial practices were learned from the Han. As the story goes, Han officials removed the bodies of family members when they returned to China, thus creating a tradition of returning bones to their place of origin. Considering the number of empty Han tombs in northern Vietnam, this theory is plausible, but not verifiable.
A second group of ethnologists hold that the tradition dates back millennia, and is part of the Austroasiatic spiritual belief that the dead inhabit their burial place. Thus, placing one's ancestors bones together in one place insures that the larger family will be near each other in the afterlife. This would also explain the non-reburial traditions of central and southern Vietnam, however, and not explicitly the practice of reburial itself.
A third group of archeologists suggests that the tradition may have started much later, possible during the later Le dynasty because, if it were older, it would have been so ensconced in Vietnamese culture that migrants would have carried the practice to the south. These same archeologists suggest a similarity of belief in souls inhabiting their graves as their final house, but say that burial practices of the Viet were adapted to local cultures and traditions - Cham, Khmer and Chinese.
Finally, some ecologists work around all this and explain northern Vietnamese reburial practice functionally. Long established villages with no room to expand rice fields had to concentrate their cemeteries in a limited space. Cremating bodies would cause their loved ones to feel "heat" in the afterlife, while temporary burial would allow their bodies to decompose coolly and naturally in a temporary house. After decomposition was complete, the bodies could then be removed to their permanent houses nearby other family members. The reason why this is not practiced in the center and south is that these regions had more land, and while customs may have been adapted locally, they do not diverge from the basic belief in souls inhabiting their graves.
And now for the boomerang. The only ethnic group regionally that practices reburial like the northern Vietnamese are the Zhuang in China. Ethnically related, of course, but the link goes back millennia.
Any help putting the pieces together will be helpful.
Mike DiGregorio
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From: Tai, Hue-Tam Ho
Date: Thu, May 13, 2010 at 5:36 AM
Mike:
Actually, this is not a "northern" Vietnamese funerary ritual. It is a Vietnamese one. In fact, I believe that during the High Socialist period, it was discouraged, perhaps banned altogether, as wasteful. But it certainly was practiced in the South. My grandfather was re-buried in the early 1960s after much consultation with a famous geomancer. Unlike the search for the remains of the dead that continues to this day, relocation closer to the family home for ease of worship was not a concern. He was re-buried on a hill quite a distance from Saigon.
In general, Vietnamese followed Zhu Xi's Family Rituals (translated by Patricia Ebrey). If I remember correctly, Zhu Xi wrote this text to combat the influence of Buddhism. At the time, it was very common for families to leave urns with the remains of their deceased relative at pagodas for long periods of time before burying them. I'll have to look up the text to see how widespread re-burial was among (Han) Chinese.
Hue-Tam Ho Tai
Kenneth T. Young Professor
of Sino-Vietnamese History
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From: Michael Digregorio
Date: Thu, May 13, 2010 at 5:35 PM
Dear Hue Tam
All of the ethnologists and archeologists I talked to noted that the practice of removing bones from the grave three years after burial, combined with the rituals associated with this, and reburying the remains in a small coffin box is a northern Vietnamese practice. They noted that the practice begins to become less common in central Vietnam, and is practiced primarily by northnern migrants in the south. This is one reason why one archeologists suggested the latter Le as the beginning of the practice. That is, the practice was not sufficiently widespread and ensconced in the north when the Trinh and Nguyen split.
The closure of the Van Diem cememtery this coming July has city residents wondering what they will do. A new cemetery is planned for a large site in Hoa Binh - but just imagine the bus ride! This is absolutely insane from a cultural perspective. Families will be very constained in their abilty to carry out annual rituals, and of course, reburials.
Van Diem will become a crematorium. If you see what takes place there, with an official reading the deceased CV, and then hustling the corpse directly into the furnace, you would wonder what this means with respect to the ideology of household organization and continuity in urbanizing areas. The association of human remains and place of family origin is deeply embedded in the mentality of people in the Red River Delta, in particular. "Que Quan", place of origin, is as much a place of birth as it is a place where ancestors are buried. I believe this is a common assumption in Vietnam. In Hue, around the Tam Giang lagoon, it is absolutely astonishing to see how women have remolded burial mounds in the sand for generations. Only recently have they begun building large tombs. And the first thing they do is line up their ancestors within and beside them.
I believe the association of propitious sites of burial is of Chinese origin, as you note. But I have seen equal or more concern to have ancestors buried near each other. The exception is in official society - where burial in a notable cemetery signifies a person's status in life.
MIke
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From: Tai, Hue-Tam Ho <hhtai@fas.harvard.edu>
Date: Thu, May 13, 2010 at 7:56 PM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
My maternal grandfather's family seems to have been quite Confucian, so perhaps this is why his children decided to have him reburied. Even though he did not believe in ancestor worship, they thought they should follow the proper rituals, and that involved re-burial. I do not believe that my other grandfather was reburied.
Geomancy has always been a factor in selecting a burial site, though families could not always follow its precepts, and many would choose convenience over other factors. I am told that much of the land in the Huyen Tran park outside Hue has been bought up by private individuals as funeral plots because of its propitious geomancy.
I am not in the least surprised that the funerary rites were reorganized during the latter Le as it is during this dynasty that neo-Confucianism (that is, Zhu Xi's brand of Confucianism) also known in Vietnam as Tong Nho (Song Confucianism) was introduced. That is when I assume that Zhu Xi's Family Rituals began to serve as guidelines for family life and rites of passage.
Phan Ke Binh has a section on re-burial in his Viet Nam phong tuc.Narquis Barak assisted at a reburial and made a video.
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From: Nhu Miller
Date: Thu, May 13, 2010 at 9:12 PM
Mike,
I'm from Hue and our family removes bones after three years.
This might be because the families (both noi and ngoai) originated
from Thanh Hoa in the 18th century. My maternal family is die hard
Khang Chien, moved to the North in the 40's and 50's but still practices
exhuming the bones, examining them and reburying them. I did this
for my aunt and mother in 1996.
Tran Tuong Nhu
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On May 13, 2010, at 9:18 PM, Hoai Tran wrote:
> Dear Mike DiGregorio,
>
> I think this practice goes back at least to the Lê. I know of at least on instance of reburial with the assistance of a geomancer in texts from the Restoration Lê, e.g, one recorded in a story of Giáp Hải in the Công dư tiệp ký (A.44, western pages 74-85). Giáp Hải lived in the 16th century; the Công dư tiệp ký was written in circa 1755.
>
> There are several Vietnamese language translations of this text which you may consult. I am currently working on a full length annotated translation of it in English, actually.
>
> Regards,
> --Hoài
>
>
> --
> Tran Khai Hoai (Jason Hoai Tran)
> 陳啟懷
> Ph.D. Candidate
> Cornell University
> 350 Rockefeller Hall
> Ithaca NY 14853
--------------------
From: Michael Digregorio
Date: Thu, May 13, 2010 at 6:01 PM
Dear Jason
Thanks for the reference.
Dong Ha at the institute of archeology (VASS) has suggested to me that the latter Le began a process of reorganizing mortuary rituals, moving away from Buddhist practice toward more confucian practices. The result was a reburial ritual that kept the original intent of bringing ancestors together into a common home in the afterlife, while dealing with some of the issues Hue Tam mentions. The newness of the reformed practices is what he considered the main reason why the reburial practices common in the Red River Delta are applied less frequently as one moves south.
But that's all speculation.
All in all, I have found very little literature available on these practices, and especially, on their origins.
Even in the pale-archeology literature.
Mike
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From: Michael Digregorio
Date: Fri, May 14, 2010 at 12:08 AM
Dear TT
Thanks. This more or less confirms the representation of reburial rituals offered to me by To Ngoc Thanh and Nguyen Van Huy. Origin in the north, traveling to the south with migrants.
It is quite amazing to go through all the steps or more precisely to watch it from the beginning.
The moment the bones are revealed is a moment seen by the gravdiggers at Van Dien hundreds of times per year. But for the family, it is perhaps a final moment of grief.
Mike
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From: JKirkpatrick
Date: Fri, May 14, 2010 at 6:45 AM
May I respectfully ask a question about this custom?
Why are the bones dug up and inspected? What is being looked for?
Doesn't the reburial custom conflict with or oppose cremation?
Best wishes,
Joanna K.
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From: Tai, Hue-Tam Ho <hhtai@fas.harvard.edu>
Date: Fri, May 14, 2010 at 10:24 AM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Yes, it conflicts with cremation.
After 3 years, all the flesh has pretty much been stripped from the bones, but they still must be inspected for any remnant and be thoroughly cleansed. The bones are then put back as close as possible to the conformation of the skeleton in the permanent coffin, then it is taken to the permanent burial site. In the video which Narquis took, the ceremony began at an auspicious hour in the middle of the night (she had a special camera), and the re-internment was completed around noon. During the cleaning of the bones, only men were involved as women were considered too sensitive. The two widows of the deceased (yes, this was northern Vietnam, but polygamy did not disappear completely even under High Socialism) squatted by the tomb and wailed as at a regular funeral.
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From: Jalel Sager
Date: Fri, May 14, 2010 at 12:40 PM
Perhaps of interest--there is extensive, very compelling recent footage of one of these ceremonies taken by a Hanoi-based artist. I don't remember the name, but it was shown at an exhibition at Nguyen Manh Duc's Nha San a year or so ago. I've also just seen beautiful footage of a recent Cham reburial taken by Julie Underhill, a grad student at UC Berkeley.
Jalel Sager
Energy and Resources Group
UC Berkeley
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From: malarney
Date: 2010/5/14
Dear Joanna,
To follow on the earlier emails, I have attended a number of secondary
burials at both Van Dien and in the cemeteries of the commune I worked in
south of Hanoi. The bones were usually disinterred at a minimum of three
years after the initial burial, though many people did not follow the
calendar exactly, with such factors as auspiciousness as well as
convenience informing the choice of when to disinter. For example, in the
commune I worked in, people preferred to conduct the ceremonies in the
cooler months because conducting them in hot weather can be unpleasant.
The same was true for starting the digging at night when it was cooler. As
already noted by Tam Tai, men usually did the digging and cleaned the
bones, though it was usually closely related men, such as sons, because
people recognized that it could be a difficult task. Where I worked, the
bones were cleaned with alcohol, which was also liberally poured into the
casket if there was water in it, which is always a possibility when
cemeteries are out among the rice fields. It was imperative that every
bone in the casket be accounted for and cleaned. For that reason, people
were sometimes buried with socks on their hands and feet in order to
prevent the loss of those small bones. After the bones were cleaned and
removed, an individual who was recognized as having the necessary skill
placed the cleaned bones into the urn, which tended at that time to have
an interior space of about a bit over two feet by one foot. I can't
remember the exact order, and don't have my notes with me, but as I
recall, the long bones (such as the femurs) were placed in first, with the
spinal bones placed down the center with the ribs arranged as they are in
a living person. Finally, the skull was placed at one end of the urn above
the ribs and the top was placed on the urn. As Mike said, the opening of
the casket and placement of the bones in the urn was very poignant because
it represented a last goodbye.
The attention to collecting all of the bones related to the idea among the
people I worked with that, with the secondary burial, the person is
finally, for want of a better word, at rest. The loss of the bones meant
that the person's soul could not be, and people who had not been able to
perform the secondary burial in a timely fashion often felt uncomfortable
for not having fulfilled all of their responsibilities to the deceased.
Given these factors, it is clear why cremation has not been popular. The
government has in fact been encouraging the practice for decades, but
people usually have rejected it. Secondary burials were never banned,
though following colonial regulations the skeletons of those who died of
such infectious diseases as cholera had to remain in the ground for
several more years until they could be disinterred. Nevertheless, in line
with other sumptuary restrictions, the government did seek to limit
feasts/banquets that followed the secondary burial. Not to self promote,
but there is a lengthier discussion of this in the chapter on funerals in
my book.
Best,
Shaun
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From: <rowens>
Date: Fri, May 14, 2010 at 1:29 PM
Hello, I am interested in knowing how these Kinh reburial practices compare with Hmong and Thai groups.
Also, does anyone know about the cultural practice for not eating the head or feet of the chicken at Thai weddings? I attended a black Thai wedding and decided to preemptively give the chicken's head to another guest. This turned out to be a mistake as the head and feet of the chicken symbolically represent the bride and groom and are not eaten. I would like to know more about the meaning of this symbolism.
thanks for any and all ideas or references on where to find more information.
-RIch
-----------------------------
Richard Owens
PhD. Candidate
Department of Anthropology
Baldwin Hall
University of Georgia
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From: Tai, Hue-Tam Ho
Date: Fri, May 14, 2010 at 2:48 PM
Shaun:
I'm so glad you chimed in! Only a few days ago, some of us were talking about meeting you in Hanoi...
In the video that Narquis took in 1999 in Phu Tho, the person in charge of the proceedings is the toc truong. The people who cleaned the bones were not very experienced or knowledgeable. They threw in the bones of the hand pell mell, leading the toc truong to scold them and to observe that "next time, we should put them in a plastic bag so that they are not misplaced or missing." I thought the liquid was alcohol, doled out very carefully, but no one actually said so. The top of the casket was decorated with a dragon, and it was very important to ensure where the head was in relation to the skeleton. It is also important that when the coffin is reburied, the head of the dead be below the vertical tombstone. I attended Catholic burial in the Boston-area many years ago, and the coffin had to be taken out and replaced because the grave-diggers has not attended to this issue.
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From: <jmcdan>
Date: Fri, May 14, 2010 at 6:11 PM
Very interesting material indeed! I am a little late to this discussion. I might have missed something. Did anyone reference Bernard Formoso's work on funerary practices in Southern China? If not, his work is helpful for understanding secondary burials and bone cleaning. I have a book coming out on Ghosts and Magic in Thai Buddhism (Columbia U. Press) later this year that mentions the practice of secondary burial among Sino-Thai in Bangkok and parts of Southern Thailand. These practices were observed among Chinese (Hokkien and Tieo Chiu) speaking communities in Siam/Thailand by both foreign and royal observers in the late 19th century and are still relatively common today. The meticulous arranging and cleaning of bones that Shaun Malarney mentions are certainly similar to these Sino-Thai rites. Thank you for the great description.
Best,
justin
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From: Michael Digregorio
Date: Fri, May 14, 2010 at 6:21 PM
Dear Hue Tam
In Van Dien that wrap bodies in a next to insure that no bones are lost. when the coffin is opened, you body is decomposed, the clothes (preferably natural materials) are also decomposed, and the remains are wrapped in this net. The net is then pulled out of the coffin and laid on the ground beside the coffin. The gravediggers at Van Dien are very experienced with this, and will count bones with family members. The remains are placed in a metal box and taken to an official area where they washed (see attached photo). In Van Dien, the remains are washed under running water and an antiseptic alcohol. The bones are then placed within the small coffin, head at the top, femurs and arms along the side, hip at the bottom, and spine and ribs in line.
Before the bones are removed. there is a ceremony in which a ritual master places eggs on chopsticks. If the eggs balance, it is believed the deceased is willing to be moved (see tiny clip below). I assume this is of Taoist origin. Can anyone confirm this?
Mike
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From: Michael Digregorio
Date: Fri, May 14, 2010 at 7:58 PM
Here is a link to one of Formoso's papers:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1317148
Mike
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From: Tai, Hue-Tam Ho
Date: Fri, May 14, 2010 at 8:14 PM
It seems that re-burial (secondary burial) is practiced widely in southern China but not in northern China (see the book by James Watson and Evelyn Rawski) Googling secondary burial in China brings up a number of references, including an article about secondary burials in southern Taiwan.
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From: Michael Digregorio
Date: Fri, May 14, 2010 at 10:08 PM
Dear Hue Tam
I followed your suggestion which also brought me to jar burials. As noted by prof Fan, the Zhuang rebury bones in rice jars (chum gao) and as I noted in my comments, the major source for both rice jars and reburial coffins is Phu Lang village in Bac Ninh. Dr. Fan notes archeological evidence for reburials in southern China to the stone age. I found similar evidence for primary and secondary jar burials in Laos and Thailand going back as far. And, of course, we have the Sa Huynh mortuary jars.
I think you mentioned Zhu Li earlier alongside a note about rotting corpses in jars. Please correct me if I am wrong.
All of this is now making sense to me, at least at a hypothesis level.
Could the first burial underground be the change that confucuanism brought to Vietnam in the latter Le?
Mike
------------------------
From: Michael Digregorio <edgeplanet@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, May 14, 2010 at 7:30 PM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Dear Justin,
I think we need to be clear about what makes each of these practices different. The Vietnamese will rebury bones of an individual, often in their native place and, if so, generally in proximity to relatives. This comes out of a belief that souls inhabit gravesites as their final home.
I have seen the Chinese ritual of orphan bones practiced in Thaland, which I beleive is also practiced in Cambodia and Malaysia. This is different in that the bones a ritually cleansed and the souls allowed to rest becuase they have no living relatives to care for them. This is also a kind of preventitive ritual in that one of its purposes is to release wandering spirits/hungry ghosts from their ordeals, and thus to stop bothering the living.
In other areas of southeast Asia, bodies are cremated and the ashes interred in pagodas, mortuaries, or placed in homes. I did not know until it was pointed out by Leedom Leferts that this may also involve a disinternment of bodies from temporary gravesites.
Several anthropologists in Vietnam have asserted that the Chinese never rebury their dead. They pointed to the importance of finding the appropriate burial site as a premanenet resting place as being different from the Vietnamese custom of temporary burial and reinternment.
So, your reference to Hokkien and Tieo Chiu practice is intriguing. How similar are their practices to what Shaun has described? As I mentioned in an earlier message, Prof Fan Hong Gui in Guangxi noted that the Zhuang practiced a reburial ritual nearly identicial to the Kinh/Viet.
-----------------------------grave sites
Phong tục cải táng có ở dân tộc Choang TQ. Chúng tôi thường gọi là táng lần thứ hai. Từ thời kỳ đồ đá mới ở Tăng Bì Nhan Quế Lâm đã có tục này. Và nay ở Quảng Tây phong tục này vẫn còn. Thường sau chôn người chết rồi 3-5 năm rồi chọn ngày lành cũng như đất lành rồi đào lên lấy xương xếp vào chum và dưa đi chôn lại vào đất lành đã chọn được trước, tức táng lần thú hai. Ngày xưa thì táng xong là xong rồi mà không lập bi, còn hiện nay, một số những gia đình sau táng lại còn lập bi.
Điều mà tôi ngạc nhiên và cũng đang hứng thú là: dân tộc Tày, Nồng của Việt Nam vốn di cư từ TQ, mà hai dân tộc này lại không có tục này. Trong khi đó, dân tộc Kinh lại có phong tục ấy. Vì sao lại như vậy? Về vấn đề này tôi đã theo dõi từ lâu, và nay cũng đang tìm tài liệu.
Here is my rough translation, with comments in brackets:
The practice among the Zhuang is generally called a second burial. This practice has been around since the stone age in 'Tang Bi Nhan Que Lam' [somebody help with this]. This still takes place in Guangxi today. After burying the body for 3-5 years, it is dug up on an auspicious day and the bones are placed in a 'chum' [earthen pot formerly used for rice storage. These are still made in Phu Lang, which also makes the re-internment coffins] and buried in auspicious ground, that is, this is the second burial. In the old days, after the reburial was finished, grave-markers [bi=bia?] were not set up. Nowadays, some families set up grave-markers. What I find surprising and interesting is: the Tay and Nung have migrated from Vietnam to China, but neither of these ethnic groups follow these customs. While, on the other hand, the Kinh practice these customs. Why is it like this? I have been following this question for years, and am still looking for information.
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From: <jmcdan>
Date: Fri, May 14, 2010 at 8:35 PM
Great points. All I know about Vietnamese practices are what I have read in bits and pieces on the VSG! The Sino-Thai practices seem different in many ways. As for your question about Teochiu speakers in Thailand they are a very diverse group and I can't speak for various Teochiu funerary rituals in Thailand. One large group, Poh Teck Tung (Potek Xiangteng) that you may be interested in founded a corpse gathering society in Bangkok in 1909. Many of the members who moved to Bangkok in the late 19th and early twentieth century obtained permission from King Rama V to practice ?second burials? for those who had died without relatives.The ones performing the second burial -- involving digging up corpses, drying their bones, and rearranging them in a mass grave after cleaning them and chanting over them -- would become their adopted ancestors. Francis Giles observed the practice as early as 1937 and the Teochiu word for a corpse that is mummified when dug up is ?kim thong? which is equivalent to Thai as ?kuman thong? (a combination of Chinese and Sanskrit--kuman=kumara=young boy). This is similar to practices in Cambodia that Erik Davis has studied. Today this same group runs a large temple in Bangkok, a 44 hectare cremetary in the Bangkok suburbs, and a large number of private ambulances whose drivers listen to radio and police bands and show up suddenly at the scene of motorcycle and car accidents to collect any dead body. They also visit hospitals requesting that the family members of a newly deceased child, sister, or husband, donate the corpse to their society. Some families donate the corpse of their relative, other corpses are given to the society if no family member claims them. Sometimes these corpses are used for asubhakamma??h?na meditation. Sometimes they are buried, as the Poh Teck Tung Foundation does, in mass graves, only to be dug up as a group once a year to gather corpse oil (nam man phrai) and bone relics from them. Then they are cremated en masse. This mass cremation not only creates merit for the foundation and those who attend, but also allows for the easy centralized collection of auspicious and protective ashes, bones, and oils.
I hope this helps. Just bits and pieces I can recall right now.
Best,
justin
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From: Tai, Hue-Tam Ho
Date: Sat, May 15, 2010 at 3:53 AM
I have to hold the workshop on Space today and tomorrow, so I will follow up on funerary practices later. My copy of the Watson and Rawski book are in my office, I believe, but I don't have a copy of Ebrey's translation of Zhu Xi. Interestingly, several years ago, I saw copies in Vietnamese in Hanoi and I was told that Zhu Xi's Family Rituals (Gia Le) had been reprinted several times as people wanted to revive old traditions.
The discussion of people leaving urns in pagodas for years was by Ebrey in a talk at Harvard. I think it became part of one of her books, but I am not sure.
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From: Michele Thompson
Date: Sat, May 15, 2010 at 6:17 AM
Dear Everyone,
This is indeed a very interesting discussion! I might note that reburial rituals still occur in Taiwan. I don't know the formal academic literature on this but I know personally several families that have followed this practise. The families I know are all Hakka/ Ke Jia Ren/ guest people. I didn't actually attend any of these ceremonies so I don't know just what took place.
cheers
Michele
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From: JKirkpatrick
Date: Sun, May 16, 2010 at 7:02 AM
Writing as an anthropologist, somewhere back in the day (grad
school ) I came across the idea that disinterring and reburial as
a familial custom extended far into the rest of SE Asia.
Of course, I'm thinking of some of the Papua N Guinea people and
of Bali, of course.
How about the Philippines?
Is this indeed the case--that this practice was distributed
rather widely over the region?
Best,
Joanna
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From: Michael Digregorio
Date: Sun, May 16, 2010 at 4:54 PM
Joanna,
It appears that jar burials and reburials were a common feature of both Austroasian and Austronesian cultures that extended all the way to Madagascar. Some archeological research points to some end of this practice among the specific national groups where their research took place. At least, that is, the reburial of bones (versus cremation of remains). It appears that only the Zhuang and the Kinh continue the practice of reburying bones. Which would mean that this is a tradition as old as the Au and Lac. Archeological evidence regionally goes back 3,500 years.
Mike
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From: Liam C Kelley
Date: Sun, May 16, 2010 at 5:22 PM
Mike,
You caught my attention with this statement here:
It looks like you are assuming that the Au were Zhuang and the Lac were Viet. That is something which Vietnamese scholars argue, however archaeologists in the West will tell us that any effort to assign modern ethnic groups to ancient terms is fraught with danger. I've read the work of some archaelogists who think that the concept of ethnicity should simply be discarded when looking at archaeological remains, because it is too problematic.
That said, there is no question but that early Viet and Tai speaking peoples came into contact (the work of Pham Duc Duong, among others, has shown, for instance, that many of the words dealing with wet rice agriculture in Vietnamese are of Tai origin). However, what I have yet to see anyone demonstrate is HOW and WHEN this happened. So you've excited me with this issue of reburial, because that is something which archaeology should be able to demonstrate.
I haven't read every one of these posts, so my apologies if this has been discussed already, but do you have any idea if archaeologists have dated this practice in Vietnam and southern China, i.e., in areas where potentially Viet and Tai speaking peoples may have lived? Do we know if it moved from one area to another?
In an earlier email you wrote the comment below in making a point about how some Vietnamese explain the origins of this practice. Archaelogically there has to be a clearer way of demonstrating the existence of reburial than empty Han tombs. Do you (or any one else) have any idea if archaelogists have done so? (and there was an email with a file about reburial in southern China, wasn't there? Maybe that explains this, but I can't find it now. . .)
Thanks,
Liam
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From: Liam C Kelley
Date: Sun, May 16, 2010 at 5:55 PM
ah, here's that information. . . so let me ask a better question. we have mortuary jars all over the place from early times, and then there is the practice of secondary burial which you say today is still practiced by the Zhuang and Vietnamese. I'm assuming that these are not necessarily the same thing, is that correct? Is there evidence or an argument about the emergence of secondary burial amidst an existing practice of burying remains in mortuary jars?
Liam
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From: Michael Digregorio <edgeplanet@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, May 16, 2010 at 6:44 PM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Liam
They are essentially they same practice. Evidence from Thailand and recent evidence from Laos suggest a first burial (including storage in caves) in jars, what Vietnamese would now call 'chum'. And the same sites also contain second burials also on jars. The evidence for second burials is that the bones have been obviously cleaned and fit into the smaller jars. The Zhuang practice as described by Prof Fan is essentially the same except that it includes a coffin burial as does the Vietnamese practice. Vietnamese use a small pottery casket (hom tieu) rather than a jar for second burials. Apart from that, the Zhuang and Kinh follow essentially the same practice.
About my comments about the Au Lac, consider it in the same vein as calling British Anglo Saxons, the French Gauls or the Germans 'Teutonic'. I believe the historic link between the people now called Zhuang and those called Kinh is what prof Fan is suggesting when he notes that he he is looking for data.
Mike