An interest in death and the dead was omnipresent in early China. K. E. Brashier's Ancestral Memory in Early China shows us widely disparate conceptions of the afterlife that existed, rejecting both a single concept of ritual and the notion that a uniform set of rituals existed. Brashier examines numerous examples and shines much-needed light on the practices and thinking linked to death and the dead in pre-medieval China, primarily but not exclusively during the Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE).
In part 1 of his study, Brashier considers the importance of doing ritual. Early Chinese texts concerning ritual are numerous and famous. They are commonly read as manuals, or as records of what happened. Brashier concentrates on the gap between what history tells us about what people did and what texts on ritual say was supposed to have occurred. In part 2 he gives many examples of shifts in ritual...
