The shoulders we stand on

Weights and waists

Vintage recordings

Conflict resolution?

Travel in a time of war

Hungry ghosts

EXPECT fewer cars on the road Tuesday night as ethnic Chinese stay home, to be safe. Tuesday is the 15th day of the seventh lunar month, the feast of the hungry ghosts.

Tuesday, and particularly Tuesday night, is supposed to be the most dangerous day of the year, when the spirit world allows hungry ghosts to roam the world with impunity. This is why ethnic Chinese all over the world will offer incense, food, wine and "spirit money" to try to placate these ghosts. If satiated, they'll return peacefully to barracks, oops, I meant back into the spirit world. If they remain hungry, then they wreak havoc, causing accidents and disasters.

Even younger ethnic Chinese, myself included (smile), are aware of these hungry ghosts, which is actually associated with the entire seventh lunar month. The month, which this year extends from July 29 to Aug. 27, is considered inauspicious, with the first half (ending Tuesday) being the most dangerous.

Marriages are discouraged because it means a bad start to marital life. Travel is discouraged (I remember for the longest time ever, my parents would get quite anxious if I had to go on a trip during this seventh lunar month, because accidents are said to occur more frequently, presumably as hungry ghosts look for victims). On the 15th day itself, many Chinese will avoid going out at night unless absolutely necessary.

Business people are especially wary, reluctant to start any kind of new venture during the month. One can imagine how economic activities in Asia stall this month, from stock market trading to new investments, all because of a Chinese fear of the ghosts! (Typically Chinese though, some young Singaporeans have taken advantage of this ghost-mania by producing documentaries about Chinese death rituals and the hungry ghosts, all being featured this month on Discovery channel.)

As an anthropologist, I look at all this as reflecting the way the Chinese emphasize ties with ancestors. Over the centuries, they've built an entire complex of practices around the dead, of which this hungry-ghosts festival is only a part. Many of these practices are found among Filipinos as well, the result of cultural exchanges through the last few centuries.

We see long wakes and elaborate funerals, often meant more for public consumption. These wakes and funerals are almost festive, noisy and boisterous with religious ceremonies (for insurance, Christian, Buddhist, Taoist), music bands and professional mourners wailing away and extolling the virtues of the dead. (Quite often, too, hitherto unknown families of deceased males show up -- wives and children -- exposing the vices of the dead and adding to the melodrama.)

The funeral itself can take the entire day, with long processions, more wailing and fainting and hysteria. Symbolic grave goods are burned together with lots of spirit money, in denominations of millions of dollars (never pesos, mind you -- I imagine pesos don't have too much value even in the next life). Paper replicas of houses, cars, furniture and lately, electronic appliances are burned to accompany the dead and mind you, we're talking here of mansions, BMWs and Sony appliances.

I doubt if anyone really believes the spirits need their spiritual DVD players in the next life, but these rituals have to be performed because they've become part of society's collective habits.

The French philosopher and sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, uses a fancy term, habitus, to refer to these social imperatives. Filipinos would put it as "walang mawawala" -- you lose nothing -- by performing the rituals, but not performing them could have consequences, sometimes quite dire in nature. Socially, death is just so disruptive an event that cultures end up formulating elaborate rituals, much more for the sake of the living rather than the dead.

Chinese wakes and funerals become an occasion to assert one's status in society -- the richer a family (or the richer one wants to look), the more opulent the funerals. Some families will have "rewind" burials, exhuming remains after a few years and burying the remains with much pomp, these secondary and tertiary burials becoming occasions for reasserting one's status in the community and bringing family members together.

The funerals also become an occasion for statuses to be reaffirmed within the clan, reflected in the strict rules around the funerals about who gets to wear what mourning clothes, who gets to walk on what side of the cortege, who first enters the cemetery. Not surprisingly, males get to perform many of the main rituals-the eldest son, for example, is the first to enter the cemetery, carrying a picture of his deceased parent, a way of proclaiming he is now head of the clan.

What about the hungry ghosts? My interpretation here is that the designation of an entire seventh lunar month to the ghosts becomes a powerful reminder to the Chinese of the need to remember the dead. In the name of filial piety, ties are maintained with the deceased for several generations.

I tend to be more secular about all these matters, feeling that we can dispense with many of the rituals and irrational fears and instead look more deeply into the meanings of these beliefs.

My interpretation of all these death beliefs and practices is that they are there to remind us of the need to keep ties with, and to learn, from those who have come before us. Neglecting the past, transformed into a metaphor of not feeding the ghosts, leaves us without our moral and social compasses. We drift alone, in futile battles with the ghosts within us, blind to the wisdom left behind by our ancestors. In the end, it is arrogance -- a belief that we do not need culture and our past -- that consumes the living.