ancestorsbetween the dead and the living at two locations: home and ancestral
temple. The family sacrifices of a more elaborate variety are observed on
the death day anniversary, festival days, and the first and fifteenth of each
month. And these sacrifices feature kowtowing before the ancestral spirit
tablets, burning of incense, candles, and paper money, offering of food and
drink, and concluding with wishes that the ancestors enjoy the offerings.
The offerings are a means of communicating with the dead and providing
them with sustenance in their next life.
Ancestor reverence is directly rooted in the social structure of a society
and embedded into the kinship, domestic and descent relations and insti-
tutions. Ancestor worship (a disputed notion) in China is a lineage cult
with the major responsibility to perform the necessary rites resting on the
oldest living son, who accepts the role as a right and a duty. This is
because he replaces his father in the social structure. Among the Ashanti
of Africa, each lineage owns a blackened stool that serves as a shrine of
its ancestors. Offerings of food and drink are made on the stool.
Ancestors play an important role in many religions because they are
believed to act as guardians of the social and moral order. They rise above
the transitory human level by virtue of constituting fundamental catego-
ries of moral and legal thought. This invests them with sacred signifi-
cance, their sanctioned rights and duties unchallenged by the living. Thus
ancestors make social members conform to expected norms of behavior,
whereas any deviation from the norms incurs ancestral disapproval. The
ancestral cult reflects the need of a society to maintain itself. If a society
depends on its ancestors, the departed also depend on the living, forming
a mutually beneficial system that helps to enhance the continuity of the
social structure. This is apparent among the Tonga, a Bantu people of
northern South Africa, whose ancestors validate the pattern of life, bind
together potentially divergent kin groups, and reinforce primary status
changes among adults.
When an older person dies a break in the social fabric is experienced
by survivors. This type of social rift calls for a reinstatement of the
deceased into the family and its lineage by means of ritual. The deceased
often do not receive rites until they manifest themselves in the life of their
descendents.
In many religions, the dead are considered impure. Among the Dogon
of Africa, death disperses a person’s vital force, which constitutes the
impurity of death. By being impure, the dead create disorder, which func-
tions as a warning to the living. This is interpreted by the living as the
dead appealing to them to regularize their position. In the Dogon society,
order is established by a cult in which millet beer plays a central role as
it is believed that the ancestor impregnates the beer giving it intoxicating