week six_the meaning behind ceremonies

It is natural in a culture to have certain ceremonies functioning as access to gods and ancestors. People use certain ceremony to build as well as revise the connection to the ones they trust in.

At the first time these ceremonies were created, they were certainly complete and fixed sets of actions, but as time goes by, these ceremonies turns into varies of forms, as a result of different culture background and other synthetic factors. Sometimes even in the same country, the process of feting the same god varies in different regions. Meanwhile feting ceremonies varies from region to region, they are also simplified since people's pace of life today are becoming quicker and quicker. So does these alternatives matter?

Why no begin with the reason why people do these ceremonies? Let's let alone the belief arena and just talk about the motivation of such action (in fact religious belief among youth in east Asia isn't very strong today). People in trouble or feel helpless tend to seek help from other strength, and religious or supernatural belief can become one resource of mental support. Ceremonies like burning symbolized paper products can also relief the sorrow and depress of having beloved relatives gone. By being a part of these ceremonies, no matter if perfect process is followed, can make people alive feel they are actually making the person gone live a better life.

Just like what was said in the interview this week, once the ceremony is taken out of a good tendency, no matter how it is held, it works. After all, the original reason why fete is created is to deposit people's good intention.

week five_for the dead or for the alive

Death may has complex meanings in different cultures and situations, but being dead just equals to the stop of human organic operation to a person. All the functions of a body cease sooner or later, without the conscious or so called spirit, a person comes to his or her end and finally turns into a "thing", a stuff. The gone people themselves, if there is no such "another world" or things like soul or ghost, surely cannot feel anything about how their bodies are treated (Though profaning bodies shouldn't be forgiven still. Not because bodies used to be people, but for the behavior itself).

Just like the cases of designing crematories and mortuaries, these places are traditionally considered to be built for dead bodies, but due to many complex reasons, the feelings of people working or visiting there should be taken into consideration. So when we talk about how we treat dead people and their bodies, we are in fact talk about our believes, thought and attitudes. It is kind of reflection of peoples' mind and culture background.

Maybe, we preserve bodies just because we want to pursue ever lasting lives; we cremating bodies just because we fear concepts of getting rotten and hope to cleanse ominous things. Other than results of rational thinking, what we to ceased lives are more likely to be following our wishful thinking.

[photo of Chuck Palahniuk] In his Exodus, Chuck Palahniuk talked about the people's emotion tied on human as well as simulants of human. Things don't think, perhaps it's we that are bordering ourselves.

week four_the each "One" behind statistics

When something is shown as a whole, even it is actually made of a lot of different "parts", we are likely to forget the fact that each single part of the whole thing has something of its own.

Seeing charts and figures day after day making us forget what are the things behind these stats we see: they are dollars lost or earned by different individuals; they are injuries spread over various bodies; they are death of both known and unknown ones. Take the example of lists of victims appear on newspapers after disasters, behind each "one" of the number there is a life, this life has his or her story, and whether catchy or not, this life is worth respect, or at least some thing more than a simple glance.

If you are a blogger, you may have noticed that many blogs you find when browsing randomly (don't tell me you've never done this before) are "dead" years before in fact. People share their photos and experiences and thoughts by blogging, and then just left the little website alone and forgot it at some time. All the limited words and images are our only knowledge about some one we probably will never see in our whole life. What is happening on them now? It's a meaningless question for our lives have no connection to these strangers we see online at all, like every single individual hiding behind the datum shown in disparate conditions every day.

Yes, meaningless, but since these people are also inhabitants on this planet, how can we just don't care?

* Cholera map made by John Snow, each black dot stands for a death caused by cholera. Deaths here are just little dots, through which no further information of the dead can be seen.