Ancestor Worship

Conceptual Issues

Ancestor worship, or “the worship of the Manes,” is no ordinary cult of the dead. It is, for example, not applicable to children who die young or to dead elders who belong to a different kin group, because neither qualify as ancestors. Demonstrative ancestry is the litmus test for such worship. The deceased must stand in a line of identified human progenitors to the living in order to receive ancestor worship from them. It follows that the mythical beings or animals revered as totemic forebears by the aboriginal clans in Australia are not receivers of “ancestor worship” in the proper sense of the term.

The concept of ancestor becomes more complicated when parenthood is not based on natural conception and gestation. In adoptions, ancestorhood is created by jural action where natural offspring are lacking. Chinese parents, for example, have the right to manipulate the filiation of their children jurally and put them up for adoption by either partner's patrilineage in case its continuity of succession and inheritance is tenuous or in danger of a breakdown. It enables close relatives without biological heirs to receive ancestor worship after death and avoid becoming “orphaned ghosts” that would harass the living. In all adoptions, ancestor worship is made to continue on the jural manipulation of filiation.

Marriage provides another way of manipulating ancestor worship. A case in point is in-married males in Japan and China. With offspring typically becoming members of mother's natal groups in a uxorilocal marriage, an in-married male can expect to receive worship only in the ancestral line of the wife's family. There is also the Chinese custom of ghost marriage, in which a never-married dead female is wedded to a living male ceremonially so that she can receive worship from the offspring of his future marriage and become an ancestress of the conjugal family. Last but not the least, ancestorhood is jurally sanctioned in many African societies where birth in legal wedlock is often a prerequisite for ancestor worship, but the father is not necessarily the true begetter. It is not unusual that in Asian and African cultures, descent is ultimately defined in the context of ancestor worship.

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