ABSTRACT
To be forgotten, at least after the death of those who could still remember us, is our common fate. To counteract this, we note how both cultural heritage and the religious ritual practices that deal with the dead including ghosts are ways of perpetuating names and the memory of suffering others like us. Both offer immortality. Moving into case studies from the Quanzhou region and a city in southern Fujian province, but citing other studies from other parts of China and from Taiwan, we note how religious funeral rituals and rituals of temples of saviour and guardian deities commemorate suffering and recognize the names of a small minority of the dead, just as secular commemoration and anniversaries do. We note how secular authorities and local elites shun ghost and death rituals as superstition but in some cases tolerate and in others embrace them. In any case, we conclude by remarking the prevalence of religious ritual as heritage, a religionization of cultural heritage, even while shunning religious recognition of suffering in its version of the history of ghosts.
