ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter provides a brief summary of the key issues presented in this book and projects the role of ancestor worship into the twenty-first century. It argues that ancestors and ancestor worship will continue to play a role in twenty-first-century modernity as the curious attitude of the younger generation of Diaspora Chinese will propel them to engage in the search for their cultural roots, resulting in the emergence of numerous agencies that help people to find their roots. Likewise, the Mainland Chinese state through its various state organs has also continued with its role of helping the Diaspora Chinese search for their roots. This has led to some Diaspora Chinese travelling to China to visit the emigrant villages of their forebears. The book concludes that while there exists social interconnectivity between the Diaspora Chinese and the Mainland Chinese, these two groups live in parallel universes. Yet at the same time, there is a collaborative cultural basin where they share various cultural elements of ancestors and ancestor worship that looms large. Finally, the chapter argues that there is also the emergence of a Diaspora Chinese culture that contains elements of Chineseness yet is pluralistic and hybridized, which incorporates other ethnic and global cultural elements from within the nation state and from the global environment.
