n a society that has seen epochal change over a few generations, what remains to hold people together and offer them a sense of continuity and meaning? In Songs for Dead Parents, Erik Mueggler shows how in contemporary China death and the practices surrounding it have become central to maintaining a connection with the world of ancestors, ghosts, and spirits that socialism explicitly disavowed.
Drawing on more than twenty years of fieldwork in a mountain community in Yunnan Province, Songs for Dead Parents shows how people view the dead as both material and immaterial, as effigies replace corpses, tombstones replace effigies, and texts eventually replace tombstones in a long process of disentangling the dead from the shared world of matter and memory. It is through these processes that people envision the cosmological underpinnings of the world and assess the social relations that make up their community. Thus, state interventions aimed at reforming death practices have been deeply consequential, and Mueggler traces the transformations they have wrought and their lasting effects.

200多年来，域外萨满教研究主要经历了三个阶段。早期主要侧重描述萨满教的外在表现形式；中期以研究萨满教的社会作用为主；近百年来，特别是近半个世纪以来，则主要围绕着萨满的生理和心理问题及其所体现的萨满教特征展开。其中，萨满的脱魂和附体问题始终是备受关注的问题。综观域外萨满教研究学术史，以及域外学界对这一问题的讨论，主要是从三个方面展开的：萨满其人；出神术与脱魂、附体论；萨满医疗。本书将域外这些有关萨满研究的论文集结。

本书的写作，立足于马长寿先生对凉山彝族地区长逹八个月的实地考察。一九三六年秋，先生进入正在筹备的国立中央博物院，任助理研究员。
在一九四九年以前，马长寿先生主要从事民族学的研究，先后在西南的彝族、嘉绒藏族、羌族等聚居区进行田野调查工作，获得了大量第一手的田野调查资料，搜集了大批珍贵的民族文献和文物，发表了一系列优秀的论文，主要有：《中国西南民族分类》、《中国古代花甲生藏之起源与再现》、《四川古代僚族问题》、《四川古代民族历史考证》、《钵教历史源流》、《嘉戎民族社会史》、《康藏民族之分类体质种属及其社会组织》、《凉山罗彝的族谱》等。这些论文，都是应用控民族学的理论与方法，结合民族学用野调查和文献资料的研究成果，具有很高的学术价值。

本书从人类学仪式理论、仪式的文学人类学解释、与自然生态的关系、酒神系谱、酒神的美学发生学原理及酒神的文学原型叙事等几个方面进行论述。笔者试图说明：像“日神／酒神”这样的纯粹具有西学伦理和哲学美学发生学意义的叙事范式其实充满着“东方叙事”的因子；它是一个“东学西渐”的历史变迁过程。它可以说明：在“西方文学”的“我者叙事”当中，事实上存在着许多东方文化的“他者叙事”。如果说比较文化（文学）的学术反思在今天有什么特质的话，其中之一便是所谓“西方”的文学叙事范式（假定为“同质性文学”）本身同样值得我们进行“比较”，包括“平行研究”和“影响研究”；因为连“西方文学”这样的概念都是“想像”和“制造”出来的。由于一个标志着帝国隐喻权力范式的作用，许多历史因素或经过选择，或经过排斥，或经过变形，或经过转换……这不能不说是一个历史的“共谋”（Complicity）在这方面提供了一个例证。

This work is a milestone in Zhuang studies. It has a wide potential readership, and is set to make an impact across the fields of anthropology, religious studies, comparative literature, linguistics, and history. It will begin to redress the near total lack of Western-language sources dealing with the Zhuang people. It focues on the ancient practice of buffalo sacrifice, and also provides a wealth of background material on Zhuang cultural history. --Anthony Diller, Australian National University
The author has done a magnificent job of making an important cultural artefact accessible. Historians, East and West, will find in it arguments for the contribution that the non-Han peoples of the southern reaches of China made to Han language and culture. This is an important work, and the research methods brought to it are a model of the highest caliber. --John Hartmann, foreign language and literature professor, Northern Illinois University