This anthropological study focuses on the practice of burning spirit money in Chinese religion, but it's about much more than that. Using eclectic theoretical lens, the author investigates how burning money and other paper replicas has persisted and even seen reinvention in Chinese communities throughout the world. Deploying diverse theoretical perspectives, including structuralism, historical materialism, and phenomenology, the author sees spirit money as central to the “spiritual side of daily life,” focusing on the complex semiotics of paper, fire, and money. The author's structuralist account looks at how burning paper (including incense, candle, and firecracker) depends on an alchemical semiotics of cosmic renewal, in which fire sublimates the material into the spiritual. The study of the cultural formation of money from a historical‐materialist standpoint eschews the discourse of ideology, in preference for viewing ritual burning as the site of the production/reproduction of enthrallment in the imperial order. The phenomenological analysis focuses on various sensual acts involved in immolating paper items, from folding, wrapping, and piercing, to fluttering paper notes before casting them into fire; these gestures are seen, in part, as ways of imparting the sacrificer's identity onto the oblation or increasing its value. The author raises five provocative theories on the historical origins of the practice, and the one which links the growth of Buddhist paper culture to the practice of burning paper is least developed. Nevertheless, this important study is a required reading for all scholars of religion in contemporary East Asia and Sinified Southeast Asia.
