The Anthropo-Semiotics of the Chinese Funeral Striptease

1 Introduction: Death to the rhythm of dance

History records that various societies around the world have incorporated the dance as part of their cultural heritage, and as part of their funeral rites. Considered a universal expression of humans and possibly the oldest form of art, it is believed that dance originated in an excess of joy or the need for selfliberation (in the form of excitation and expression of feelings), besides being a link between magic and religion, which produces certain effects on the dancers and on the members of the audience.^[1] As Winick says, “the funeral dances are widespread and are often mimetic, so that they can influence the dead by sympathetic magic” (1969: 190) in order to communicate with death, propitiate him (placate his anger, win his favor or benevolence) or exorcise a dangerous spirit.

Already in ancient Egypt, for example, dance was present in the rites of life and death; it was used in the celebrations of royalty, religious ceremonies, funerals, and festivals as a way of expressing deep feelings that often people could not externalize with simple words, hence its mimetic character (Ecured 2015). It has been reported that there are artistic reproductions of dance in the ancient Egyptian burial chambers of Mereruka (the Chancellor of Pharaoh Teti and governor of Memphis), located northeast of the necropolis of Saqqara in Lower Egypt, where dancers appear with very short skirts, a hat with a braid that ended in a disc, dancing with arms over head, torso bare with a large bead necklace. They were led by a dancer wearing a long transparent linen tunic, who marked the rhythm with palms.

According Diez (2010), funerary dances appear during the pre-dynastic period of Ancient Egypt (4500–3000 BC), in the tombs of high officials and contrails statues, in pyramid texts, and in the papyri. Then the dancers were required to adopt certain poses and omit some dance steps during their ritual representation, and these rules had to be respected in this funerary context or it may be that the deceased did not travel to the beyond (or his “other reality”).

In other places such as Madagascar, a peculiar type of funeral ritual is held at least every five years after the death of a person. This is well known as the Famadihana, a practice that comes from their Indonesian ancestors, according to which it proceeds to the opening of tomb to remove the bones of the deceased, which are placed on a mat. Then they dance with the bones in a great feast and gifts are given to the dead when the celebration culminates, and after that they return the bones to the grave until the next party (Los archivos del viento 2011).

In China, dances pervade the lives of members of the ethnic group Qiang (located to the northwest of Sichuan province), such that all aspects of this culture are related to a dance, because “every activity has its dance: party, harvest, receiving guests, worshiping the gods, funerals” (China viva 2015). For the Qiang, the dance has a strong ritual component, as it is still regarded as a closely related activity with their history and mythology, which also serves as a means of expression through which they are able to transform any act of their lives into something sacred and with great significance.

Among the Qiang the Salang is the most famous dance, inspired by ancient shamans. Currently it is performed exclusively by women and although it has a playful role, it is present in all the ceremonies of this ethnic group, whose ritual components are manifested in the way the participants are distributed around a fire, forming a semicircle, and dressed in red skirts; performances may last all night and culminates with the dawn.

Today the Salang includes numerous variations with meanings that change as they relate to love, marriage, the harvest or field work, while at funerals the Salang dance acquires certain special features, including slow and stereotyped movements to express respect for the dead (China viva 2015). But they also have other important religious dances as described by Yaxiong (1987), such as the Dance of the Armour, in which the leave-taking of soldiers to war and their victorious return are represented, a ceremony restricted to funeral rites to show the spirits that living people are able to protect their dead.

Greece also reports the practice of the funeral dance, which took place at the death of Athenian kings. These dances involved the elite of the army, whose members led the way dressed in long white robes, with two lines preceding the coffin, which was surrounded by two rows of virgins. All participants carried wreaths and cypress bouquets, while serious and majestic figures were made accompanied by grim symphonies. They were followed by priests, who wore distinctive costumes alluding to their dignity, marching with slow and measured steps, singing verses as praises of the deceased (Wikipedia 2014).

In Venezuela, the Jesuit priest Jose Gumilla described various funeral rites of people of the East, following his tour of that country in the mid-eighteenth century. These rites had their roots in pre-Hispanic cultures, including the Salivas ethnic group living to the north of the Amazonas state. I quote him below (italics are mine):

He tells us in El Orinoco Ilustrado that he witnessed the funeral of the brother of a chief tribe being among the Salivas. ‘In started coming groups of outsiders. I do not know how it could be, neither where they brought so handy to tears, because being they were coming happy, to get to the door they let loose a tender cry with real tears. To this cry promptly answered the cries of those inside and after this melancholy was over they used to drink and to dance merrily. If during the dance fervor came another visit, the cry was renewed, and they returned to drinking and dancing, and this lasted so until they reached the last’.

(Macpecri 2015)

As can be seen, many cultures around the world have incorporated dance to their funeral rites, and the dance has also been present in various art forms such as literature, music, painting, and theater such as the so-called Death Dance or Dance Macabre.^[2] It is a medieval allegory teaching that humans cannot escape their fate, because all are condemned to death. In a grim mime-drama, death is personified as the one who leads this dance, in which she is seen dancing with other skeletons, which means “the absolute power exercised over the life of man, from the pope or the king to the beggar” (Perez-Rioja 1997: 158).

However, this funeral rite has introduced an innovation in certain rural areas of China (and even in Taiwan), where the deceased is not only accompanied by some dancing girls in their final farewell, as described in the mentioned examples, but also these dancers remove their clothes during the dance. Thus, the dancers have integrated the striptease into the rite of the funeral dance, a modification that has its followers (especially among rural communities in China) but also its detractors: that is, the Chinese State has banned this practice in an attempt to eradicate it, considering it to be a cultural distortion imposed by external influences (specifically by the West), according to international press reports.

A description of the new rite, based on ethnographic data (Del Fresno 2011), is as follows: the coffin is placed on a platform; a portrait of deceased chairs the auditorium, while people of all ages – even if they do not know the deceased – gather to pay their respects. Suddenly, blaring dance music invades the room and one or more scantily dressed women appear on the “stage” to dance and perform a provocative striptease a few steps from the coffin, under the watchful eye of the mourners (including children) who witness the action; they dance passionately and garment by garment clothes are removed. Sometimes there is a screen behind the dancing girls where a photo of the deceased is displayed (El Mundo 2015, AFP 2015, Phillips 2015).

On other similar occasions, the stage is a tent in which young girls sing and dance to the rhythm of the typical Chinese trumpet “suona” (usually played during funerals), are dressed suggestively either in underwear or totally naked, before a large photo of the deceased. Generally the body in the coffin is also present because it is believed that the “show” can still be enjoyed, even from life in the hereafter. Two-way conversations between artists and the audience are typical at these funerals, as well as rogue lap dances for some of the funeral attendees (EFE 2015).

This phenomenon has attracted the attention of the Western world providing an impetus for the present work to take an anthroposemiotic perspective, since dance (even erotic or with sexual content) is a cultural manifestation of humans, which allows the construction of certain transcendental meanings for society. In sum, the phenomenon has raised the following research questions:

• Is the funeral striptease a means to hide a human fear of death?

• Is the funeral striptease a means of providing an aesthetic sense to death?

• Is the funeral striptease a way of expressing the stark reality of the binomial life/death?

2 Theoretical and methodological foundations

My approach to this Chinese cultural phenomenon was based in part on the anthropo-semiotic proposal of Finol (2011), especially the two fundamental principles of this scientific discipline. That is, first, the predominance of the cultural as a defining of the human is present, and simultaneously, of the human as constitutive of the cultural; second, the predominance of the semiotic as defining of the cultural is also given, and in parallel, of the cultural as a constituent of the semiotic. Finol considers,

The meeting between the semiotic and the anthropological, among the data that expresses the human and the way, how that data expresses what it expresses, is an own encounter from a tense dialectic: the search of what, its contextual relationships and its possible meanings then comes to be resolved in determining the how, which, in turn, it will help us better understanding the what, i.e. to determine its meaning.

(Finol 2011: 239)

Finol considers urgent that anthropo-semiotics address the study of new forms and methods that affect funerary cultures and micro-cultures (such as the Chinese rural funeral striptease), which are often imbued with new situations never imagined by traditional studies, but now are present in contemporary societies and cultures. Thus, the implementation of these new forms and modalities has created new values, perceptions, and visions about death that draw the attention of scientists, while at the same time making evident changing conceptions about death and dying that exist around the world.

In order to analyze this new practice represented by striptease dances at funerals, a scheme of heuristic interaction levels proposed by Finol (2011) was used. Accordingly, anthropo-semiotics progresses dialectically from the level of reality(where the phenomenon under study is located) and from there methods and theories that lead to the ethnographic level (where data characterizing this reality was obtained) are raised, the anthropological level (corresponding to the approach of hypotheses about the meanings of such a reality), the semiotic level(represented by analyzing how the processes of meaning of that reality occur), and finally the anthropo-semiotic level (the establishment of interpretation rules for determining the meaning of reality addressed).

At the level of reality, it has been established that the phenomenon under study is the rural Chinese funeral striptease dance, whose analysis was inserted into the introspective-experiential epistemological approach proposed by Padrón Guillén (2001). In this approach (which is operationalized at the ethnographic level), knowledge is the product of the interpretations of socio-cultural symbolisms that members of a particular social group use to read reality. That is, “knowledge is interpretation of a reality as it appears inside the spaces of subjective consciousness (hence it is called Introspective)” (Padrón Guillén 2001), besides being an act of understanding that emphasizes the notion of subject and subjective reality.

According to this author, the idea is to capture the true essence of the object, “beyond and above their phenomenon appearances”. That is the reason why this approach focuses on aspects such as the development of cultural experiences, interventions in experiential spaces and real problematic situations, among others. Therefore, it takes for analyzing the symbols, values, norms, beliefs, attitudes, etc., in order to reach the subjective symbolic construction of the social and cultural world. On the other hand, the resulting theory will not be supported by the so-called universal scientists, but is “a kind of definition or translation of how social groups and individuals perceive the facts from their own internality or from their own conscience” (Padrón Guillén 2003); i.e., it is a phenomenological-interpretative theory.

The above approach is in line with the methodology used in this ethnographic level to obtain the data about the reality studied, which was based on the scientific and intellectual proposal that is called Netnography by Del Fresno, since the data on the striptease at funerals were taken from cyberspace, where there are different documentary reports integrating a cyberculture about the phenomenon studied. Such Netnography has not only the objective of

identify[ing] universal laws in order to reduce an ontological uncertainty, but to refine, as far as possible, the intellectual tools to better capture, describe, analyse, understand and explain the multiplicity of complex structures of meaning in which we find ourselves immersed.

(Del Fresno 2011: 20–21)

It can be said that Netnography is a new discipline or rather an ”anti-discipline” or an interdisciplinary, considered ”a theory under construction and development to understand the social reality that is occurring in the online context, where millions of people live, express and interact daily” (Del Fresno 2011: 17). It is an adaptation of ethnography to the analysis of a new being thererepresented by cyberspace, and for this it uses its main technical field: ”observation and participant observation, conversation, deep interview, analysis of social networks, the genealogical method, life stories, the documentary analysis” (Del Fresno 2011: 54).

However, the novelty lies in the fact that now it is not necessary to travel to isolated and exotic communities in order to investigate them since it is now possible to focus on specific and very unique online communities that are part of this new space “without a place”. Furthermore, it facilitates no participant – if it is so required – without violating ethical rules; i.e., there is no falling into the questionable covert participant observation. Accordingly, the present research is qualitative in nature and participant observation or description was used in order to address the field of study in this virtual terrain that is cyberspace, where the cyberculture is developed that speaks about the phenomenon in question. It is mentioned an observation or participant description, because the researcher intervened in cyberspace to witness some short videos of that funerary ritual practice.

Several documentary reports on striptease dances at funerals available on the Internet were used as a study corpus, as well as the above-mentioned short videos, but only by way of a qualitative rather than quantitative sample, in order to describe and analyze this ritual practice carried out in certain rural areas of China.

At the anthropological level, the following hypotheses seek to shed light on the meanings of the reality under study. On the one hand, there is the emic approach represented by the position of those who accept that practice at funerals as a mark of prestige, luck, and to attract many attendees to the funeral, and a State that for years has been looking to eradicate it, because it is considered a cultural distortion imposed from the West. On the other hand, there is the eticapproach, which characterizes the striptease dance at funerals as an attempt to mask the fear of death, give an aesthetic character to it, and reveal the underlying vulnerability of humans both in life and in death.

In relation to the semiotic level, the analysis of how processes of significance of that reality occur, the method is based in part on the contributions of Lotman (1996, 1998, 1999, 2000) on the semiotics of culture, especially those related to his notion of semiosphere (i.e. the construction of a particular funeral semiosphere, with its relations of power), tension/explosion in Chinese culture, recurrence to life/death frontier as a translation space of peripheral Chinese culture. Also relevant to my analysis are concepts offered by Peirce (1987), especially his idea of a triadic semiotics – icon, index, and symbol – which I bring to bear on the striptease as an expression of identity, otherness, and cultural change. As well, I incorporate the rites of passage by Van Gennep (1984, 2008), as the funeral striptease simultaneously actives rites of separation (the world of the living from the world of the dead), rites of margin (the deceased at the time belongs neither to the world of the living nor to the world of the dead), and rites of aggregation (to the world of the dead).

Finally, at the anthropo-semiotic level the meaning of the addressed reality will be determined by means of the interpretation resulting from the interaction of the two preceding levels (the anthropological and the semiotic), in order to establish that the striptease at funerals involves notions of identity, otherness, and change in Chinese culture.

Thus, the analysis is expected to cover the general objective of this research, that is to understand the presence of the striptease as part of the funeral rituals of Chinese rural culture, as well as the fallowing specific objectives: (a) explain the use of striptease in Chinese funerals as a mask before death, (b) understand the use of striptease at funerals as a strategy for giving an aesthetic character to death, and (c) explain the function of the funeral striptease as an expression of the underlying human fear of the binomial life/death.

3 The striptease in the semiosphere of Chinese funerals

Before developing this section, I remind the reader that a rite is a “lot of acts performed in accordance with a series of prescribed rules, usually with a symbolic meaning” (Beals & Hoijer 1978: 788) and that the person is an animal that uses the ritual as “a constitutive element of human existence” (Tamayo-Acosta 2008); this is an element that permeates all social life and all cultural structures of society (Finol 2006).

These prescribed rules have been modified in the funerals of some rural areas of China (and Taiwan too) such as Donghai or Suqian city, in the eastern province of Jiangsu, as well as in a village in Cheng’an County and the city of Handan (both in Hebei province to the north of China), where the striptease has become part of funeral ritual, despite having been banned by the authorities. This reveals the presence of a particular funeral semiosphere, which is defined as “the semiotic space outside which is impossible the real existence of semiosis” (Lotman 1996: 24), because it is only inside this space where the communicative acts and production of new information related to the phenomenon analyzed may occur. In short, it is a semiotic universe, an extraordinary mechanism or great system, within which the languages interact, interfere, and self-organize hierarchically, as a way of guarantying the real existence of semiosis or sign construction.

That semiosphere is constituted by some organized, dominant, and self-descriptive nuclear structures by means of the meta-languages generated (with which it also describes the otherness or peripheral space) and some peripheralstructures that are in constant collision and tension with the first (Lotman 1999); these structures represent the level of the ideal unity of real semiotic map, where the other is always a key factor, since all semiosphere involves an internal diversity: that is, there is identity (among those who accept the practice of striptease), but also difference, otherness or alterity and plurality or diversity(those who disagree with such a practice).

Nuclear structures are represented by the Chinese state as the embodiment of the majority culture who practice traditional funerals and, therefore, prohibit striptease dances because they are deemed a distortion of culture inserted from the West as an obscene and uncivilized show; while peripheral structures are represented by the rural areas of the nation where the striptease has been in-corporated as part of the funeral ritual. There is always a tension between both structures that can lead to an explosion (Lotman 1999), which was expressed in the government prohibition against these kind of shows, the announcement of the Ministry of Culture about starting campaigns against those shows, the imprisonment and payment of fines of strippers and some impresarios who hire them, and the payment of a small reward for denouncing this practice (Muertes conocidas 2011).

However, despite the pressure of the nuclear structures, the habit remains as an active ceremony among the peripheral structures, because it is argued that dancer girls are used as a resource in order to guarantee a massive attendance at funerals, as it is believed that the greater the number of people, the greater the honor for the deceased (Muertes conocidas 2011); it is also considered a good omen in his life in the hereafter (Limpieza de tumbas 2016), besides being a symbol of good luck for the relatives of the deceased and a sample of prosperity of the former. This new practice may be related, in a degenerate way, of the common Chinese practice of hiring professionals “mourners” called Kusangren, including artistic events such as dance, even as this dance was tending more towards the erotic (McKirdy & Lu 2015).

According the anthropologist Mark L. Moskowitz, a specialist in Taiwanese folklore from the University of South Carolina, the presence of striptease at funerals may have other more religious explanations, based on the belief that the inferior gods who once were humans – but were worshiped by many people – still enjoy pleasures like games and naked women, so these erotic dancers represent a symbolic gift with which these gods are honored (Marcianos 2015).^[3] Moskowitz revealed the existence of the funeral strippers in Taiwan in a 40-minute documentary titled Dancing for the Dead: Funeral Strippers in Taiwan, which showed the audience the cultural diversity of this country.

However, an unidentified historian attributes the origin of this practice to the Taiwanese mafia, which about 25 years ago ruled this nation, a time when it bought most of the nightclubs and many of the funeral services. These activities were combined to increase their income and so the funeral striptease was born – a novel change for a funeral ritual, especially in rural areas. These obscene shows were frequent there in the mid-1980, but being prohibited by law, this practice has since moved from Taiwan to Mainland China (Marcianos 2015).

This particular Chinese funeral semiosphere reveals the ability of the striptease to be a catalyst text for cultural change (Lotman 1996, 1999), when it is inserted into another text already established (the traditional funeral), for making a new text with features of both structures: the traditional remains in rural funerals, but combined or supplemented with this new ritual practice of striptease. About it, Finol considers:

As any cultural phenomenon, the rite is sensitive to change and in a society that is rapidly transformed – in large part because of globalization and pervasiveness of technological media and communication – such changes can be very fast. In addition, the new communication needs and communication contexts promote the emergence of new secular, religious or semi-religious rites. For facing these needs, the groups often resort to existing rites and transform and adapt them to their expressive and communicative purposes.

(Finol 2014: 7)

However, this ritual change involves understanding that, currently, the genesis of rites is not necessarily located in the tradition, and they do not have the density and the symbolic prestige that were intrinsic to the ancient rites; often the new rites are inventions or adjusted to “the characteristics and circumstances of the group, family, business or neighbors” (Finol 2014: 8), such as has occurred with the striptease in rural Chinese funerals. But in spite of the conflicting positions of the viewpoint emic – expressed as nuclear and peripheral structures of this particular funeral semiosphere – it should be asked whether this local perspective is sufficient, or in other words: what is the real reason for the presence of this ritual practice?

4 Strategies to mask the fear of death

One of the hypotheses raised here is that the striptease is used as a mask at the funerals in some Chinese rural areas, in order to hide the natural fear human beings may have before the mysterious and unavoidable phenomenon of death, because death is an expression of the end of life and of all experience; this is what May (2009) considers not only an unavoidable but uncertain interruption, although Maffesoli (2005) points out that the costume and makeup (the appearance) rather than evasion have always represented an exacerbation of the tragic. Hence religions arose largely to discuss death and the idea of a universal and primordial fear to it, because “people die but their shadows remain, die and await the Last Judgment or return under another form” (Boyer 2002: 328).

This fear cannot even be appeased by the idea of a “life after death” suggesting that Last Judgment. In fact, May (2009) notes that the soul is judged in Christianity, as in Judaism or Islam, but also in Buddhism and Hinduism – in the last two – many times as a reincarnated soul, where the karma of a previous life will determine the form of the next life. Meanwhile, it is considered in Taoism that each person is a kind of wave of a great cosmic ocean, to which everybody returns when they die and continue “living” integrated into the whole.

It can be said that the root of this fear lies in the fact that people are aware that “death is always with us. It lies in wait for us. We are accompanied at all times for it. We are never far from it, because it is unavoidable to occur and we cannot control the time it will” (May 2009: 51); besides the anguish experienced with this phenomenon because of the nonsense that generates and that Eco sums up well when he exclaims: “What a waste, we spent dozens of years building experience and then throw it all away. It is like burning the library of Alexandria, destroying the Louvre, sink into the sea the beautiful, the very rich and wise Atlantis “ (Eco 2007: 386).

Perhaps this is why man has historically tried to escape the power exercised by death on his life, by establishing, for example, funeral rituals such as the use of mourning, a part of what Van Gennep called rites of passage (1984, 2008); or through the use of masks in funeral rituals of different cultures in ancient times, for representing or idealizing the face of the deceased (Doblado 2006).^[4] These evasive or exacerbation strategies join another currently observed in the funerals of some rural areas of China, represented by the quoted presence of the striptease as a part of the ritual, as a means of ignoring or at least reducing the impact made on survivors by death.

Before beginning the analyses of this phenomenon, it is necessary to examine where the word striptease comes from. First, it should be mentioned that it is a term composed of two English words: to strip, meaning stripping or taking clothes off in a sexually exciting way, and the verb to tease, meaning cause someone to displease or put in an embarrassment situation or make someone sexually aroused, even if having no intention of having sex with that person(Hornby 2001).

It can be said that the striptease at a funeral is part of what Lardellier (2005) calls a revolution that funeral rites are experiencing in the West before that worrying “presence-absence” of a dead body. This revolution also has an influence on the culture of the East as the American mythologist Joseph Campbell already pointed out in the early 1970s of the twentieth century, when he said that “the spiritual and physical convulsions of the turbulent present come in part from the fact that the isolationist walls of India and the Far East not only have opened, but dissolve” (Campbell 1994: 77). Pascal Lardellier (2005) considers that obsequies have always seemed immutable, but when time and mentalities are changing, so too are the funerary traditions that today have been altered; therefore the funeral rites evolve at the same rate as the values, beliefs, and behaviors of societies, and if these societies “require rituals, then changes in societies will produce changes in rituals” (Muir 2001: 341).

Similar to what Lardellier expresses, talking about a new state of the body and death, cremation, and all new funeral ceremonies that modernity has invented such as the funeral striptease, points to hiding the unacceptability of death by means of a “de-ritualizing” or “re-ritualizing”, which involves adapting the rite of the inevitable and impactful in order to accompany the family on the last trip of the deceased and to give a representation of permanence to the memory of the loved one, while seeking to “humanize” death to make it more acceptable. This must be understood as Finol says when he claims, “ritualization is, so, a complex process by which means a group crosses the boundaries among practical, technological and utilitarian behaviors, and symbolic, allegorical and imaginary behaviors” (Finol 2015: 91), a process that he opposes to the concept des-ritualization, which is constituted by strategies and actions directed to create a life/death conception lacking in its sacred, different, special and extraordinary nature given by the cult and rites. In other words, this allows the rites to fulfill their role of facilitating and making more bearable the mourning period.

So a first mask that comes to hide or lessen the impact of death on survivors is represented by the same language, because “in each type of discourse manifest and articulate combinatorial that in its morphological and syntactic shape must be understood as intentional strategies of organization and production of meaning” (Losada Garcia 2011: 11). Then, the slogan seems to be now: “Hiding the (dead) body that we can not see” (Lardellier 2005: 197) and therefore is used to de-semanticize language to conceal that reality, because it must be understood that things exist when someone names them, so now this reality is just named indirectly and it is re-semanticized by a cognitive-semiotic process called by Losada Garcia as “a translation of semantic features with a contrastive intentionality” (Losada Garcia 2011: 13). In fact, the sign – as the representation of something (the object) in which place is, as stated by Peirce (1987) – can be seen as a mask that hides the real essence of that thing. Indeed:^[5]

The dead are evoked by euphemism and understatement, saying they have ‘expired’ or ‘are deceased’, that they have ‘left this world’, or they ‘have gone’ … But they are really dead, regardless of the way of (not pass) naming the thing….

(Lardellier 2005: 197-198).

Similar situations can be seen in Greek mythology, when the ancients avoided (it being considered a bad omen) pronouncing the name of the god Hades, king of the world of the dead, rather referring to him by using euphemisms (Hernandez de la Fuente 2005). However, the reality is always lurking in language in order to establish what can be said or not at that ritual moment, but not ignoring that words such as elderly or dying, rather than unpronounceable words have actually become “indecent” or “bad” words, which has transformed funeral rites to mere euphemisms, as Hernandez de la Fuente calls them. Thus, these ceremonies have become a “matter for specialists” carried out by “funeral managers”, but always thinking that these rites “are mainly responsible to hide, mask, conceal. Death and the rituals that surround it have become minimal, since the body is evaded, the ceremonies disappear, ‘stages are burned’” (Lardellier 2005: 200; italics are mine).

On the other hand, another way of carrying out the concealment of that reality is precisely by using the striptease as a mask, which becomes a symbol within the rites of passage of Van Gennep (1984, 2008), because it activates rites of separation of the dead from the world of the living, since this erotic and sensual dance represents a kind of farewell similar to that performed at a bachelor party with the same function of separation (in this latter, separation from the world of singleness), where also lay a mythological feature. In fact, dance was conceived as a goddess in different mythologies of the ancients, and she was personified

in a bacchante dancing with sudden movements and playing a drum, appearing at her feet three characteristic attributes: a mask, a thyrsus (rod bower, emblem of Dionysus) and a bunch of grapes (also by reference to Bacchus).

(Perez-Rioja 1997: 158)

As well, the striptease is a representation of the rites of margin, because its performance gives evidence that the deceased is no longer part of the world of the living, but has not yet gone to integrate into the world of the dead, which will occur once all the funeral rituals are finished. This means that the deceased is in a kind of neutral space, “as it crosses a cultural environment that has few, if any, of the attributes of the past or coming state” (Turner 1988: 101), where the striptease is integrated as a symbol to the period of mourning of survivors. These survivors come to form a special partnership or communitas that lies “between the world of the living, on the one hand, and the world of the dead, on the other, and that relatives come out sooner or later depending on the degree of closeness of their relationship to the dead” (Van Gennep 1984: 147, 2008: 206). When arises that communitas quoted by Turner (1988), the dead have the same status that all deceased have: similar colors and style in dress, in a way to set and present the body in the coffin, the use of funeral space and the presence of the dancing girls who perform the erotic dance.

Such dance is used as a way to exorcise the contagious violence of the death of the one who is in that period of margin and isolated in space and inside the coffin, as a prophylactic measure that protects the transmission of death to healthy members of the community and that this latter exceeds the threat of dying together with the person who died, to be reborn “to the fruitfulness of a new or renewed cultural order” (Girard 2005: 265). Indeed, Girard points out that “the death of an isolated person vaguely appears as a tribute to be paid for collective life can continue. One being dies and solidarity of all living people is enhanced. (…) What astonishment if death, ultimately, is felt as an older sister, when not even as a source and mother of all life?” (Girard 2005: 265).

Hence the striptease in the funeral ritual becomes a symbol of purification and expulsion rites of the evil violence of death, though that erotic dance is a prohibited practice, but at that time is “required” as a mask for this purpose. This is because “sexuality ‘naked’, ‘pure’, is in continuity with violence; therefore it constitutes both the last mask under which violence is coated as the beginning of its revelation” (Girard 2005: 126). For this reason, that transgression represented by the striptease points to a general disappearance of differences abolished or reversed, manifested in the aesthetic accompaniment of the ceremonial funeral, as the decor as the same striptease as the aesthetic mask; also in the use of this resource as a disguise that hides the face and violence of death.

Finally, the striptease also actives the rites of aggregation of the deceased to the world of the dead, because it becomes an accompaniment of the deceased in order to pass the threshold of the known world that is leaving (the world of the living) and penetrate into this new world to know. There is no one reminiscent of the past, of a life after death, but also the mythological passage in which some god, deity, or character accompanies the soul of the deceased during the road leading to the world of the dead, as the Egyptian god Anubis, guardian of the necropolis and guide for the soul of the deceased in the afterlife; this is the reason why the chief priest wore the mask of Anubis during the embalming ritual of Pharaoh and his associates (Grant 2001); or the boatman Charon, which was paid with a coin for accompanying souls on their journey by boat on Acheronriver that they had to cross on their road to the afterlife (Hernández de la Fuente 2005, Palao Pons, & Roig 2006).

In short, the striptease becomes a mask to death, because it is used to express the victory of the ritual loss of life over death, because the dance involves the joy of life as opposed to the sadness that surrounds death. Moreover, it is the victory of the movement of the living before the helpless stillness of the dead subject. The mask is a fake face superimposed on the real one (i.e., it hides it), which many times was used in different villages as a sacred object, rather than an accidental magical or transient means, as the shamans who used it for traveling to the world of spirits or for recalling them and being possessed by them as they danced (Willis 2007). The idea of this symbol was to hide the mystery and shame resulting from the transformation or metamorphosis that, as in the case of death, come to something that “is modified enough to be already another matter, but still remains what was” (Pérez-Rioja 1997: 296). In other words, the striptease hides while revealing the marginal state in which the deceased is, because it still does not leave the world of the living, but does not end to enter into the world of the dead.

5 Towards an aestheticity of death

One of the oldest references in the history of striptease is in Greek mythology, specifically the story about Demeter, the goddess of agriculture and grain, when she was in search of her daughter Persephone abducted by Hades – the god of the dead and Demeter her brother – for being his wife and queen of the underworld (Hernandez de la Fuente 2005, Palao Pons & Roig 2006). This disappearance made Demeter so sad that neither eating nor drinking alleviated the pain, until a maid of kings who admitted her as a nurse of his son made her laugh, when she pulled up their clothes to show their private parts. That sudden nakedness – although lacking music, lights, dance, and scenography, served as a mask to hide the ugly situation of the goddess, represented by the great pain that had been aroused in her by the abduction of Persephone.

Thus, it can be said that the striptease in rural Chinese funerals refers to that primordial act that connects the human being with the myth of Demeter, the goddess of crops who symbolizes the cyclical repetition of death and regeneration of nature, which is related to the belief in Eastern culture about life after death (dying to be reborn). As Maffesoli says:

The different cults, the summer, the sun; the celebrations, the sports, the concerning of body, or the epiphanytation of bodies we exhibit, big musical bands, the different mythologies of wine and other good local products, all of them are made in reference, increasingly explicit, to the gods of different known pantheons.

(Maffesoli 2005: 132)

On the other hand, the story of Demeter places the striptease as one of the strategies inserted into the funeral ritual, trying to hide the “ugliness” of death and give it some appearance of aestheticity. In this attempt of concealment, humanity has developed different thanatopraxy operations, specially designed to make beautiful the deceased and death in general. One of them is exclusively delegating death to the hospital (it cannot occur at home) “and as a ‘market of death’ has appeared, one refers all management related to the dead body (and death) to professionals” (Lardellier 2005: 199). However, many times there is the risk that good taste is not precisely what characterizes all this ‘ceremonial bricolage’, often kitsch because of its doubtful originality: coffins shaped as a golf bag or boat, the broadcasting of the best music of the deceased”, and so on (Lardellier 2005: 201).^[6]

Nowadays, this mask is also expressed by means of so-called “thematic funerals” by Ricardo Peculo, a thanatologist and organizer of funeral rites, where the mask is suited to the tastes and hobbies of the deceased. For example, if he liked golf, the funeral space is decorated with allusive balls to this sport; if he practiced fishing, this activity is recreated, even reflecting it with coffins adorned according to the choice of each person and adding technology for making smart tombstones with QR code, which allow people to view online information, photos, and videos of the deceased (La Nación 2013). Such coffin ornamentation recalls ancient Egyptian times, when “the sarcophagus or wooden coffin had the exact shape of the body. It was beautifully painted, sometimes with a image of the deceased” (Grant 2001: 23).

But the idea of striptease as a mask that gives some aestheticity to death is not new, as seen in different cultures from ancient times that tried to erase any trace of fear, pain, absence, and emptiness produced by the inevitable. This was the role of so-called funerary art (Doblado 2006) as it was developed in Egypt (3000 BC), with its colossal architecture for temples and tombs, as well as the Egyptian sculptures that were at pains to achieve a realistic representation (although sometimes idealized) of the deceased face, so this mask that “adorned” the dead became a symbol in the funeral ritual that functioned as an evocative device, “whose use is aimed at the raise, channel and tame the strong emotions such as anger, fear, affection and pain” (Turner 1988: 53; italics are mine) produced by the loss of a loved one and therefore “the mask aims to hide the ugly represented by the cadaverous decomposition, which would be something like a transition that speaks about the return of microcosm for integrating to macrocosm where it came from” (Becker in Finol & Montilla 2004).

As a rite of margin symbol, striptease as a mask becomes a border (Lotman 1996), which marks the threshold where the deceased is between the world of the living and the world of the dead, a border that also works like a translator filter (Lotman 1996), not only the life/death cycle but the ugly in the aesthetic or beauty of death. On the other hand, the mask of funerary art helped to scare away evil spirits as a protection for the deceased soul and connected his spirit with the “other world” (Arquehistoria 2013), a role that now has the striptease (as a dance at last) to give an aesthetic nature to death and scare these spirits off, by means of the noises and sounds produced during the performance.

However, that funerary mask of ancient times evolved into today the makeup used by the professionals of the thanatopraxy industry, to “beautify” the corpse to exhibit at the funeral. It is no longer a second face that hid the real and hid the ugliness of death, but is to “transform” the face to be nice for those attending the funeral (Finol & Montilla 2004). There is another translation (Lotman 1996, 1998) ranging from the ugliness of death toward the image of a face that looks alive (like it was sleeping), lush and impeccable; i.e., that makeup is a mask of life that hides death and does not hide the identity of the deceased, but to make it pleasing to the sight of all that “naturalize” the death and then “to overcome” death … at least in appearance, as does the striptease-mask. This is a commitment to the aestheticism of death that reveals that, “even after death physically, we create a work of art whose tissues are civilizations” (Brito Garcia 2014: 160), because this “work of art” precisely speaks of the cultural aspects of those civilizations.

6 The nakedness of life and death

The funeral striptease is constituted by a series of slow, sensual, and suggestive movements while the dancing girl becomes naked, because the art is in the act of provocatively removing clothes – so the public will want to see more of this exhibitionism – and not in the nudity itself (Wikipedia 2015). It is the same provocation that is present in a Chinese funeral ritual, but now the idea is to excite the audience by focusing their attention on the living body in motion and diverting them from the “naked” and inert body in death.

This is why Maffesoli notes, “fixing attention on the game of appearances is, certainly, a good way to feel the presence of that something that is there, ‘jumping in the eyes’ of the observer, who however sees nothing” (Maffesoli 2005: 117). According to him, this game of appearances, which he calls the mythology of masks, is expressed regularly on the human stories, precisely when death is present, in order to “play” with her and tease her, because “the bright appearance has no other functions, but remember this finitude, the impermanence, showing that this can engender a kind of joy” (Maffesoli 2005: 121) and referring toward a symbolism that leads to “celebrate” the life dramatizing death.

On the other hand, this provocative act of undressing represents a ritual symbol of eroticism, which prompts us to remember that sex is the giver of life, but in the funeral rite is present as a way of farewell to that life that was created at some time and now “born” or “re-born” (life beyond death) for being part of another world or non-world: the world of the dead or afterlife, which expresses the continuum (Lotman 1996) life/death/life or birth/death/re-born. It must be remembered that in many traditional societies death is regarded as a second birth; this means starting a new life in the spiritual realm, which always entails death for the profane condition of the subject and a new birth in the sacred condition (Eliade 1981). It should be noted that

This second birth, however, is not natural as the first, the biological birth; i.e. it is not “given” and should be created by the rite. In this sense death is an initiation, an introduction to a new way of being. And, as we know, all initiation is essentially a symbolic death followed by a rebirth or resurrection.

(Eliade 2002: 56)

Therefore, it is must be noted that striptease in Chinese rural funerals is part of a ritual that speaks of tension, conflict, and confrontation between the life/transition/death. In fact, life involves moving matter and this is represented by the dancing girls with the dance steps that accompany the act of undressing; while death is inert matter, represented by the stillness or immobility of the dead body. So, it can be said that:

Contrary to widespread prejudice, the dance, that accompanies strip-tease all the time, no way is an erotic factor. Even it may be the opposite: the gently rhythmic undulation conjures fear of immobility.

(Barthes 2009: 129)

In other words, dancing conjures fear of stillness or immobility of death, while the ritual gestures of the dancer play a role like “cosmetic” movements, and they distract the viewers attention to “hide” or “mask” (it is their intention at least) the nakedness of the performer. It is the same distracting effect of the striptease in the funeral, so that the mourners divert their attention (even momentarily) from the dead body, because “here the shape [that striptease] is mythifying an ‘absence’” (Barthes 2009: 184; information in brackets is mine), which is the absence of life, the absence of a loved one who has become a nonbeing.

This erotic dance immunizes the collective imagination of those attending the funeral, “by means of a small inoculation against a recognized disease” (Barthes 2009: 206.); i.e. a small inoculation of the idea related to death. This means that death is “celebrated” with music, dance, and eroticism, to naturalizeits presence (although in fact it is something natural, because it is a really common phenomenon) and immunize the voyeur public at the funeral from the fear of dying, because this is an everyday act that is tied to life. But the striptease also intends to make “invisible” an otherness that produces this fear and that is represented by the dead body. This why the striptease denies that otherness and transforms it into an “identity”, because the dead body also participates in the “celebration” as do another living bodies. In short, the striptease as a symbol that has been integrated into the funeral rites reveals that these latter “both celebrate death, and at the same time affirm the reborn life” (Maffesoli 2005: 66).

We could say that the striptease transforms the attendees at the funeral into a voyeur public, because they not only witness the nakedness of the dancers during their performance, but also the nakedness in which death has plunged the corpse when it is exposed to everybody completely stripped of his soul, so the “evil is shown to disturb it more easily and exorcise it” (Barthes 2009: 127). Even when this exorcise is in vain, because that evil, represented by death, is an inevitable act; therefore this exorcising is equivalent to separate momentarily the idea of the death from thought of that voyeur public, although awareness of its inevitability always remains.

At the same time, the act of the striptease at funerals leads to conceive of women as an object “disguised” (by the mask), so the purpose of the performance is not to show a naked body, but consists of “meaning, through the dispossession of an artificial baroque dress, nakedness as a natural garb of woman, that is finally rediscovering a condition of absolutely chaste of flesh” (Barthes 2009: 128). Indeed, the striptease dance in Chinese rural funerals reveals that nakedness is something intrinsic to humans, because each person is born naked and when dying, the body is stripped of its garments of life (its soul); in short, death undresses the human being.

Finally, it can be said that the nakedness of the funeral striptease acquires a religious sense, since it suggests the Edenic condition in which the first two people on Earth appeared, before disobeying the order of their creator and committing the original sin. In fact, the latter not only triggered the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, but made them aware of their nakedness and that they had lost the divine gift of immortality, which condemned humanity to death. In other words, the nakedness of the striptease is just a way to return the dead to its original Edenic condition, as a way of reconciling with the creator.

In short, this erotic dance loses its nature as profane through the rite and is transmuted into sacred, thus attaining the symbolic efficacy of the rite that everything sacralizes, even converting to a physiological act as food or sexuality in “a ‘sacrament’, a communion with the sacred” (Eliade 1981: 12). Eliade says, for example, both the nudism and movements towards absolute sexual freedom are nothing more than an expression of nostalgia for the lost Paradise and of desire to return to that original Edenic condition that preceded the fall into sin.

7 Conclusion: Striptease as identity, otherness, and change

It can be said that there is a division in Chinese culture on the presence of striptease in the funeral rituals of some rural areas. Those in opposition to the practice consider it to be “obscene”, “uncivilized”, and imposed by Western influences, while those who support the practice assume the striptease to be an expression of progress, an emblem of prestige of the deceased family, as well as a tribute to the deceased, based on the cult of the dead or lesser gods, among others, similar to other offerings that, like food, are made for the benefit of the deceased. In fact, these offerings have even more sexual content than the erotic dance, as in the culture of the Kogi tribe from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta(Colombia), where

offerings, “food for the dead”, also have a sexual sense, because in myths and dreams, and wedding ceremonies, the act of eating symbolizes the sexual act; therefore funeral offerings constitute a semen that fertilizes the Universal Mother.

(Eliade 2002: 55)

However, the real meaning of this practice lies in the fact that the funeral striptease has the three basic properties pointed out by Turner (1999) of dominant symbols of a ritual: condensation, since the striptease is a single formation representing many things or actions (it is used as a mask to hide the painful reality of death, as a tool to give aestheticity to this natural phenomenon, and as a strategy to reveal the intrinsic nakedness of life/death); unification of disparate and interlinked significata, since the striptease has in common similar qualities or is associated in fact or in thought of those who practice it as a funeral rite; these aspects refer to many different cultural phenomena of humanity (like reincarnation or resurrection myths, as well as the soul’s journey accompanied by gods, deities, or characters; the world of the dead, funeral mask, etc.), in addition to those phenomena already mentioned in this analysis.

A third principle is that of the polarization of sense, since at the ideological pole of meaning, the striptease is a symbol that reveals the moral and social order, some principles of social organization, norms, and values (Turner 1999) of these rural areas where it has been incorporated into the funeral rite, whose expression is manifested in the cohesion, unity, and continuity achieved among members of social and cultural groups who practice it. While at the sensory pole, the striptease is associated with phenomena and natural and physiological processes capable of provoking feelings and desires among those attending the funeral, since some contents may appear to be rude, as its rough presence confronts (or at least transgresses) traditionally felt emotions experienced at a funeral because of references to male and female genitals related to the naked body and the sexual nature of the dance.

It can be concluded with Turner that the analysis of symbols is a substantial part of the evaluation of a society’s values and norms, considering that a ritual reveals the meaning systems that help explain the characteristics of a social structure, as well as the tensions and conflicts present in its interior. Especially if that ritual symbol is something peculiar like the striptease, which must be assumed as one of many Jungian masks used to work socially in the world, since “we are frequently playing roles, and those roles are called by Jung as personae, from Latin persona, meaning ‘mask, false face’, the mask that wears an actor in the Roman theatre” (Campbell 1994: 82) and that is used here for masking death.

In addition, the sense of striptease in Chinese rural funerals is also understood because it represents a kind of inverted image that returns the mirror's reflection, so that before an image of the inert and asexualized dead body (which, in short, will be the image of everybody at the end of life), the mirror returns the reflection of the image of a dynamic and sexualized live body. This revels and strengthens the triad life/transition/death as a continuum (Lotman 1996), an idea that the Egyptians represented with the ouroboros, a snake biting its tail and that symbolizes the eternal return and continuous regeneration of life (life/death/resurrection or reincarnation), the entirety of the universe, and is the emblem of creation (Battistini 2005). This implies the existence of the binomial world (of living)/non-world (of the dead) and an otherness that is a non-being (because it already is not/is not-exist); hence the automatic solidarity that arises and manifests itself among the survivors, when they face the inevitable and shocking phenomenon of death.

Thus, “we are only the mirror: speculum sinister (…) mimicking the horror proposed by chaos in gestures that alternatively amplify or invert it” (Brito Garcia 2014: 151). It is an idea that relates to the Lacanian mirror image understood as a copy in the mirror that distorts (Lacan 1977) because it projects the image opposite of death in the dancing girl, who performs the erotic dance and, therefore, represents an allegory of life. It must be remembered that mirror in Latin is speculum, which also means a “copy” (Ediciones Nuevo Mundo s/f), so it is concluded that the inverted image representing the striptease is a copy or imitation of the image (of “life”) that the deceased will be when upon entering the world of the dead, according to the widespread belief of “life after death” present in Chinese society: it is a “being” who first is “born” naked, as everybody comes into the world. This “birth” implies that it will be a “living being” with “movement”. In short, one side of the mirror reflects life and the other “reflects us to the coming death” (Brito Garcia 2014:151).

The idea of otherness is also a key element in identity construction since the presence of the Other (the otherness), such as a dead body, makes that personal identity (the self) and Others identity (the plurality) accentuated, as living bodies involved in the eternal and naked dance of life. This is the triple anthropological experience (identity-otherness-plurality) pointed out by Auge (2006); Yurman (2008) suggests the metaphor of the glance (of me) in the mirror that includes the glance of other (otherness) and others (diversity) supports the idea that identities are constructed by means of negotiation (Silva 2002, Choza 2002, Garcia Gavidia 2005) since “all identity is, by definition, reactive, born from dialectic confrontation and constitutive with what it is not” (Andacht 2001: 232), i.e. the not self precedes the self (Silva, 2002). This is confirmed by Lotman, who stresses that “the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ are two sides of a single act of self-knowledge and are impossible without each other” (Lotman 1999: 52).

Simultaneously, the metaphor of the mirror reveals the ability of a text to generate and transform other text (Lotman 1996, 1998, 1999), because “each mirror reflects another reflection which in turn reflects another reflection” (Brito Garcia 2014: 151), like the signification cascade concept used by Merrell (1998) to identify the unstoppable process of begetting a sign in another, something that Peirce (1987) called infinite semiosis and led to Lotman (1996) to state that all text is preceded by a text; to put it in terms of Losada Garcia, “there is no absolute beginning, each statement is based on an earlier speech (… ) which extends” (Losada Garcia 2011: 15). This gives the striptease funeral dance the sense of a sign of identity, otherness, and change (Andacht 2006) because it behaves like an icon that identifies it with groups that practice it as a funeral rite, an index that refers to the presence of the other/others who do not practice it, and as a symbol to become its practice in a “habit” or a “law” in some groups, generating a change in the traditional concept of Chinese funeral ritual (Peirce 1987). As Merrell says,

a sign emerges with the ability to beget other signs, which then beget other signs, and begin to fully enclosed within the semiotic river built by their own essence, i.e., their absence. They become recursively self-referential, begetting interpretants with implicit nature.

(Merrell 1998: 153)

So the striptease as a mask not only gives an aesthetic character to death and hides the transformation experienced by the body of the deceased, but also represents a text of culture from an erotic and sensual world that is profane, which enters as a fragment in another text considered sacred (the traditional Chinese funeral rite) and, therefore, that invader text is sacralized when it is joined to the rite, begetting a new text that retains many features of the traditional funeral, but has experienced a change that makes it different now because it incorporated the striptease into the funeral ceremony as another symbolic element. In fact, Merrell believes that “what distinguishes one culture from another, or a historical period of another, depends on which categories are attributed to the ‘sacred’ and which to the ‘profane’” (Merrell 1998: 208).

By the way, this practice confirms the Lotmanian maxim, i.e., “the intrusion of a ‘fragment’ of text in a foreign language can play the role of generating new meanings” (Lotman 1999: 100), which does not necessarily result in the displacement of the original by the alien, but is assumed to be updated (either evolution or involution) of the original, which also sets a limit on the otherness. This is the result of the unpredictable explosion produced by the collision between two texts of culture, which generates a new text by an act of redenomination (Lotman 2000), for example, the funeral rite as “funeral rite with striptease”. This means that the “name change is conceived as annihilation of the old thing and birth, instead, of a new one, which satisfies most requirements of the initiator of that act” (Lotman 2000: 161), where that redenomination arises “as a reincarnation or rebirth as another” (Lotman 2000: 148), applying to both erotic show striptease/funeral ritual striptease as well as to the transit life/death.

The striptease is part of the metalanguage used by peripheral structures of the Chinese semiosphere for their self-reproduction and self-legitimation (Lotman 1996, 2000). This objective is achieved by translating a text (the traditional funeral rite) of nuclear structures of that semiosphere constituted by the majority of ethnic Chinese followers of tradition, in a new text (the change) that represents (identity) and makes different (otherness) the periphery (Lotman 1996) of the other (plurality), as a result of quoted tension/explosion between both structures.

The conflicted relationship of permanent tension/explosion is understandable in a country like China where there are 56 different ethnic groups present (what this implies in the cultural sphere), of which the “Han” ethnic group occupies 91.6% of national territory and from the remaining 55 minority ethnics, the “Zhuang” ethnic group is the second, with more than 16 million members reported by the Fifth Census carried out in 2000 (Mingwei, Youyi, Changjian, & Wei 2009).

Finally, it is necessary to note that this anthroposemiotic analysis is made from a cultural approach from the West, but even so and following Auge referring to the office of an anthropologist, it must be remembered that anthropose-miotician writing “has not as its primary vocation expressing the alleged ineffable part of each culture: it relates an experience where the individual has his part and this is open for its comparison” (Auge 2007: 61), but always remembering that, beyond interpretation or rummaging through them for their hidden meanings, actually, “the function of rituals is not significant but emotive” (Muir 2001: 341), and here is where the striptease is inserted into the funerals of some Chinese rural areas.