Göran Aijmer

Biographic Data

ID3641127
NAMEGöran Aijmer
GIVEN NAMESGöran
FAMILY NAMEAijmer
SIGNATUREAIJMER G
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Gothenburg
VERIFIEDNo
TOTAL WORKS42
TOTAL CITATIONS83
AUTHOR COUNT41
EDITOR COUNT1
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1967
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2025
H-INDEX5

  • They Break their Arms and They Break their Brains”

    Göran Aijmer, Virgil K Y HoARTICLEAnthropos2025

    Ethnographic field notes from south-eastern China, taken in the period of vanishing imperial rule and the early republic, describe a lunar New Year custom in which village people assembled to form sides that started fighting, including pelting one another with stones. It is suggested that these dramatic New Year sessions expressed contradictory features characterizing southern Chinese culture. Momentary explicit and brutal antagonism publicly dis…

  • Earth, Death, and Fire in Eastern China

    Göran AijmerARTICLEAnthropos2023

    A communication from 1868 tells us that in the eastern Chinese provinces of Zhejiang and Jiangsu it was common for people to cremate their dead. Being a rather unusual practice in a Chinese environment, this particular custom is discussed here from an anthropological perspective, a number of suggestions being made to form an "experimental" holistic explanation of this variation in traditional funeral procedure. The use of coffins, fire and cerami…

  • Meanings of Violence: A Cross Cultural Perspective

    Virgil Kit Yiu HUMA Ho, Göran Aijmer et al.BOOKMeanings of Violence2020Cited by: 14

    There are good reasons to look at violence from new perspectives. In its endless manifestations violence is part and parcel of human existence, and is very probably a constituting element of human society. And yet violent action - warfare, penalties, insults, feuding, assault, murder, rape, suicide, sports - remains in all its complexity one of the least understood fields of human social life.The book's contributors identify the symbolic and ritu…

  • Timely signs, dominance, and vernal celebrations in late imperial Southern China: An exercise in anthropology in the past tense

    Open AccessGöran AijmerARTICLECivilisations2020References: 8

    The aim of this essay is to contribute to the anthropological exploration of "traditional culture" in the Chinese south. Focussing on a description of one early-spring celebration in a township in Jiangxi Province, it suggests that these ceremonies are connected only superficially with local society and therefore lack a local message. A brief comparison suggests that there was nationwide conformity in the staging of these ceremonies, a degree of …

  • Economic Man in Sha Tin: Vegetable Gardeners in a Hong Kong Valley

    Göran AijmerBOOKEconomic Man in Sha Tin2018

    This book, first published in 1980, is a study of how refugee immigrants from China make a living as market gardeners in a valley in Hong Kong. Based on extensive field-work, it examines various aspects of economic life; the discussion concerns the adaptations necessitated on the part of the gardeners by the new socio-economic structures which present themselves. The general problem of agricultural change is discussed and the Hong Kong observatio…

  • Rice and Death in Southern China and the Shan States: Transforms in Iconic Grammar

    Open AccessGöran AijmerARTICLEJournal of the Royal Asiatic…2018References: 9

    This essay in historical anthropology juxtaposes some rice rituals in southern China with their counterparts in the Shan States of Upper Burma. The approach is one of symbological analysis of iconic codes, and it is suggested here that the two sets of rituals, superficially different, may be seen as morphological transforms of a common cultural semantic pattern. This understanding has a bearing on further explorations of the formation of the wide…

  • Ancestors and Ancestry in Southwestern China. Transforms in Tradition

    Open AccessGöran AijmerARTICLEAnthropos2018

    This article explores some enigma of Chinese ancestor worship as they were found once in Sichuan Province of southwestern China in late traditional times.These rituals and their symbolism are subjected to an anthropological analysis resulting in some new understandings of the ethnographic data.Ancestry is shown to have been a pluralistic concept with varying semantic properties and put to use in terms of shifting cultural modalities.The outcome o…

  • Ancestral Force in Iconic Imagery: Death and Continuance in a South China Village

    Göran AijmerARTICLEJournal of Chinese Religions2017

    This essay discusses idioms of continuance in a village in southeast China, based on what was recorded some one hundred years ago by an American sociologist, Daniel Harrison Kulp II, and his research team. This discussion is focused on the cult of the dead with a bearing on the construction of a powerful past influencing the building of a future, in terms of both agricultural production and the creation of new children. The discussion suggests th…

  • The Enigmatic Ancestors of Yen-Liao

    Göran AijmerARTICLEEuropean Journal of East Asian…2016References: 2

    This article explores a case of ancestor worship in Taiwan, within the southern sphere of Chinese culture. Ancestry as a system of belonging works as a fundamental grammar for building structural continuity in traditional China, yet the system displays a great deal of variation. The Hakka peasants of southern Taiwan are shown to honour, in an ‘unorthodox way’, several different agnatic lines of descent as forming an individual, while at the same …

  • Dominance in a Traditional State. - The Kingdom of Kengtung

    Göran AijmerARTICLEAnthropos2015

    Anthropos , Seite 43 - 62

  • Cold Food, Fire and Ancestral Production: Mid-spring Celebrations in Central China

    Open AccessGöran AijmerARTICLEJournal of the Royal Asiatic…2010References: 3

    This article seeks to explain the traditional celebration of Cold Food and some other springtime customs in the mid-Yangzi basin in central China. In these rituals the ancestors and their influence in the production of new rice were highlighted while, at the same time, social reproduction through women was temporarily suspended. Female generative energy was not allowed to compete with the creative force of the ancestors in the fields. Cold Food i…

  • Rice, Death, and Chiefly Power in Cen- tral Borneo

    Göran AijmerARTICLEAnthropos2010

    Anthropos , Seite 393 - 410

  • The Wong Lineage Land: Property and Belonging in the New Territories of Hong Kong in 1904

    Open AccessGöran AijmerARTICLEModern Asian Studies2008Cited by: 4References: 14

    This essay explores the distribution of the ownership of land in a coastal village in the New Territories of Hong Kong at the beginning of the last century. The study examines land and houses as indices of relative wealth in a poor community. Above all, it points to the discursive social use of land as a genealogical tract in an area where written genealogies would have been scarce or nonexisting. Belonging in terms of agnatic continuity and its …

  • The Temporality of Immortality in Lesu: The Historical Anthropology of a New Ireland Society

    Göran AijmerARTICLEHistory and Anthropology2008References: 22

    This article suggests a new reading of the famous wooden sculptures formerly carved in New Ireland to celebrate the dead. It is argued in terms of a holistic approach implying different ontological perspectives and shifting cultural modalities and discusses the available fragments of ethnography stemming from observations made in the early part of the last century. It proposes that in terms of iconic semantics the making and exposition of a malan…

  • On Making Fathers in Lesu: The Historical Anthropology of a New Ireland Society

    Open AccessGöran AijmerARTICLEOceania2007

    This article examines the initiation of boys in Lesu, New Ireland, in 1929‐30. It is argued that these rituals not only transformed the initiands but also their fathers and thereby created counterpoint notions of social continuity in an openly ‘matrilineal’ society. Discursive and iconic symbolism identified and made manifest an alternative male cultural modality, not generally accessible to women. The neophytes' socially ascribed fathers, not ne…

  • Houses in Lesu: The Historical Anthropology of a New Ireland Society

    Göran AijmerARTICLEJournal of Anthropological Research2007Cited by: 2

    This historically inclined study examines features of habitation and domestic symbolism originally encountered in fieldwork in New Ireland in 1929-1930 by Hortense Powdermaker. It aims to reconstruct important aspects of early social life with a focus on houses as mundane institutions and expressive devices. The examination concerns the organization of shelter into continuous groups and social communities. Men's houses and women's houses stood ou…

  • The Construction of Continuity in Lesu: The Historical Anthropology of a New Ireland Society

    Göran AijmerARTICLEHistory and Anthropology2006Cited by: 2References: 11

    This study examines features of social organization originally encountered in New Ireland in 1929–30 by the anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker. It aims to depict important aspects of social life before these were transformed by colonial and missionary influences. Kinship and marriage are discussed as topoi in discourses of continuity. It is suggested that in a social landscape of demographic limitations and widespread violence, social morphology…

  • A Family Reunion The Anthropology of Life, Death and New Year in Soochow

    Open AccessGöran AijmerARTICLEJournal of the Royal Asiatic…2005

    For a long time students of China have held the view that ancestral cults formed one of the pillars of the Imperial state, that they were the backbone of family life and provided the ideological source for the political class. In a vague and general way this is no doubt true. However, from an anthropological perspective, the position of the dead in Chinese society is not well known. China is a vast country with a great variety of ecological circu…

  • Cantonese Society in a Time of Change

    Yuen-Fong Woon, Yuen‐fong Woon et al.ARTICLEPacific Affairs2001

  • Ritual Dramas in the Duke of York Islands: An Exploration of Cultural Imagery

    Marta Rohatynsky, Göran AijmerARTICLEJournal of the Royal Anthropologica…1999Cited by: 2

  • The Myth and Ritual Theory: An Anthology

    Göran Aijmer, Robert A SegalARTICLEJournal of the Royal Anthropologica…1999Cited by: 4

  • Zwischen Himmel und Erde: Riten und Brauchtum in Nordwestchina

    Göran Aijmer, Johann FrickARTICLEJournal of the Royal Anthropologica…1998

  • Guest People: Hakka Identity in China and Beyond

    Göran Aijmer, N ConstableARTICLEJournal of the Royal Anthropologica…1998

  • Political Ritual: "Aspects of the Mao Cult During the Cultural "Revolution

    Open AccessGöran AijmerARTICLEChina Information1996Cited by: 1References: 9

  • Chinese Mythology: An Introduction

    Göran Aijmer, Anne BirrellARTICLEJournal of the Royal Anthropologica…1996