Words on Display: Chinese Funeral Banners and Wreath Messages Through a Geosemiotic Lens

Abstract

This chapter draws on the geosemiotic framework to examine the indexicality and dialogicality of funeral banners and wreath messages at Chinese funerals in Hong Kong). Data were collected from media reports (videos, photographs, and news articles) on the high-profile “happy” funerals of casino tycoon Stanley Ho Hung Sun (1921–2020) and best-selling martial arts novelist Louis Cha Leung Yung (1924–2018). The data were analyzed with a focus on social actors, code preference, materiality, inscription, composition, emplacement, and the relations between them. The findings illustrate that the open display of funeral banners and wreath messages constitutes a semiotic aggregate representing the most conspicuous and significant cultural component of Chinese funerals in Hong Kong. In addition to being used as the main artifacts to adorn funeral halls and index the space and place for funeral rites, the banners and messages serve as a vehicle for phatic communication among the funeral participants on two different levels—an individual level and a collective level. On the individual level, the banners and messages embody the mourners’ own personal grief and respect for the deceased and provide comfort and mianzi (面子 “face”) to bereaved family members and fellow mourners. On the collective level, they signify joint efforts to overcome grief over the loss of the deceased, through reaffirming social bonds and evoking a shared sense of cultural identity and belonging not only between the living and the dead, but also among family members, friends, relatives, and sometimes even anonymous onlookers and passers-by.