CECI N'EST PAS UN INCENDIE: Atrophie de gestes funeraires pyrotechniques dans l'archipel de Hong Kong

As the night falls in the Hong Kong archipelago, an ecology of specters sometimes ghosts (gui [phrase omitted]), ancestors and gods--appears in the glow of braziers lit in their memory. This ecology of specters and the pyrotechnic care gestures that animate it tend to disappear under the pressure of urbanization and ecological campaigns. In this article, I focus on what and who the extinguishing of these fires is likely to make disappear. I propose to consider that what is disappearing is less a certain obscurantism--such as the government's education campaigns, promoting ecological burials and funerals suggest--but more a relationship to the night, to fire, to the story. What comes to disappear along with these fires is a perspective, that of the dead, which confronts the living with their own finitude and post mortem becomings.