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Do you believe in ancestor veneration?

#Poll #EvanPoll

  • Strong yes (4%, 16 votes)
  • Qualified yes (14%, 54 votes)
  • Qualified no (32%, 124 votes)
  • Strong no (49%, 190 votes)
384 voters. Poll end: 1 year ago

Evan Prodromou reshared this.

BTW, thank you for all you did and do for ActivityPub. I wouldn't be here thanking you without it 😀
@shoq thanks! That's very thoughtful.
@Shoq
The section on North America seems to include visiting gravesites and memorials, in which case my "strong no" vote was an inaccurate response. However, I don't see pausing to reflect or keeping a photo of someone who is gone in the same category as keeping an altar, making offerings, or ritualized exhumation and reburial of a body. Maybe I should; it's not something I've given much thought to before now.
@splicer yeah, I think there's a real spectrum. Also in North American secular culture, we have other practices like: memorials and statues; named holidays; use of surnames or family names; naming children after family members; "what the founders intended"; family recipes; family traditions; genealogy; inheritance laws; historical reënactment.

I think drawing a clear line between these and other practices elsewhere might be hard.
@splicer Especially in North America but also in other European settler states, the Myth of the Crossing often plays a big part in our self-identity.
Strong no. No disrespect to gramps, however. I would never have learned to cast my own fishing sinkers without him. (I never picked up fishing itself, however. I dislike killing critters if I'm not eating them.)
@shoq how can you be a Strong No if you not only are grateful to your grandfather but also believe that he deserves respect? That has to be at least a Qualified No.
@Shoq
I guess I was thinking I just don't go in for optimal veneration, but that doesn't mean I can't slip the guy some props for the useless skills he passed on. He meant well 😀
Depends on the ancestor. Some may have good qualities to emulate, and some may have bad qualities to leave behind. Take the best, leave the rest.

I don't believe the dead are still sentient, if that's what you mean.
I see I'm dominating your poll by being the first to answer lol I think it's important and interesting to know who the people we came from are (if we can) but as as an Australian settler with some very strong WASP ancestry, including an ancestor who wrote a letter home to Australia in the 1800s tut tutting the French revolution and what the communards had done to Paris upon visiting Paris while at medical school in Edinburgh, I'd say I appreciate and find knowing my ancestors interesting and informative, I don't venerate them.

I think it's more important to think about how we treat our elders who are still alive and, in that sense, I think ancestor appreciation (and/or veneration) serves an important cultural purpose of linking us into a chain of existence rather than thinking of ourselves as individuals purely of our own making. We can know and appreciate our ancestors, for better and worse, without actually venerating them. Ancestor veneration can also easily become a form of cultural supremacy as well, particularly if it's about creating false images of our ancestors.
I endorse the sentiment behind the saying: "be a good ancestor".
I don't, but been living in West Africa (Benin) for quite some time, where Vaudoun is part of everyday life. When someone old dies, the tradition in some cases is to burry them in their room or house, where the family lives.
I personally don't, but my mom is from Hong Kong and her family is/was Taoist, so they have a number of ancestor veneration practices that I have no problem participating in, making me a "qualified no".

"Strong no" to me implies "my ancestors suck" or "veneration sucks", as some other respondents have indicated, and that's not how I feel about it.
@governa is this something that horses do?
if they're stallions yes 😄
@governa this doesn't make any sense. Is there a joke here that I'm missing?
Seems potentially like three different questions:

Do I believe AW happens? Strong yes

Do I approve of AW practiced by others? Qualified yes

Do I practice AW? Strong no
@rhetoricked potentially, yes. But there's a specific connotation when talking about human beliefs, social causes, and practices that makes the second one the clear choice.
@rhetoricked also, I specifically said "veneration" and not "worship"! Very different.
You are right. I should not have ≈'d "venerate" and "worship".
It seems to me that folks are answering (at least in the comments) questions 2 and 3 (with a couple answering 1). I think all the questions are interesting, and I'm curious what prompted you to post the poll
@rhetoricked

Joining this conversation after the poll closed it was *not at all* clear to me that the implication was the second meaning listed.
Dying does not necessarily make you a better person. If it does, it doesn't speak in this person's favour.
@drq which person are you talking about?
The dead one, who is supposed to be venerated.
Hmmm, ancestors are not necessarily dead yet, and we do venerate our elders...
@jeffmcneill yes. Wikipedia redirects "Ancestor veneration" to "Veneration of the dead", which I think is inexact but not worth squabbling over.
@Evan Prodromou I don't practice it, not coming from such a culture. I can see why it would be beneficial for a family's cohesion and continuity, and by extension the cohesion and continuity of a whole society, to celebrate who came before and honoring their memory.

At 3-4 generations back I start feeling that simply being my ancestor isn't much of an accomplishment and it would probably be better to venerate people who exemplify good values as we understand them today.
@clacke also, what cultural backgrounds and do you come from where ancestor veneration is not part of your traditions?
I went with qualified no because I think we should get to choose which (if any) of our ancestors deserve our veneration.

For example, some of my ancestors were horse thieves, and the surname from that part of the family is a pseudonym that helped them evade law enforcement. No veneration there.

But some of my other ancestors did amazing things in their lives, like fighting Nazis, researching infectious diseases, and building schools in Africa. Definitely veneration-worthy.
I'd say it's better to err on the side of no, and only venerate those whose accomplishments in life truly made them worthy of veneration.
Venerating people simply because they managed to achieve the very common feat of procreation is clearly wrong. Nonetheless, I think it very useful learn from studying one's own genealogy so that you can understand, in a deeply personal way, that the saints gave birth to sinners whose unremarkable children spawned remarkable offspring, and so on...

By "genealogy," I don't mean a simple cataloging of successful sex. I mean gathering, and learning from, the stories of each generation.
I'm slightly confused : are you asking whether we believe that ancestor veneration exists in some culture somewhere, or whether it "works" for some interpretation of "works"?
@mds2 I'd say in this case "believe in" is less about acknowledging the existence of the practice, but whether you endorse it or practice it in some way.
@Mike
I voted Strong Yes even though I don't personally care for it. However, I come from an East African nation whose culture is deeply rooted in ancestor veneration, and keeps track of their lineage meticulously.
we use the same word for both "ancestor" and "god".

Telling!
Wow. Wildly negative results!

My guess is that a lot of it is the loaded anthropological term I used.

The answers may have been different if I'd asked if people had respect for their heritage, remembered their deceased family members with fondness, or used other phrases more in line with contemporary Western practice.

Or maybe not! I might try different wording in the future.
@splicer mentioned graves, funerals, photos in the home and memorials.

I also listed statues; named holidays; use of surnames or family names; naming children after family members; "what the founders intended"; family recipes; family traditions; genealogy; inheritance laws; historical reënactment.

Other possibilities: keepsake items; place names like streets, parks, towns, and states.
For me personally, I'm a qualified yes.

I have photos of family members in my house going back 3 generations.
We tell stories of those people. I've visited many of their homes, in multiple countries.

I'm named after my grandfather and my son and father are named after my great-grandfather.

I cook heritage foods, grow heritage crops, and celebrate heritage holidays. I try to trace genealogy.

I like to think that the effort and good will of my ancestors helps me and my kids today.
I think it might have to do with what comes up when you google the phrase: belief in ancestors’ spirits continued existence in the present. Very religious reading.
@splicer this tells me that the polls on mastodon aren’t accurate reflections of anything. There’s no way at all that this is reflective of the bell curve in human nature. A reminder that unless a survey is created according to scientific and statistical best practices, the survey is meaningless.
yeah, wording on this one definitely skewed my response.
@skullvalanche that's too bad! There was a whole Wikipedia article attached with much more detailed description.
oh, I missed that followup post! doh! 🤦‍♂️
yeah, but what proportion of your sample is exclusively descended from settlers on colonized territory?
@arkiuat I don't know. Why do you ask?
I just thought it might have something to do with the way people interpreted your question
"believe in" is more of a sticking point here for me; i have respect for my extended family and ancestors but i do not consider it religious, which "believe" connotes, esp in concert with "ancestor veneration". like there are a lot of cultures that do specifically *worship* ancestors and that's cool and i kind of assumed that's what you meant with the poll at first
@shoofle I linked a Wikipedia article which covers veneration from a lot of different angles.
I voted no because some of mine were right dicks.
So, if people don’t give the answer you predicted, they must have not understood the question? 🧐

Content warning: Angry about ancestors

@feonixrift you brought a lot to the question that wasn't there.
@otfrom that's not a parallel list. I was listing ancestor-venerating practices; you're listing reasons ancestors shouldn't be venerated.
@otfrom they are! And ancestor discussions are pretty divisive. I'm also angry at a lot of my ancestors for their failures. I think the best response is taking good and thoughtful care of our descendants.
I suppose the polls are meant to provoke us aren't they?
I was a strong yes, but my answer deals directly with genealogy. My parents have vastly different stories; my mom’s people were dirt poor farmers back to the 1600s in North America, my dad the grandson of dirt poor Slovak immigrants. I value my study of my family history tremendously. Many of them were wonderful people. Some were not. I love knowing as much as I can about how I am connected to history through my people.
@mpjgregoire I used exactly the words I intended!