Paper Money Ritual Materiality

Paper money ritual materiality is the source’s way of reading burned paper money as more than a colorful custom. In 开天窗｜指路兼推荐几本书, the host introduces 《烧钱》 as a book about Chinese material pursuit in spiritual life, placing money, afterlife imagination, and religious practice inside the same analytic field.

Key Claims

• Ritual money makes material desire visible inside spiritual life rather than outside it.
• Burning paper money connects belief, household obligation, imagined afterlife economies, and the material forms through which people communicate with the dead.
• The concept extends Chinese Folk Religion Layering by adding a money-and-object layer to gods, underworld offices, festival practice, and ritual variants.
• It also extends Material History Narrative because paper money is a thing whose social life can reveal institutions, family duties, and cosmology.

Connections

• 《烧钱》 - book that supplies the source prompt.
• 海外中国研究丛书 and 刘东 - series context named by the episode.
• Chinese Folk Religion Layering and Underworld Bureaucracy - adjacent folk-religion frames.
• Material History Narrative - object-centered historical reading frame.