2011
This article focuses on the popular representation of the afterlife, or our belief in such, as embodied in the idea of a ghost, a revenant, or a spectre, or in other words, the spirit of the deceased, as contrasted with the more animistic spiritual beings epitomising the powers of the natural world. For the lack of suitable research materials, the paper is geographically limited to the areas influenced by the major religious systems of beliefs, out of which Christianity (particularly Catholicism), Buddhism and Taoism seem to be particularly spirit-friendly, and to the areas culturally abounding in literary and cinematic representations of the spiritual encounters between the living and the dead. At the time when inter-cultural communication has become a hot topic to discuss, we become aware that even the dead are expected to resolve their cultural differences. One way to bring harmony to the culturally diverse world of contemporary spirits, as this paper suggests, is to see them as subject to the same process of globalisation and informatization as the living.