Ritual, Ancestry, and Cultural History in Modern China, with Alice Mah

What do we owe to the dead? What responsibilities do we inherit from the past, and how do they intersect with the crises of the present? In an era of ecological collapse and cultural dislocation, how can we meaningfully honour ancestral memory when the material sites of remembrance - tombs, villages, traditions - are themselves vanishing?

In this episode, sociologist and author Alice Mah joins us to discuss her new book, Red Pockets, a deeply personal yet globally resonant exploration of ancestry, ecological anxiety, and cultural memory.

Mah is a writer and Professor of Urban and Environmental Studies at the University of Glasgow. Originally from a small town in northern British Columbia, she has a long-standing interest in ecology and place.

Drawing on her experiences tracing her family’s lineage from the rice-growing villages of South China, through the Chinatowns of Western Canada where she was raised, to the post-industrial landscapes of Scotland and England where she now lives, Mah reflects on what it means to reckon with a legacy of silence, displacement, and environmental degradation.

As Qingming Festival tomb-sweeping traditions fade and wildfires rage across ancestral lands, Mah’s meditation on the “hungry ghosts” of forgotten obligations is both an intimate memoir and a cultural history of rupture. 

Joining Mah to discuss environmental sociology, intergenerational responsibility, and the often overlooked spiritual dimensions of ecological grief, is journalist and book critic Mythili Rao.

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