A few weeks ago my Archaeology of Death class was asked to do a monument analysis. With this task, it was meant for us to understand the use and functionality of data collecting. It also demonstrated the need of grave site analysis which is what we did. For my groups project, we decided to visit the Chinese Cemetery located in our city. Even though I have been going to school in this city for the past couple years, I'm not very familiar with the cemetery's here.
For our main research, we focused on the presence of the English language and how it was incorporated into the Chinese environment. With this, it was learned that less then a quarter of the grave monuments contained English writing. For those that did, it was seen to be a consistent addition to the primary stone that could be identified. Many of the grave markers we payed close attention to involved a primary and secondary stone. From the look of each of those grave markers, it was easy to tell that the secondary stone did not have much pollution deposits because they were not introduced into the grave site long ago.
Doing this research made me think about the influence on Chinese culture integrating with English. In many cases, the dominant culture overruns the sub dominant culture. It is though the dominant culture has an incredible hold on society and it will, metaphorically, step on anything that gets in its way. But that's just one theory.
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