Governing Death, Making Persons: The New Chinese Way of Death

by Huwy-min Lucia Liu

Overview

Governing Death, Making Persons tells the story of how economic reforms and changes in the management of death in China have affected the governance of persons. The Chinese Communist Party has sought to channel the funeral industry and death rituals into vehicles for reshaping people into "modern" citizens and subjects. Since the Reform and Opening period and the marketization of state funeral parlors, the Party has promoted personalized funerals in the hope of promoting a market-oriented and individualistic ethos. However, things have not gone as planned.

Huwy-min Lucia Liu writes about the funerals she witnessed and the life stories of two kinds of funeral workers: state workers who are quasi-government officials and semilegal private funeral brokers. She shows that end-of-life commemoration in urban China today is characterized by the resilience of social conventions and not a shift toward market economy individualization. Rather than seeing a rise of individualism and the decline of a socialist self, Liu sees the durability of socialist, religious, communal, and relational ideas of self, woven together through creative ritual framings in spite of their contradictions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501767241
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	01/15/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	270
File size:	5 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Huwy-min Lucia Liu is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at George Mason University.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Part 1: The Funeral Industry and the Making of Market Subjects
1. Civil Governance
2. Market Governance
3. The Fragile Middle
Part 2: Death Ritual and Pluralist Subjectivity
4. Individualism, Interrupted
5. Dying Socialist in "Capitalist" Shanghai
6. Dying Religious in a Socialist Ritual
7. Pluralism, Interrupted
Conclusion

What People are Saying About This

Joel Robbins

Governing Death, Making Persons is a rigorously argued and wholly original study of funeral practices in Shanghai. Making innovative contributions to the anthropology of death, ritual, subjectivity, and contemporary China, this is a major work of very wide relevance.

Ruth E. Toulson

Governing Death, Making Persons is a beautifully written and field-defining book. It challenges our understanding of the lived-experience of China's market economic reforms, of the complex on-the-ground machinations of authoritarian states, and of the tangled processes of subject formation.

Richard Madsen

Grounded in rich ethnographic data, Governing Death, Making Persons provides a crucial look at the very foundations of Chinese culture. Huwy-min Lucia Liu's observations of Shanghai funeral practices are key to understanding fundamental aspects of the political, economic, social, and cultural transformations of China.

University of California Richard Madsen

Grounded in rich ethnographic data, Governing Death, Making Persons provides a crucial look at the very foundations of Chinese culture. Huwy-min Lucia Liu's observations of Shanghai funeral practices are key to understanding fundamental aspects of the political, economic, social, and cultural transformations of China.