Erik Mueggler | Playing with Corpses: Assembling Bodies for the Dead in Southwest China

This talk describes the ritualization of death in an indigenous community in Yunnan Province, China, called Júzò in the local Tibeto-Burman language. It focuses on the assembly of fully social dead bodies in the reform era, when death rituals were re-established after a hiatus of two decades. To attend to the active fashioning of dead bodies is to build on the focus that the tradition of the anthropology of death has maintained on the corpse and its transformations, while running counter to that tradition’s tendency to take dead bodies as given entities left over after death. In Júzò, kinship begins with the assembly of dead bodies. Living bodies are made through generative relations of nurture and care; dead bodies are made through the materialization and actualization of ideal relations. Procreation and bodily health among humans and domestic animals and plants depends on life substance channeled through filial relations with dead parents. This process depends upon the successful fabrication of dead bodies out of idealized, formal images of the relations in which the dead were once suspended in life. Through work on the dead, the dead body is made into the image of an entire social world. This world contrasts with the understanding of the social world as “society,” which founded political discourse in the socialist era and post-socialist eras.

Center on Contemporary China | View More Events
Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies, Center on Contemporary China (OWNER)

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