Two funeral rituals were abandoned in the 1950s and never revived. These events centered on a four to eight-hour long speech to the dead, rendered in poetic language, and conducted by a ritual specialist. The speech was divided into 48 “songs” and was reputed to tell of the origins of the world and all its beings and reveal the secrets of death and life. This lecture examines this speech, treating it as a massive construction project intended to build a world for the dead. After bringing sky, earth, and markets into being, these songs for dead parents alternate between two fates for the dead soul, connected to the 19th-century transition from cremation to burial, under pressure from the Qing state and Han immigrants. On the one hand, the soul hangs forever in the sky, swaddled together with its spouse, head to the west and feet to the stars. On the other hand, it lives forever beneath the tomb, subject to the Chinese-speaking bureaucracy of Mo´mi A`b?`/Yan Luowang ???/Yama, king of the underworld. Ultimately, the songs are about recomposing the corpse of the dead once again so that its contractual relations with the living might be rehearsed once again and finally severed.

The Roy A. Rappaport Lectures are a series of public lectures on a work in progress. As the description written by Professor Roy “Skip” Rappaport in 1976 states, “…it offers the opportunity for other students and faculty to hear a colleague in an extended discussion of their own work.”