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Ties to spirits in Suzhou are not just metaphors or projections of human kinship, but literal parts of a kinship system that invokes responsibilities of care and filial piety. Such intimacies are not always pleasant, and the first part of this presentation shows their emotional weight. The second part turns to how the rapid urbanization of the area over the past two decades has interrupted the responsibilities of care, creating an affect of frustration. In a concluding example, the frustration spiraled into madness for one woman, whose alternate chanting and screaming marked how kinship ties of both blood and affect had been severed by the forces of urbanization.

Robert P. Weller is Professor of Anthropology at Boston University. His most recent books are How Things Count as the Same: Memory, Mimesis, and Metaphor (with Adam Seligman), and Religion and Charity: The Social Life of Goodness in Chinese Societies (with C. Julia Huang and Keping Wu). He has over forty years of research experience in China and Taiwan on topics that run from ghosts to politics, and from rebellions to landscape paintings. He is currently involved in two book projects: one on silence and haunting, and the other on the effects of rapid urbanization on village religion in China.

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