Before the Socialist era, most dead people in this community received four major funeral rituals and many minor ones. Between 1958 and the late 1970s, nearly all inherited techniques for working on the dead were abandoned, both here and throughout rural China. In the 1980s, two major funeral rites were revived, and their importance increased throughout the post-socialist period. This lecture examines the mechanics of the first of these, a night vigil after which the corpse is buried. The work of this ritual was to form a fully human body for the dead, composed of a formal image of the social relations in which the person was suspended while alive. This body comes together in order to be divided. The body and the world of the dead are split into two worlds, immaterial separated from material, one to be inhabited by the dead, the other left to the living. This work is accomplished by operations on corpses — first the corpse of the dead, then the corpses of sacrificial animals, partitioned and distributed among the participants in the person’s social world.

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.”

For more information on this lecture series, visit: http://www.lsa.umich.edu/anthro/