Ritualized poetic language flourished in this community, as in many parts of Southwest China, particularly as a mode of communicating with the dead. Lament was a prominent feature of the revived funeral rituals. This lecture compares texts of laments from two periods: the early 1990s, after ritual revitalization had gotten thoroughly underway, and 2011, after people in the community had come into more intimate contact with the modernity-obsessed cultures of urban and semi-urban China. Laments fashion grief in a public setting by conceptualizing the dead and their relations with the living in vivid poetic language. Laments from the early 1990s described these relations as a circuit of suffering, in which children used funerals to return a debt of suffering they owed their parents. By 2011, innovative lamenters had reoriented their understanding of suffering to be personal, internal, and intimate. The dead became more “modern,” allowing the living, defined largely by their relations with the dead, to participate in “modernized” forms of authentic, sincere emotional expression.

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.”