This podcast discusses urbanization in China through the lens of changing funerary practices. It examines how spatial reorganization during Chinese urbanization problematizes death, and how newly emerged patterns of familial reorganization, stranger sociality, and economic restructuring are reflected in funerary ritual and the rise of the funerary industry. It also discusses some of the unique features of Chinese patterns of governing death and how existing frameworks of governance influence and are influenced by everyday practices of urban memorialization. Finally, it considers moral debates on the commercialization of death and the place of secularization and ghost stories in contemporary urban China.
Andrew B. Kipnis is a professor in the Dept. of Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His latest book is “The Funeral of Mr. Wang: Life, Death, and Ghosts in Urbanizing China”. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press (2021, available for free here. He is also the author of “From Village to City: Social Transformation in a Chinese County Seat” (University of California Press 2016), “Governing Educational Desire: Culture, Politics and Schooling in China” (University of Chicago Press 2011), “China and Post Socialist Anthropology” (Eastbridge 2008), and “Producing Guanxi” (Duke University Press 1997). From 2006-2015 he was co-editor of “The China Journal” and he is currently co-editor of “Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory”.
