CSSR Global South Hub Book Talk

'Governing Death, Making Persons: The New Chinese Way of Death' by Huwy-Min Lucia Liu

Center for Social Science Research

Friday, March 1, 2024 12:00 PM to 1:30 PM EST
Online Location

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Governing Death, Making Persons:
The New Chinese Way of Death

By Huwy-Min Lucia Liu

 

Governing Death, Making Persons tells the story of how economic reforms and changes in the management of death in China have affected the governance of persons. The Chinese Communist Party has sought to channel the funeral industry and death rituals into vehicles for reshaping people into "modern" citizens and subjects. Since the Reform and Opening period and the marketization of state funeral parlors, the Party has promoted personalized funerals in the hope of promoting a market-oriented and individualistic ethos. However, things have not gone as planned.

Huwy-min Lucia Liu writes about the funerals she witnessed and the life stories of two kinds of funeral workers: state workers who are quasi-government officials and semilegal private funeral brokers. She shows that end-of-life commemoration in urban China today is characterized by the resilience of social conventions and not a shift toward market economy individualization. Rather than seeing a rise of individualism and the decline of a socialist self, Liu sees the durability of socialist, religious, communal, and relational ideas of self, woven together through creative ritual framings in spite of their contradictions.

 

Author: Huwy-min Lucia Liu
Assistant Professor, Sociology and Anthropology
Department, George Mason University

Huwy-min Liu is a cultural anthropologist specializing in Sinophone cultures (Chinesespeaking societies). Her research engages in anthropological discussions on subjectivity, citizenship, and governance. At the core of her research is to understand how individuals arrive at, understand, and navigate their everyday lives under specific political regimes as they interact with specific cultural ideas, social norms, institutions, flows of capital, and other forms of power.

Photo provided by Huwy-min Liu

 

Discussant: Anne Allison
Professor, Anthropology Department, Duke University

Anne Allison is a cultural anthropologist who researches the intersection between political economy, everyday life, and the imagination in the context of late capitalist, post-industrial Japan. Her work spans the subjects of sexuality, pornography, and maternal labor to the globalization of Japanese youth products and the precarity of irregular workers.

Photo provided by Anne Allison

Discussant: Priscilla Song
Associate Professor, Humanities and Emergency Medicine, Penn State College of Medicine

Priscilla Song is a medical anthropologist working
at the nexus of global health, science and technology studies, and Asian studies. Her ethnographic research focuses on the social and ethical aspects of biomedical technologies, including the challenges of regulating experimental medical treatment in a globalized era, the ways in which digital communication technologies are transforming patient activism, and the unintended consequences of Chinese healthcare reforms.

Photo provided by Priscilla Song

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