Songs for dead parents : corpse, text, and world in Southwest China /
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Author / Creator: | Mueggler, Erik, 1962- author. |
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Imprint: | Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. |
Description: | 1 online resource |
Language: | English |
Subject: | |
Format: | E-Resource Book |
URL for this record: | http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/11389062 |
ISBN: | 9780226483412 022648341X 9780226483382 022648338X 9780226481005 022648100X |
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Notes: | Includes bibliographical references and index. Print version record. |
Summary: | In a society that has seen epochal change over a few generations, what remains to hold people together and offer them a sense of continuity and meaning? In Songs for Dead Parents, Erik Mueggler shows how in contemporary China death and the practices surrounding it have become central to maintaining a connection with the world of ancestors, ghosts, and spirits that socialism explicitly disavowed. Drawing on more than twenty years of fieldwork in a mountain community in Yunnan Province, Songs for Dead Parents shows how people view the dead as both material and immaterial, as effigies replace corpses, tombstones replace effigies, and texts eventually replace tombstones in a long process of disentangling the dead from the shared world of matter and memory. It is through these processes that people envision the cosmological underpinnings of the world and assess the social relations that make up their community. Thus, state interventions aimed at reforming death practices have been deeply consequential, and Mueggler traces the transformations they have wrought and their lasting effects. |
Other form: | Print version: Mueggler, Erik, 1962- Songs for dead parents. Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017 9780226483382 |
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