BOOK SYMPOSIUM Corpses and voices across worlds (original) (raw)
Related papers
A remodelled childhood for the dead: Shamanic perceptions from birth to marriage in a Yi funeral manuscript (China) », in Dominique Blanc, Marine Carrin et Harald Tambs-Lyche (dir.), Transfer of Knowledge and Children’s Agency. Reconstructing the Paradigm of Socialization, Dehli, Primus, pp. 18-37., 2016
The Masters of psalmody have different kinds of books, reserved for the diverse rituals they may perform. References to birth or childhood are usually an integral part of their ritual texts so that childhood does not constitute a central theme by itself. It forms the main topic of only one text I collected in the field, the one on which this essay focuses, extracted from a book reserved for funerals—for men, in particular.
Going Beyond the Western Pass: Chinese Folk Models of Danger and Abandonment in Songs of Separation
Modern China, 2019
From the early Qing dynasty (1644–1911) to the beginning of the People’s Republic, men in northern China from drought-prone regions of northwestern Shanxi province and northeastern Shaanxi province would travel beyond the Great Wall to find work in western Inner Mongolia, in a migration known as “going beyond the Western Pass” 走西口. This article analyzes anthologized song lyrics and ethnographic interviews about this migration to explore how songs of separation performed at temple fairs approached danger and abandonment using traditional metaphors and “folk models” similar to those of parents protecting children from life’s hazards and widows and widowers lamenting the loss of loved ones. I argue that these duets between singers embodying the roles of migrant laborers and the women they left behind provided a public language for audiences to reflect upon and contextualize private emotions in a broader social context, offering rhetorical resolutions to ambivalent anxieties.
The Corpse and Humanist Discourse: Dead Bodies in Contemporary Chinese Art
Arts
In the 1990s, a notable trend in contemporary Chinese art was the use of human corpses as material for installation art. These works were called derivative and societally harmful by critics and have been dismissed as anomalous in more recent scholarship. This paper will demonstrate that the use of corpses was the continuation of a a decade-long attempt to free art from a perceived unhealthy relationship with society through ridding the human body of ideological meaning. I argue that the use of dead bodies marks a metaphorical end to this preoccupation within the contemporary Chinese art world and paved the way for a fundamental shift in the way artists approached society as a whole.
Journal of Chinese Religions, 2006
It is well known that Han fear the metaphysical pollution they associate with death and especially corpses. Traditionally they believe family members of the recently deceased are temporarily polluted and those who work handling corpses are permanently polluted; people try to avoid such polluted others for fear that sickness or other unfortunate events may follow contact. Yet strewn across the countryside of both China and Taiwan, and scattered throughout accounts in Buddhist historical texts, are mummified corpses venerated as deities: granting requests, sending dreams, enshrined, worshipped, often gilded, sometimes installed inside or below a religious statue or decorated to look indistinguishable or nearly so from a statue. What happens to most bodily remains? How is it that most corpses are feared, whereas certain others are worshipped? Are these divergent evaluations of corpses due to conflicting religious systems, or does it depend mainly on the identity of the corpse? The following article focuses on these questions as they apply to contemporary Taiwan. First, I describe in detail corpses that are worshipped, since their existence is less recognized or is mistakenly assumed to be nothing but a Buddhist aberration within an otherwise universal pattern of corpse avoidance. Next, I describe corpses that are feared and show changing attitudes toward bodily remains. Finally, I suggest how divergent attitudes toward bodily remains can be placed into the broader context of Han religious beliefs. [Actual year of publication: 2006. Date on journal: 2005].
Corpse Brides: Yinhun and the Macabre Agency of Cadavers in Contemporary Chinese Ghost Marriages
Asian Studies Review, 2019
Recently, Chinese newspapers have captured the attention of their readers with stories of criminals pillaging graves and murdering people to obtain corpses to sell for use in “ghost marriages” (yinhun, 阴婚). One sensationalistic report even claims that “150,000 yuan (US$22,000) won’t even get you bones”. When the state casts yinhun as a “culturally backward” superstition incongruent with national visions of modernity, how are we to understand the resurgence of this practice? By tracing the history of ghost marriages, we argue that yinhun corpses are simultaneously dead and alive. Adapting Gell’s theory of the agency of art, we maintain that yinhun corpses may be traded as lifeless commodities, but they also possess powerful living agency that critically undergirds the social efficacy of the ghost-marriage ritual. Indeed, these cadavers perform a sort of macabre affective labour that soothes the anxieties of the living. As such, this article deepens our understanding of what we mean by “commodity”.