Description
Book SynopsisGoverning 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 ind
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part 1: The Funeral Industry and the Making of Market Subjects
1. Civil Governance
2. Market Governance
3. The Fragile Middle
Part 2: Death Ritual and Pluralist Subjectivity
4. Individualism, Interrupted
5. Dying Socialist in "Capitalist" Shanghai
6. Dying Religious in a Socialist Ritual
7. Pluralism, Interrupted
Conclusion
