The Funeral of Mr. Wang

This is a timely book on a timely topic. In this book, Andrew Kipnis describes the transformation of death management and death rituals in urban China after the Chinese Community Party adopted a market economy. As Kipnis points out, while death has been seen cross-culturally as a critical social transition, there were no prior monographs on death in the urban areas of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Such an absence of scholarly monographs is especially surprising considering the study of death had previously played a large, if not a defining, role in Sinophone studies (the study of Chinese languages speaking societies).Through the funeral of Mr. Wang described in chapter 1, Kipnis tackles four key areas in which we see the transformation of death: in changing relationships between self and other (individuals and their kinships), in spatial changes and the urban economy, in regulatory changes and the politics of death, and in changes in the concept of souls. Unlike the concept of transition, which is about regularly occurring structural changes (like death), Kipnis sees transformation in these as open-ended change. Building on the concept of “recombinant” culture developed in an analogy to biological evolution in his earlier work on urbanization, Kipnis explains how old elements of death rituals, culture, politics, and economy and new elements were combined together in specific ways that form a new entity in each of the four areas.1 As the title indicates, Kipnis's analysis of death in contemporary urban China is positioned around the bereaved. Chapter 3 describes how the process or moment of dying has been moved from the private (homes) to the public sphere (hospitals) over time and how cemeteries have moved from the urban center to urban peripheries in contemporary China. Following the French historian Philippe Aries's analysis based in western Europe and America, Kipnis argues that such an increased spatial separation between the living and the dead and the professionalization of death has created a new attitude toward death in China as well: fear.2In chapter 4, Kipnis describes how the management of death was transformed over time from being managed by kin in the context of a community to one managed by strangers—funeral professionals. In chapter 5, Kipnis explains the gift exchanges that occur between the living and the dead and the contrasting commodity exchanges between the bereaved and funeral professionals in Nanjing. These two chapters connect transformations in these social areas to changes in the urban economies around death that provide a basis for understanding the state's attempts to govern death. Kipnis delineates, for instance, the rise of conjugal units within the patrilineal tradition and how this new transformation in kinship has led to legal disputes over inheritance and property division.3 He also sketches out, from the perspective of the bereaved as consumers and kin, how the informal economy of death works within the framework of the state's control of death. In chapter 6, Kipnis then provides an overview of the Chinese Communist Party's governance of funeral rituals and land use in cemeteries to show how its governance of mourning was both authoritarian and fragmented. Finally, in chapter 7, Kipnis describes the coexistence of secular and religious ideas of person and death in a discussion of the transformation of concepts of souls that suggests the concept of filial piety is where the state's secularism finds common ground with religious practices. He analyzes a ghost story “written by an author who goes by . . . ‘Li’” (134) in the last chapter as a means to circle back to his concept of recombination by showing how people might come to feel their present space was haunted even without a specific belief in ghosts.Like any scholarly work, there is always room for critique and conversation. I will offer two comments in this vein here. First, one of the key arguments in the book is that there was an increased fear of ghosts that emerged in Nanjing due to the spatial separation between the living and both the dead (moving cemeteries to the periphery) and the dying (moved into hospitals). Combining this argument with a cultural logic that Kipnis sees equalizing ghosts and strangers in Sinophone cultures, he argues that people in contemporary China disliked funeral professionals not because of the symbolic pollution of death that they were said to embody but because as professional strangers they were rather more like those increasingly present ghosts. This argument, however, appears to be in direct contradiction to his analysis of ghosts in chapter 8. Here Kipnis discusses his trouble gathering ghost stories during his fieldwork and explains how this led him to see how space could be haunted without the existence of ghosts. This contradiction, though it may indeed be solvable, weakens his argument as presented in this area.Second, Kipnis argues that modernization propelled a need to create something immortal via memorialization of Communists past that links the past with the future. He suggests that this existential need limited secularism. As a result of this need, both the Chinese Communist Party and ordinary people found filial piety to be an acceptable middle ground between the secular spirits (of socialism) and religious souls. Assuming that the above-mentioned existential need indeed existed in China due to modernization, there still remains a paradox left undiscussed here. That is, while the party might utilize dead soldier tombs as a basis for patriotic education, in post–economic reform China the state did not promote secular socialist rituals—the kind of memorialization that happened in funeral parlors as described in the funeral of Mr. Wang. Instead, the party sought to promote old age care that emphasized filial piety. If this is the case (and I do agree that it is),4 then why do urban Chinese cling to secular socialist rituals despite the party having attempted to move away from this ritual? Why not move toward filial piety as a new core of the funeral ritual? From the perspective of the state funeral homes, what were their preferred secular/soulful mix of rituals?These concerns should not obscure the contributions of this book. The Funeral of Mr. Wang is very well written. Kipnis writes in a straightforward manner and leaves the book relatively free of jargon. The concepts discussed in the book are empirically grounded so that undergraduate students with little training in anthropological theories can easily follow the arguments. In fact, Kipnis provides enough fundamental cultural background so that readers who do not have any prior background in Sinophone cultures in general and in the PRC in particular can comprehend the description and analysis. I can speak on this from personal experience, since I recently used this book in my undergraduate course on death and culture. Finally, this book contains a wealth of information about funeral policies and cemeteries in the PRC that serves as an excellent information source for academic as well as for nonacademic readers who are interested in these topics. Significantly, this book is also a good example of a form of engagement that promotes ethnography and the study of China in its complexities to the public

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