Erik Mueggler

The Emory Department of Anthropology presents: Songs for dead parents: materializing and dematerializing the dead in Southwest China Erik Mueggler
Professor of Anthropology, University of Michigan
This talk examines the ritualiza on of death in a
“minority” community in mountainous Southwest China,
where people are heir to an extraordinary range of
resources for working on the dead, including abundant
poe c language. The talk’s focus is the central ar fact of
poe c heritage in this region, an eight‐hour‐long speech
for the dead, abandoned in the 1950s. The speech,
divided into 72 “songs”, is a massive construc on project,
which builds a world for the dead. A er bringing sky,
earth, and markets into being, these songs for dead
parents alternate between two fates for the dead soul,
connected to a 19th‐century transi on from crema on to
burial. On the one hand, the soul hangs forever in the sky,
swaddled together with its spouse, head to the west and
feet to the stars. On the other hand, it lives forever
beneath the tomb, subject to the Chinese‐speaking
bureaucracy of Yan Luo Wang 閻羅王/Yama, king of the
underworld. Ul mately the speech is a kind of
anthropology: an a empt to sympathe cally understand
and describe a difficult and alien world of others, in this
case dead others.
Monday, April 6, 2015
4‐6 p.m.
Anthropology 206
Image courtesy of E. Mueggler
Addi onal Event for Graduate Students: Lunch me Seminar with Professor Mueggler Tuesday, April 7, 2015, 12‐1 p.m., Anthropology 206 RSVP by April 1 to [email protected] Recommended Reading for seminar: Erik Mueggler, 2014. “Corpse, Stone, Door, Text.” Journal of Asian Studies 73(1): 17‐41.
Erik Mueggler, 2011. “Bodies Real and Virtual: Joseph Rock and Enrico Caruso in the Sino‐Tibetan Borderlands.”
Compara ve Studies in Society and History 53(1): 6‐37.
Co‐sponsored by the Confucius Ins tute at Emory, the Hightower Fund,
Religion, Russian and East Asian Languages and Cultures, and East Asian Studies