Death Rites and Chinese Culture

Abstract

This essay argues for a modification of James L. Watson’s influential ideas on official cultural standardization via ritual in late imperial China. Focusing on Watson’s introduction to Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China, co-edited with Evelyn Rawski (1988), it refutes Watson’s hypothesis that officials deliberately confined themselves to effective reform of death rituals in the period before the corpse’s expulsion from the community: gazetteers show that officials tried—and failed—to modify numerous practices, both before and after expulsion. The essay proposes that some reported orthoprax standardization was illusory, resulting from defensive, subversive, or self-deceiving writings of local elites, and it also recognizes forms of unofficial standardization that did not follow Zhu Xi’s Family Rituals. In explaining resistance to official standardization, it emphasizes local agency: as key sites of culturally appropriate emotional expression and as important vehicles for upholding and redrawing local status, funerals tended to develop distinct regional patterns and ramifying variation within them.