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Songs for Dead Parents: Corpse, Text, and World in Southwest China by Mueggler,
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A book that has been read, but is in good condition. Minimal damage to the book cover eg. scuff marks, but no holes or tears. If this is a hard cover, the dust jacket may be missing. Binding has minimal wear. The majority of pages are undamaged with some creasing or tearing, and pencil underlining of text, but this is minimal. No highlighting of text, no writing in the margins, and no missing pages. See the seller’s listing for full details and description of any imperfections.
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- Buy it nowSongs for Dead Parents: Corpse, Text, and World in Southwest China by Mueggler,
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Item specifics
- Condition
- ISBN
- 9780226481005
About this product
Product Identifiers
Publisher
University of Chicago Press
ISBN-10
022648100X
ISBN-13
9780226481005
eBay Product ID (ePID)
11038259081
Product Key Features
Number of Pages
352 Pages
Publication Name
Songs for Dead Parents : Corpse, Text, and World in Southwest China
Language
English
Subject
Death & Dying, Anthropology / Cultural & Social, Asia / China, Customs & Traditions
Publication Year
2017
Type
Textbook
Subject Area
Social Science, History
Format
Trade Paperback
Dimensions
Item Height
0.1 in
Item Weight
17 Oz
Item Length
0.9 in
Item Width
0.6 in
Additional Product Features
Intended Audience
Scholarly & Professional
LCCN
2017-010952
Dewey Edition
23
Reviews
This is an extraordinary work that challenges some of our most precious assumptions about the nature of theory, about the nature of ritual, and, perhaps most importantly, about the relationship between the two., ... Songs for dead parents is not only an ethnographic account of death rites among Lòlop'ò of Southwest China--not another book, that is, that treats death as a culture-bound syndrome and the dead as figments of cultural belief. This is a book about the death that lives intimately within our bones and skin, and about the dead who gesture through our hands and infiltrate our dreams., The entire Lòlop'ò funeral system collapsed in 1958 with collectivization, followed by the Great Leap Forward, famine, and an age of wild ghosts. When ritual returned in the late twentieth century, laments were revived and modernized, but the specialists of the great nèpi songs were already largely defunct. This book is an astonishing exegesis of those songs, and richly fulfills the author's debt to old Lòlop'ò friends (who complained that his first book was more about politics). The world has contained thousands upon thousands of local religions, and the disappearance of each one represents a further step in a global loss of theodiversity. Our access to these is so fragile. Some of the greatest documentation in anthropological fieldwork happens by luck as well as persistence, and some key interlocutors tease their anthropologist with obscurity all the way to their coffin. What would Mueggler have made of the wrapped corpses (and what would I have made of their muteness) without the lucky break of Li Bicong's ambivalent invitation, the nights spent in hopeless anticipation on a hard, narrow bed in a barn, and his sudden command to turn on the tape recorder?, The entire Lòlop'ò funeral system collapsed in 1958 with collectivization, followed by the Great Leap Forward, famine, and an age of wild ghosts. When ritual returned in the late twentieth century, laments were revived and modernized, but the specialists of the great nèpi? songs were already largely defunct. This book is an astonishing exegesis of those songs, and richly fulfills the author's debt to old Lòlop'ò friends (who complained that his first book was more about politics). The world has contained thousands upon thousands of local religions, and the disappearance of each one represents a further step in a global loss of theodiversity. Our access to these is so fragile. Some of the greatest documentation in anthropological fieldwork happens by luck as well as persistence, and some key interlocutors tease their anthropologist with obscurity all the way to their coffin. What would Mueggler have made of the wrapped corpses (and what would I have made of their muteness) without the lucky break of Li Bicong's ambivalent invitation, the nights spent in hopeless anticipation on a hard, narrow bed in a barn, and his sudden command to turn on the tape recorder?, Like Mueggler's earlier works, Songs for Dead Parents shapes engagingly detailed and intimate ethnography into an enviably imaginative narrative. Mortuary and commemorative practices, associated ritual and literary forms, and culturally manipulated bodies (both corporeal and otherwise materialized) combine complexly in what amounts to an implicit existential meditation, culturally specific, on how 'the persons and bodies of the dead' impact the personhood of the living. In the process, Mueggler advances any number of distinctive interpretive-cum-analytical propositions likely to provoke considerable emulation and productive debate for some time to come., Working with villagers in north-central Yunnan over more than twenty years, Mueggler analyzes funeral rituals once banned as 'superstition' and now critical to sustaining rural communities serving as labor reserves in China's new economy. Embodiments of the dead--corpses, stones, texts, chants--have disturbing counterparts in their living descendants whose prolonged absences as labor migrants from their natal communities threaten to extinguish them as social persons. This extraordinary study will be of vital interest to scholars within and beyond Asian Studies, including anthropologists and historians of religion, politics, kinship, and the political economy of health, and those integrating methods and theories from anthropology, history, and literature.
Illustrated
Yes
Dewey Decimal
393.909513
Table Of Content
Acknowledgments Introduction Part 1 1 Corpse, Stone, Door, Text 2 A Life, a Soul, a Body 3 Playing with Corpses 4 Making the Dead Modern Part 2 5 Songs for Dead Parents 6 Earth Work 7 Soul Work 8 Body Work Epilogue Appendix Bibliography Index
Synopsis
A community's rituals and practices surrounding death are one of its foremost ways of making sense of itself and its relationship to the passage of time. Historical time, in particular, with its attendant social and political shifts, is most directly experienced and reckoned with through those whom time leaves behind, the men and women whose lives come to form that community's past. In Songs for Dead Parents, distinguished anthropologist Erik Mueggler investigates death in a mountain community in Yunnan Province, which he studied over a period spanning two decades. Through evocative analyses of the community's rituals, exchanges, laments, and chants, Mueggler shows how their way of thinking and feeling the passage of time and the loss of life is rooted in the landscape surrounding them and the raw materials it provides. These materials give new substance to the dead, as they transform from body to effigy to stone to text in a cycle of degeneration and regeneration that gives shape to the ongoing life of the community. In the wake of the disappearance of the socialist rituals that once gave people narrative structures with which to understand historical change, death rituals have become ways of coming to terms with that socialist past as well as ways of moving forward from it and creating new forms of meaning. What emerges from Mueggler's book is a powerful analysis of a praxis and poetics of grief, one whose personal and historical dimensions are profoundly intertwined. Written in an accessible language for multiple audiences, Songs for Dead Parents will appeal to anthropologists, historians, scholars of modern China, and any reader interested in how a community grieves, mourns, and endures., In a society that has seen epochal change over a few generations, what remains to hold people together and offer them a sense of continuity and meaning? In Songs for Dead Parents, Erik Mueggler shows how in contemporary China death and the practices surrounding it have become central to maintaining a connection with the world of ancestors, ghosts, and spirits that socialism explicitly disavowed. Drawing on more than twenty years of fieldwork in a mountain community in Yunnan Province, Songs for Dead Parents shows how people view the dead as both material and immaterial, as effigies replace corpses, tombstones replace effigies, and texts eventually replace tombstones in a long process of disentangling the dead from the shared world of matter and memory. It is through these processes that people envision the cosmological underpinnings of the world and assess the social relations that make up their community. Thus, state interventions aimed at reforming death practices have been deeply consequential, and Mueggler traces the transformations they have wrought and their lasting effects.
LC Classification Number
GT3283.A3S659 2017
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- 9***x (38)- Feedback left by buyer.Past monthVerified purchaseFast shipping. The package was sealed well, but no padding was added to secure the item inside the box. The book's condition was a bit worse than expected. With only a stock photo provided in the listing, a more detailed description of the book's condition should have been provided.
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This item (1)
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- r***r (24)- Feedback left by buyer.Past 6 monthsVerified purchaseBook arrived on time, and the seller was amazing. The book is in a great condition and for the price I bought, it's a steal.
- l***l (54)- Feedback left by buyer.Past 6 monthsVerified purchasePurchased and quickly cancelled order. The seller monitors messages and cancelled the order before it shipped with a full refund. Honest seller, good prices, and excellent customer service. I would reconsider purchasing from this seller. A++The Arras Witch Treatises: Johannes Tinctor's Invectives contre la secte de vau (#235954445229)
- b***r (58)- Feedback left by buyer.Past 6 monthsVerified purchaseUnfortunately the book I received was in bad shape and was a different edition than was shown in the listing, however, my experience with the seller was excellent! I reached out requesting a refund and very quickly received a very professional and friendly reply and an immediate refund. Based on this experience I would recommend buying from this seller!Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (#335858773063)
- 9***x (38)- Feedback left by buyer.Past monthVerified purchaseFast shipping. The package was sealed well, but no padding was added to secure the item inside the box. The book's condition was a bit worse than expected. With only a stock photo provided in the listing, a more detailed description of the book's condition should have been provided.