Since 1993 anthropologist Erik Mueggler’s intensive fieldwork in southwest China has sensitively investigated funerary belief, custom and practice, and the place of the dead within a mountain community. The period of his fieldwork has seen some drastic shifts in Chinese society. In his earlier work he examined carefully the impact of the suppression of traditional funerary practices during the Cultural Revolution, under conditions where those who had previously observed such practices were also having to deal with the aftermath of the devastating famine following the Great Leap Forward that left an increased legacy of uneasy dead spirits to be accommodated. In the last period, the further opening of China to market economies and an accelerated urbanization of the region has seen still further changes, with a relaxation of the prohibitions on traditional mourning. This background to Mueggler’s latest fascinating study has resonances well beyond its specific local context.
Working in a Yunnan Province community he has been studying for a long time, Mueggler focuses here on changing material observations of death. Work for the dead, he argues against much anthropological thinking, “does not restore a social order fractured by death . . . [but] creates a formal and objectified image of the social world in the dead body” (7). This, as he notes, creates and answers problems about the world, spirits, and being alive or dead, and he has some constructive reflections on how this relates to ontology as it has been dealt with in recent anthropology.
Mueggler takes a usefully long historical view of these changing traditions, which allows him to note the tensions internalized in such transitions (and date some earlier shifts) without resorting to oversimplified correlations. The transitions are comprehensible only through an understanding of the socioeconomic alterations brought about by contact between Han migrants and Lòlop’ò residents of the mountain region. This is carefully negotiated: he shows, for example, the differences and exchanges between the two funerary traditions, with the shift from cremation to burial generating new places for the dead, and also their reflection at a linguistic level (there has been some adoption of Chinese as a medium for mortuary inscriptions). At the same time, Mueggler also brings out recent anxieties among Lòlop’ò diaspora communities, that they might be honored after death with practices outside their own experience and expectation of tradition. He reflects, too, on the relative perceptions and interpretations of “backwardness” and “modernity” contained within these viewpoints. This placing of such considerations deserves the attention of anyone attempting to get to grips with emic views of funerary belief.
The book offers an intriguing and disturbing coda to Mueggler’s excellent recent work on the interruption and suppression of funerary traditions. Where ritual traditions had been deliberately disrupted (Mueggler offers the example of construction of a clinic on one of the most prominent sites of observation of the ritual Tenth Month Sacrifice), those who performed the traditions were also marginalized and unable to perform, often at great personal and psychological cost: when resumption of these ritual traditions recently became possible again, the sociocultural context had changed dramatically and it was also no longer always possible to find people still capable of performing the full chants. The material is rich here, as Mueggler is right inside a changing and developing situation. He is also rather moving regarding how these developments impact those attempting somehow to sustain older traditions, as well as being generally acute on the ethical responsibilities of and implications for the fieldworker. If at times the reader could wish that Mueggler went further in making explicit his comprehension and analysis of these pressing emergent socioeconomic questions, which are clearly of much wider import, it is extremely welcome to find a determination to see politics as a lived expression with effective implications for every aspect of social and cultural life, including death. As Mueggler notes, “Political relations with the dead found and sustain politics among the living: there is no politics that is not also a politics for the dead” (192).
Mueggler places his analysis within a broader history of anthropological theory,
particularly on questions of kinship. The complexity of this close reading of kinship
enables an acute reading of the performance of specific songs within the funerary
tradition, which should encourage folklorists, for whom this is not necessarily familiar
territory, to consider it more closely. Mueggler argues that the
As one might expect from a serious fieldworker engaged with one community over a long period, Mueggler sensitively addresses the relationship between his own work and person and the lives of his research subjects throughout. He places the specialist performer within the activity of ethnographic research, and draws out a comparison between anthropological work and ritual. The epilogue, in which he attempts to place his own brother’s untimely death within the constructs of Lòlop’ò mortuary belief, is moving in its recognition of the differences of belief embodied by fieldworker and informants, and in its striving to understand how that works in practical interaction as well as in academic study. Assimilating the implications of our informants’ belief structures for our own experiences is a painful and humbling exercise, but Mueggler shows well how it also deepens our appreciation of other lives. This satisfying book has much to tell us both about its subjects and about how we pursue research.
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[Review length: 974 words • Review posted on September 13, 2018]