Sutton-DeathRitesChinese-2007

Death Rites and Chinese Culture: Standardization and Variation in Ming and Qing Times
Author(s): Donald S. Sutton

Source: Modern China , Jan., 2007, Vol. 33, No. 1, Ritual, Cultural Standardization, and
Orthopraxy in China: Reconsidering James L. Watson's Ideas (Jan., 2007), pp. 125-153
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Modern China
Volume 33 Number 1
January 2007 125-153
? 2007 Sage Publications
Death Rites and Chinese 10.1177/0097700406294915
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Culture hosted at
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Standardization and Variation in

Ming and Qing Times
Donald S. Sutton
Carnegie Mellon University
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 prac
tices, 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 unof
ficial standardization that did not follow Zhu Xi's Family Rituals. In explain
ing 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.
Keywords: cultural standardization; cultural integration; ritual; funerals;

heteropraxy; orthopraxy; the state
w: hen introducing his co-edited conference volume about Chinese

death rituals (Watson, 1988b), James L. Watson made an argument
Author's Note: For supporting the research behind this essay, thanks are due to the Needham
Institute and St John's College, Cambridge, the U.S. Fulbright Committee, and the Endowment
for Culture and the Arts (Wen Chien Ji Jin Huei), Taipei. I am also grateful to the Institute of
Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, for offering me space to work in 2001 and for the oppor
tunity to present the argument in preliminary form at its seminar; to the participants of an
Association for Asian Studies roundtable at San Diego in 2004; and in particular to Adam Yuet
Chao, Patricia Ebrey, Hill Gates, Ken Pomeranz, Robert Weiler, and two anonymous review
ers for their comments. But the views expressed here are my own.
125

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126 Modern China
that bore directly on the issue of the standardization of Chinese culture in

late imperial China. Making sense of the diversity of death rites from region
to region, in the face of evidently successful efforts to standardize culture,
Watson argued that the late imperial state, in a self-abnegating decision,
contented itself with standardizing the funerary rites between death and the
formal expulsion of the corpse from the community, after which locals were
free to practice their own customary rites. These "pre-expulsion" ritual acts,
practiced all over China, were nine in all; despite variations, they consti
tuted a sequential "elementary structure" that defined a proper funeral and,
to its participants, Chineseness itself. This essay reexamines that argument
through a survey of primary materials and recent secondary sources.1
Watson's sixteen-page introduction had an importance out of proportion
to its length. Its power was derived not just from the book's interdisciplinary
nature (the authors were six anthropologists, three historians, and a sociol
ogist). Nor did it rely just on the quality of the contributions (including his
own, on death ritualists; Watson, 1988a), or his tone, which was deliber
ately "polemical" (Watson, 1988b: 4). By linking the book to another inter
disciplinary conference volume published three years before (D. Johnson,
Nathan, and Rawski, 1985; Watson, 1985), Watson made its topic directly
relevant to current scholarly concerns. Watson's own pathbreaking and
much-cited chapter on Tianhou, based largely on his fieldwork in the Hong
Kong New Territories, emphasized ritual standardization (Watson, 1985),
and in his 1988 introduction Watson again argued that the state's promotion
of ritual enhanced cultural unification. Imperial officials focused on the
"performative domain"?that is, ritual. They were "content to legislate
action, not beliefs" (Watson, 1988b: 10-11). In the case of funerals, they lim
ited themselves further. "By excluding disposal from the standard set of
funeral rites, state officials implicitly condoned the cultural expression of
ethnic [and regional] differences" (Watson, 1988b: 17). The "elementary
structure" of key (pre-expulsion) rituals was crucial in unifying Chinese
culture, helping to define who was truly Chinese.2
In emphasizing the performative domain (ritual) and finding a discon
nect with the ideological domain (belief), Watson disagreed with Evelyn
Rawski, his co-editor, who argued that it was a fundamental concern of
early modern imperial reformers of ritual to change belief (Rawski, 1988a).
But both agreed that belief was quite well standardized (by comparison
with Europe or South Asia, for example), and found the state ultimately
responsible for China's cultural uniformity. Standardization along official
lines was a success story.
Not much was written in Death Ritual about the active role of ritual par
ticipants, though ritualists were given due attention (Watson, 1988a; and in a

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Sutton / Death Rites and Chinese Culture 127
gazetteer-based study of the North China plain, Naquin, 1988). Watson

acknowledged local agency, but saw it as acquiescent. Locals voluntarily
participated in the process of standardization "as an expression of cultural
identity and as an affirmation of loyalty to the imperial state[;] ... it was a
small price to pay for the privilege of being accepted as proper Chinese"
and for avoiding being marked as "dangerous sectarians. . . . They partici
pated in a unified, centrally organized culture and at the same time [in
the post-disposal rites] celebrated their local or regional distinctivenes s"
(Watson, 1988b: 17).
My intention is to reopen some of these issues, which up to now, besides
the disagreement with Rawski, have seemed closed.3 This essay extends
and modifies Watson's argument, and suggests a new interpretation consis
tent with now readily accessible local historical records. I will not debate the
question of how uniform Chinese culture (or culture of mourning) was, at
whatever level, though recent scholarship would probably find more diver
sity, or more significance in its diversity, than Watson and other scholars did
in the 1980s, when a "commitment to grasping society as a whole" (Dirks,
Eley, and Ortner, 1993: 27) was widespread in the social sciences.4 China
is, and was, both uniform and varied; Watson did emphasize the great local
variation within the "elementary structure" of funerals (Watson, 1988b: 15
16), and indeed to argue whether Chinese culture is better described as uni
form or varied would be like debating whether a glass of water is half full
or half empty. But important structural variations seem extraordinarily per
sistent, as we will see, and much of the uniformity does not serve official
purposes at all. How can we account for these departures from the expected
model?
Contra Watson, I will show that officials and local Confucian reformers
habitually drew no distinction between pre- and post-disposal (-expulsion)
rites as respectively standard and free; that they pushed for reform of the
entire sequence and were equally ineffective pre- as well as post-disposal;
that standardization did occur, but often in ways contrary to official desires.
This analysis suggests a bottom-up dynamic quite different from Watson's
emphasis on local acquiescence to official ritual standards. Looking at cer
tain ritual segments, including some of those noted by Watson and some
that he omitted, I emphasize local initiative, which was mentioned in his
subsequent article "Rites or Beliefs?" but without elaboration (Watson, 1993),5
and offer several reasons that may have made certain death rituals popular.
And I suggest that the same dynamic of inventiveness and popularity might
well apply to standardization along orthodox lines. This proposed reinter
pretation, based on gazetteer reports, will account for how variation was
replicated and why standardization, despite centuries of reform efforts, was

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128 Modern China
always incomplete. I then look at those who claimed to standardize in order

to conceal and protect local practices and thereby left an impression of
greater official success than a close inspection of the record indicates. What
was crucial to the preservation or elaboration of a particular ritual segment
of mourning, I finally propose, was not official or elite pressure or the desire
to be orthoprax but emotional obligations on the part of ritual participants,
as well as a variety of local micropolitical requirements. The result was a
rough equilibrium of forces tending to variation and sameness, and of offi
cial and unofficial kinds of standardization.
Another Kind of Standardization? Heteroprax

Patterns in Death Rites before Expulsion
Watson took ritual standardization as the spread over China not simply
of common practices but of officially approved practices: "It appears that
by Ming and Ch'ing [Qing] a uniform structure had emerged, based roughly
on classical models outlined in the Lichi [Liji] and later simplified by Chu
Hsi [Zhu Xi, 1130-1200] and others" (Watson, 1988a: 12). Thus, according
to Watson, the standard and the orthoprax were essentially the same, demon
strating official success in standardizing death ritual, at least up to the
expulsion of the corpse.
To test this assumption, let us first compare Watson's nine pre-disposal
acts with the twelve listed in Zhu Xi's Family Rituals, more recently trans
lated by Patricia Ebrey (1991a) (see Table 1). (Note in passing that Watson
conveniently collapsed some of Zhu Xi's required acts and added others,
such as the use of professionals, that Zhu must have taken for granted.)
First, the order is slightly different?wailing comes earlier, and corpse wash
ing later?which casts some doubt on the existence of the required official
sequence Watson claimed (Watson, 1988b, 1993). Second, Watson's key
break in the funeral, corpse removal, is not given any emphasis by Zhu's
manual, a point to which I will return. Third, the well-attested use of music
(not in the approved form of the dirge; Ebrey, 1991b: 89) is omitted. The
standard, in other words, was not orthodox, forcing us to the conclusion that
ritual standardization could also be heteroprax.
Not only were official standards and Watson's elementary structure not
the same, but neither list seems a reliable guide to what was actually prac
ticed. An additional set of rites, which are separately noted by Susan
Naquin (1988) but do not figure in Watson's nine acts, might be categorized
as guest rituals (cf. Chau, 2004),6 with sometimes the dead and sometimes

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Table 1
Required Acts in Funerals: Ideal and Inferred
Watson's Proposed "Elementary Structure"
Zhu Xi's Specified "Mourning Rituals" (up to expulsion of corpse)
1. Beginning of the end 1. Notifying death by wailing and other

signs
2. Washing/dressing 2. Putting on the proper mourning costume
3. Soul seal/soul cloth and inscribed 3. Ritualized bathing of the corpse
banner
4. Preliminary laying out 4. Transferring money, food, and goods to
the dead*
5. Final laying out 5. Preparing the soul tablet
6. Putting on mourning garments 6. The use of money and payment of
professionals*
7. Wailing, offerings 7. The use of music*
8. Condolences and gifts 8. Sealing the corpse in an airtight coffin
9. Receiving notification and hurrying 9. Expelling the coffin from the
to funeral community
10. Preparing for burial
11. Moving coffin/greeting ancestors
12. Sending-away oblation
13. Procession
[post-expulsion, but not separately
demarcated]
14.Arrival at grave site
15.Returning to wail
16.Sacrifice of repose
17.Cessation of wailing sacrifice
18. Sacrifice for associating tablet
19. First sacrifice for good fortune
20. Second sacrifice for good fortune
21. Peace sacrifice
22. Miscellaneous etiquette for mourners
Sources: Ebrey, 1991a: 70-152 (headings slightly abbreviated); Watson, 1988b: 12-15.
* Items omitted by Zhu Xi.
the living treated as guests. Condolence visits (Zhu's no. 8, which I discuss
below) were almost universal, marking a success for orthopraxy, though
there were criticisms of how they were done (for a seventeenth-century cri
tique, see Kutcher, 1999: 118). Other guest rituals are absent from both Zhu
Xi's prescriptions and Watson's suggested structure, some for the days after
death but before the body's expulsion from the community.
One of them, common in gazetteer accounts, was the wake. Wakes were
frowned upon; Ming law had stipulated a beating of eighty blows for the

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130 Modern China
family head who allowed the mingling of the sexes, the drinking of wine,
and the consumption of meat at funeral celebrations?the same punishment
meted out to those guilty of delayed burial (Lei, [1563] 1999: 225). The
wake was part of the deceased's send-off, which seems salient enough to be
taken as an "elementary structural" feature. Intended to please the dead or
"turn death into pleasure" for the survivors (at Daozhou, in Yongzhoufuzhi,
1828: 569), the wake was sometimes termed naosang, a drunken party con
ducted on the night of the death or on the night before the burial, and was
a common focus of ineffectual neo-Confucian reformist complaints. It took
many forms: in some parts it occurred on the eve of encoffining, with drums
and singing; elsewhere there was a formal banquet on the eve of the funeral
(Xinning xianzhi, 1839; cf. [Minguo xinxiu] Dapu xianzhi, 1943). (Like Zhu
Xi, Watson omitted any mention of the consumption of food and drink.
Mourners were supposed to be indifferent to food?see Ebrey, 1991b: 215?
but funeral feasts often crop up in the sources and were doubtless universal.7)
In a few areas there were more orthodox-sounding send-offs: for example,
the singing of the twenty-four filial stories by the sons and grandsons, a
practice attributed (oddly) to poorer families (near Shanghai, Chongming
xianzhi, 1930; in Hunan, Baling xianzhi, 1872). The wake in its many forms
seems to have been widely seen as an essential part of the send-off for the
deceased.
Another part of the send-off was the roadside offering (luji), probably
with an altar; these booths were specially erected along the route to be taken
by the bier procession to the grave, so that friends and relatives could pay
respects to the dead person and the bereaved family. This practice had been
excoriated by Sima Guang but despite centuries of Confucian opposition
was still common in late Qing Shandong and other regions (Ebrey, 1991b:
96; Shanghe xianzhi, 1832; Dengzhou fuzhi, 1694; Cao, 1973-86: 1.285,
5.214). These various rituals associated with the send-off are sometimes
overlooked in early-twentieth-century English-language field reports, but
given the social opportunities they offered?in Donald DeGlopper's terms
(1995) for the public expression of qing, and in Yunxiang Yan's terms
(1996) for the exchange of gifts to give form to sentiment or to win personal
favors?funerary guest rituals must have marked an essential incorporation
of community beyond family mourners.
Whereas condolence visits appear to be a mark of orthopraxy, the more
informal types of send-off should qualify as an example of ritual standard
ization, like music, but standardization of the "heteroprax" variety. Why did
heteropraxy persist so obstinately? An ability to take cover within official
categories helped.8 Let us here consider in more detail an example of "het
eroprax standardization," once again in the pre-disposal period?a case about

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which Watson had already supplied rich material in his classic article "Of
Flesh and Bones": the ritual of "buying water" (maishui) (Watson, 1982).
He included it as a southern variant of washing the corpse, the third of his
nine standard rites and one also specified by Zhu Xi. The importance of
buying water in the record seems to overshadow the "elementary structural"
feature of washing the corpse, and the centuries of official condemnation
argue against its interpretation as an unobjectionable variant on official rites:
the Tang authors of the Suishu had called it a barbarian practice, as had the
Song writer Fan Chengda (1126-1193) (Qingyuan xianzhi, 1937). Confucian
writers campaigned against buying water for centuries, yet in Qing times
gazetteers report the practice widely in Guangdong and Guangxi, as well as
Hunan and part of Hubei, where it was called "requesting water".
In a typical critique, Governor Wu Rongguang wrote in the nineteenth
century: "In the South when the corpse is washed there is what is called
qingshui or maishui. People from the household bring incense and paper
spirit money, with the chief mourners, their hair untied, following behind.
At a pool or well they bow and ketou and throw money into the water. Then
they draw water and return home." The governor commented sharply, "This
custom is very crude. How can the filial son bear to go outside at a time
when he is crying to heaven and clawing the ground [in his grief]?" (Wu,
[1832] 1970: 18.5b). Like other Confucian commentators he disliked buy
ing water because it brought the leading mourners out of the house at a time
when it was their duty to be quietly watching over (shou) the corpse (cf.
Anren xianzhi, 1869). This part of the pre-disposal rites nonetheless remained
popular. Like the music and the send-off rituals, it was a form of heteroprax
standardization, though on a regional level.
Leaving aside its undoubted benefit in permitting tired and squeamish
mourners to escape their vigil close to the corpse, this ritual must to some
extent have owed its popularity to the pressure to conform to local practice,
which outweighed any incentive to earn the respect of orthodox neo
Confucians. One gazetteer writer in southwest Guangdong accused even
"people who could read books and understand principles (mingli) of daring
to violate the li [proper ritual] but of being terrified of violating local custom"
(Yangjiang xianzhi, 1925: 837). This is an example of educated locals?who
were expected to lead local reform?abdicating to local opinion and practice,
and it reflects the power of heteroprax regional standardization.
The conservatism of local custom is not the only reason why such
nonorthodox practices kept their hold. The resistance of maishui practices
to official disapproval over so many centuries can be explained by their fit
with belief in the pantheon and by their rich symbolic appeal, unlike corpse

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132 Modern China
washing?that is, by resonances that made subconscious sense to the par

ticipant. On this point, Watson's 1982 article can be followed and extended
(see also Thompson, 1988). In that article he noted that the death rituals
have the son and heir absorb pollution in its positive aspect to ensure the
continuation of the family line, represented by the "yang" bones once these
are free of "yin" flesh. A similar interplay of yin and yang, in which the
negativity of yin is tamed and reappropriated through interaction with pos
itive yang elements, can be seen in many ways in the maishui ritual: male
and female in the role reversal when the well or stream frequented routinely
and informally by women is visited ritually by the senior male; water and
fire in the successive floating of spirit money and the lighting of incense;
and metal and water when the copper coin with its microcosmic represen
tation of a hollow earth square within the circle of heaven is tossed from the
river bank.9 Given these symbolic resonances and maishui's suitability as a
ritual frame, for females as well as filial sons?some Cantonese women
used the occasion for their laments (E. Johnson, 1988: 149)?the failure of
Confucian elite opposition should not seem surprising.
Watson saw ritualized washing of the corpse as the fundamental cultural
practice, and maishui as the southern version of it, but Naquin (1988: 39-40)
did not find the washing salient in her survey of funeral customs on the
North China plain. This departure can be explained by adjusting what exactly
is defined as standard. If we see the public announcement of death and the
report to the local deity as the crucial "standard" elements, the difference
between north and south is whether the deity is riverine or temple-based.
The postmortem report by close relatives to the local god is mentioned in
several Shandong accounts, each evidently written independently (Leling
xianzhi, 1762; Dexian zhi, 1935; Pruitt, 1967: 188). All omit the washing of
the body or the fetching of water, but some specify the purpose to be "dao
tou" (turning the head down, perhaps in the direction of the underworld); in
yet another Shandong case a "heads-down soup" (daotoutang) was presented
to the god ([Chongxiu] Ju zhi, 1936). In another Shandong case no fewer
than five visits to the local god were expected, giving extraordinary public
attention to the family and its bereavement (Laiyang xianzhi, 1935). The
parallel is sometimes made with the "summoning the spirit" ritual of Han
times and earlier. In an administrative city, the report had to be made to the
City God, presumably with the filial son(s) walking right past the wall
paintings and images that pictured the underworld horrors that the loved
one, and in due course the individual mourners, would have to endure. Zhu
Xi's Family Rituals and other manuals called for written notification along
with wailing to announce the death to those far and near. Instead of

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conforming to these prescriptions, the maishui/report to the god accommo

dated them to local practice.
In both north and south, Confucian filiality came to be expressed
through widely accepted notions of folk culture such as belief in the local
god, the connection to the underworld, and the passage of the soul. What
kept these rituals flourishing and resistant to reform, like the send-offs and
other heteroprax customs, was their symbolic resonance, social service
ability, and performative effectiveness. I will return to these characteristics,
which must account for the popular appeal of other parts of the mourning
sequence, after discussing aspects of ^ost-expulsion rites in connection with
Watson's "elementary structure."
Post-expulsion Rites and the Case

for Inclusive Treatment
As we have seen, Watson argued that the tension between orthoprax and
local customs is conveniently resolved by limiting local divergences to the
post-expulsion phase. (Other contributors do not draw this distinction, and
he does not cite other informants or field work.) If we look at the Chinese
material on post-expulsion practices, however, we see that reformers did
not refrain from criticizing such rites. Officials and literati were just as crit
ical of delayed and second burials and of anniversary feasting at graveside.
Instead of leaving alone the post-expulsion rites as permitted regional devi
ations, they made a point of praising locals for following Zhu Xi in the way
they returned the tablet to the altar place (Zhaoyuan xianzhi, 1846) or per
formed the burial rites and the first and second blessings ([Zengxiu] Jiao
zhi, 1931), or they sharply criticized improper practices: one compiler in
northern Guangdong characterized bone excavation and placement in pots
as "against li" and reported that a local official had ordered unburied coffins
to be buried "according to li" ([Congxiu] Qujiang xianzhi, 1875). Besides
demonstrating intense concern with what happened after the body left the
community, such acts reveal continuing tension and debate, and often offi
cial failure. The same critique, as is well known, is found in the case of geo
mancy, which China anthropologists, perhaps arbitrarily, tend to treat as
entirely separate from mourning and ancestral rites.
While no one who has witnessed a village funeral in China can forget
the drama of the cortege leaving the community, one wonders whether the
break in the rituals was felt by participants to be as complete as Watson sug
gested in 1988. His most arresting example of the pre-/post-expulsion split

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134 Modern China
was the matter of Cantonese/Minnan secondary burial, in which the coffin

was first carefully sealed and later, before burial, deliberately punctured to
speed the corpse's corruption and make the bones ready for potting and
eventual reburial (Watson, 1988b: 15-16). It can be suggested that coffin
sealing need not just be an orthoprax act but could also have followed folk
custom. Taoist priestly or shamanic rites often accompanied the sealing of
the coffin, and local folk may have expected some form of purifying exor
cism as a necessary step in the gradual removal of the dead?if only in the
form of a ring of fire lighted around the coffin or the burning of paper spirit
money, a customary way of banishing unwanted spirits. Such heteroprax
exorcistic acts recurred during the entire mourning sequence.10 In this inter
pretation the coffin sealing and puncturing are not contradictory and would
not substantiate a sharp official demarcation between the pre- and post
expulsion phase of mourning; rather, their occurrence in sequence meets
the felt popular need to exorcise menacing spirits as well as to speed the
time of reburial.
Evidence of the pre-/post-disposal division is absent from the materials
in my sample. Like Family Rituals, Ming and Qing scholars drew no dis
tinction between pre- and post-expulsion rituals, taking the entire process
as a unit. For example, one declared: "The most important parts of mourn
ing ritual are laying out, encoffining, and burial" (Baoshan xian xuzhi, 1921 :
70). There is no abrupt break after the body leaves the community, and
sometimes Zhu Xi's Family Rituals is specifically said to be followed in the
post-disposal period by the more knowledgeable locals. In gazetteers the
whole process is normally found under the heading sangli (funeral ritual)
rather than sangzang (funeral and burial), which might have suggested a
separation of the two stages. Descriptions of typical burial usually begin
with the night before, not at the body's departure from the community; and
most significantly, the end of the process, in principle after three years (more
precisely, twenty-seven months from the day of death), was marked by a
special ritual (Jiading xian xuzhi, 1930; Luodian zhenzhi, 1889). Throughout
the gazetteer excerpts I find no evidence that the compilers (or other locals)
actually perceived an essential pre- and post-expulsion distinction.11 Like
Watson's 1982 article "Of Flesh and Bones," they drew the line at burial,
not expulsion, taking offerings after burial as a separate topic.12
The continuity of mourning rituals beyond the community's expulsion
of the corpse is evident in numerous respects: for example, in the ritual pri
vations demonstrating filiality and the repeated efforts at exorcism. Corpse
expulsion did not interrupt "doing the sevens," or zuoqi, a custom noted
both by Watson (1982) and by Naquin in her gazetteer-based study (1988).

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This began on the day of death, and entailed Buddhist services every seven
days from the death date, sometimes simplified to burning incense and an
offering. Doing the sevens appears to be not regional but a case of hetero
prax standardization across Han China. Neo-Confucian writers strongly
opposed Buddhist participation in funeral rites (Ebrey, 1991a: 79, 80, 85,
88-89), but evidently with little effect (Brook, 1989). To exclude this period
from the analysis of mourning misses the typical funeral's full recapitula
tion of the ideological domain that Watson proposed (1988b: 8-10): belief
in the presence of several souls; in continuity past death of gender, social
status, and bureaucratic regulation; and in mutual obligation and exchange
between living and dead (on persisting obligation, see Ahern, 1973; Oxfeld,
2004). Mourners followed the soul, in spirit as it were, as it passed through
hell (or purgatory, diyu).
In the usual interpretation there were ten courts of hell to be navigated,
and the weekly rituals were designed to put the mourner almost physically
in touch with that experience. For example, one step was crossing the bridge
over the Naihe, in some areas represented by piled-up tables and chairs and
a dramatic performance by Buddhist priests and their helpers. One court of
hell was traversed, with the mourners' ritual help, at the end of each seven
day period (Yangjiang xianzhi, 1925), with somewhat greater emphasis
being given to the fifth and seventh sevens?yang numbers and therefore
more auspicious. A few counties reported ending mourning at this point,
but most continued for three more stages, in conformity with the usual ten
court model. The eighth court was passed through on the hundredth day
after the death, the ninth on the one-year anniversary, and the tenth on the
three-year anniversary, which ended mourning. This pattern can be found
as early as the Dunhuang materials (Ji, 1998: 443). It is hard to believe that
the bereaved did not see this powerful series of standard rituals spanning
the expulsion from the community as an ensemble.
Like "buying water," the three-year pattern shows folk belief absorbing
filiality as much as the reverse. Coinciding with the canonical Confucian
period of mourning, the process made available to the mourners what we
might distinguish (though they probably didn't) as Confucian and Buddhist
idioms. Seen as a whole, it included at least six movements13 working in
tandem: (a) the transformation of the family member into ancestor, (b) the
symbolic expulsion and vanishing of polluting flesh and the purifying of
bones, (c) the physical movement of corpse to cemetery and soul tablet to
family altar (perhaps better seen as two movements), (d) the mythic paral
lel notion of the soul passing through the underworld (see Ahern, 1973;
Stafford, 2000: 80-82), (e) the emotional experience of mourning and

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136 Modern China
recovery, and (f) the social readjustment to family loss. All these move
ments are brought into mutual relationship chiefly by the evocation of
symbols (yinyang and cosmic direction), and by the physical gestures and
movements of the mourners. Thus the movement of yinyang in the sense of
the everyday and the underworld plays against the expulsion of the yin
flesh; the moves of mourners assist the mythic movement through the ten
hells; the movement of the corpse in elaborate stages channels the emotions
of the mourners; the cosmically correct placing of mourners establishes
their hierarchy and relations with outsiders. The comprehensiveness, inter
dependence, and multiple resonance of these messages must have made
them persuasive. And their simultaneity and sheer number may have had a
mystifying effect, assisting contingent manipulation in favor of the chief
mourners. If these rituals and ideas are taken as vital to mourning (and they
are almost universal in one form or another), their composite nature, popu
lar and Confucian, suggests an unexpected form of standardization that
once again seems to have subsumed Confucian concerns within folk prac
tices and beliefs.
Surely the most remarkable aspect of standard Chinese mourning, in
comparative terms, and a sign of the influence of classical norms,14 was its
great length; but this distinctive feature is left unanalyzed if pre- and post
expulsion phases are separated. Taking this rite of passage as an ensemble
reveals its powerful effects on mourners, the uses that mourners were able
to make of it, its openness to ritual elaboration, and indeed the full integra
tion of the "ideological domain" into ritual.
Pseudo-standardization
Why did members of the Confucian elite fail to get their message
across? How hard did they try? The minority bent on reform, against the
wishes of locals, had few options beyond circulating copies of guides like
Family Rituals. Magistrates' complaints and (rare) orders were denuncia
tions that imposed no sanctions. Though officials and other literati are on
occasion described as personally intervening at shamanic s?ances (Sutton,
2000, 2004), it is impossible to imagine one interfering with an ongoing
funeral, which would have been a gross violation of li. As for the gazetteer
writers, their own writings may partly be acts of concealment. Though the
longer funeral accounts are conscientiously descriptive, they may not per
fectly mirror local patterns of behavior. Obliged to report such patterns,
some say people "more or less" follow Family Rituals, or acknowledge

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disapproved customs and point optimistically to progress; others spell out

notable local divergences almost proudly, glossing over their unorthoprax
nature. We should probably conclude that officials, even when burnishing
their reputation with loud complaints and printed reports about "bad"
funeral rituals, did little to stamp them out.
In view of their ineffectiveness, we might best envisage officials and
members of the local educated elite as poised between state and people,
between Confucian orthodoxy and folk practice, devoting at least as much
effort to protecting local diversity and local reputation as to spreading
Confucian orthodoxy. The willingness to live and let live can be glimpsed
in many of the long-standing examples of heteropraxy discussed above.
Rather than being forced into a confrontation with Confucian principles,
they have adapted to a more or less comfortable coexistence with them. We
saw that send-offs including naosang and funeral laments could readily be
seen as expressing properly orthodox feeling; doing the sevens could facil
itate and structure the Confucian notion of protracted mourning; the buying
water excursion to the local god could be legitimated as an aspect of filial
washing of the deceased. Thus "bad" rituals could be excused by their asso
ciation with "good" rituals?or (more commonly) with "good" beliefs, the
ideological domain trumping the performative domain. Note that instead of
being offered as a direct defense, such justifications were left implicit, at
least in the present sample.
Yet there were cases in which the intermediary position of the Confucian
elite prompted its members to mask local or regional customs as ortho
praxy. Here a new term deserves to be coined?"pseudo-standardization."
It happens when literate locals, ingenuously or deliberately, validate local
customs by proclaiming orthopraxy, using the rubric of the center as a cover
for local customs. Allen Chun (1992) discovered such validation in his
study of Qing marriage handbooks. Some of what Helen Siu and David
Faure (1995; see also Siu and Liu, 2005) say about the people in the Canton
delta remaking central forms in the local idiom fits the pattern. The result
could be like Prasenjit Duara's "superscription" (1988), with official con
cepts exercising some effect on folk opinion, or Paul Katz's "reverberation"
(1995), entailing mutual influence; alternatively, it might resemble the "illu
sion" perpetrated by Michael Szonyi's Fuzhou templekeepers (see Szonyi's
essay in this issue), which offers a good example of pseudo-orthopraxy in
religious cults. In such cases the ritual guides, gazetteer statements, and
other sources become part of a discourse attempting to justify and incorpo
rate or condemn and exclude local customs. Patricia Ebrey (1991b) explores
a similar pattern as she examines the tension between ritual texts and folk

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138 Modern China
rituals. Because the discourse is never-ending and is part of an essential

relation of ideal and reality, or of different ideals, and includes practition
ers as well as performers, it permits active agency. Local people who ignored
ritual manuals or asserted the propriety of their local practices were ipso
facto participating in the same cultural discourse.
One of the most blatant departures from orthodox practice was delayed
burial, which was banned in both the Ming and Qing codes (see also Hu, 1991 :
3.50-51). As described in many literati sources, it becomes an example of
feigned standardization (pseudo-orthopraxy)?and of local agency. This prac
tice was common in Ming and Qing central China and in parts of Guangxi and
the Lower Yangzi. Since it entailed keeping the encoffined body inside the hall
of the house, this practice was in direct contradiction to Watson's ninth stan
dard feature: it delayed the corpse's expulsion from the community. One east
ern Guangdong commentator deplored the resulting concentration of yin airs
in the towns and its untoward effects on their inhabitants' well-being (Haiyang
xianzhi, 1900: 778), and literati and officials explicitly opposed it. Delayed
burial happened when a lucky day could not be decided on (Liling xianzhi,
1948), an impasse some critics blamed on the machinations of geomancers
and their clients' na?ve trust in the arts of wind and water (Anren xianzhi,
1869). When many sons and grandsons were present they commonly disputed
the best siting of the grave, with one member or branch of the patrilineal
family pitted against another (Jiahe xiangtu zhi, 1931).
One nineteenth-century magistrate in the Lower Yangzi (Chen, [1835]
1991: 3.51-52) thought the problem lay with the high cost of local funerals,
which resulted from the all-night banquets that friends and relatives insisted
on. Without mentioning the officially excoriated fengshui, defenders of the
practice gave the excuse of poverty in the interval while suitable grave land
was located (Xingning xianzhi, 1875). Other locals gave sentimental rea
sons for the practice, claiming that "it showed that unlike the heartless city
people who send their loved ones' bodies to the public cemetery, they could
not bear to part from their beloved" (Jiahe xiangtu zhi, 1931: 535). It is very
likely that there were multiple motivations behind any incident?say, a
strategic urge to benefit from proper cosmic placement; the political wish
to delay property division by deferring the marriage of younger brothers,
which could not occur as long as mourning continued; and sentimental rea
sons of personal affection or a fondness for local and family custom.
Locals, who must have known about official disapproval of this heterodox
practice, refused to give in.
Some local writers actively promoted delayed burial. As a direct violation
of li, how could the practice be defended?for example, against critics who

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pointed out the dangers of accident through fire, which would destroy the
chance of a respectable burial? This double moral violation of orthodoxy
could not, it would seem, be justified in traditional terms, yet a whole genre
of writing turned such disasters or near disasters into triumphs, by portraying
bereaved widows or sons who put themselves in mortal danger to guard a
parent's coffin or a husband's. During a fire, the flames draw near, and they
resist entreaties to leave. Some "die defending the coffin," redeeming their
obligation to the dead by what is represented as self-sacrifice, or are dragged
with the coffin to safety in the nick of time (Jiangxi tongzhi, 1732: 94.24). In
other cases, the fire magically avoids the house or room where the coffin sits,
"heaven bringing a contrary wind" as if in response to the show of virtuous
bravery (Jiangxi tongzhi, 1732: 97.16; Huguang tongzhi, 1733: 62.23). A
Qing account from Guangxi, where it was commonly the custom to defer bur
ial for several decades (Yuexi wenzai, ca. 1710: 71.47-48), describes a son
defending his unburied father's coffin. When he refuses to flee from rebel sol
diers, they are moved to spare him (Guangxi tongzhi, 1732: juan 82.30).15
Despite their exaggerations, these hagiographies are revealing. Something
more complicated is going on than the onward march of orthodoxy16?or, for
that matter, outright resistance. By citing particular cases to reaffirm filial
piety or conjugal loyalty, locals strove to reconcile established regional prac
tices with sanctioned Confucian behavior. In this way all served their own
interests, as the gazetteer compilers retained their own mediating position
between local practice and orthodoxy and the families fended off public dis
approval. In spite of the violation of orthoprax behavior, the compilers tend to
affirm orthodox pieties in principle, making the defense of the coffin an
expression of li, in the sense of a disposition inseparable from the ritual act.
As in the cases of buying water and doing the sevens, orthodox values are used
to justify heteropraxy, again suggesting the priority of the ideological over the
performative domain. Although the covert resistance is transparently visible,
these accounts did not exactly contradict orthopraxy. By redefining it from
below and reappropriating li, they loosened and broadened the criteria of cul
tural integration and indirectly, perhaps, helped to promote it. This dynamic is
another source for the loose standardization, a mix of orthopraxy and hetero
praxy, that actually characterized China's late imperial death rituals.
Performing the Obligatory Emotions of Mourning
Such evidence reveals the Janus-faced role of local elites who mediated
(and indeed personified) the contest between state requirements and local

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140 Modern China
demands, but it doesn't get to the roots of variability or heteropraxy. Why

did officials and the local elite fail, and what produced the unexpected
degree of "heteroprax" standardization that did come into being? Here we
must seek to explain, first of all, the appeal of those obstinate practices that
survived for centuries among families, rich or poor, despite official con
demnation. In discussing the send-offs, buying water, and doing the sevens,
I have suggested that such heteroprax standard rituals had broad psycho
logical and social appeal. In this and the following section we will closely
consider the appeal of these and other parts of the funeral sequence in two
senses: their emotional draw and their political uses in contexts of family
and community. These topics require that we work partly by inference. We
must set aside the usual assumption of structural-functionalist and interpre
tive (Geertzian) anthropology that emotion and politics are each too vari
able and contingent to be relevant in cultural generalization.17 The argument
will be that, granted variability from case to case, participants needed
places in the funeral sequence for culturally appropriate sentimental and
political expression; consequently, certain funeral segments became elabo
rated and to a degree standardized, creating the heteroprax standardization
already outlined?hence their popularity and prevalence in the face of
reformist disapproval.18
Given the efforts it devoted to propagandizing Confucian forms of mourn
ing practice, officialdom cannot be called very successful. In an article on
funerals, Tim Brook has linked concern for ancestral (and funeral) rites to the
rise of the lineage in Ming China; yet in Qing China, which has been described
as a lineage society, his gazetteer sample shows almost as many counties using
Buddhist funerals as Neo-Confucian rites. He concludes that "Buddhist rites
were preferred at most levels of society," and even that the gentry, despite Zhu
Xi's prohibition, "often chose to side with popular custom" (Brook, 1989:482,
485). What is to explain this resistance? One part of the answer, according to
Brook, is that the Zhu Xi rites were not appealing to mourners. In contrast to
Buddhist rites, neo-Confucian funerary rituals had "psychological limits" and
were "metaphysically impoverished" (Brook, 1989: 411-12). Similarly, Ebrey
comments on the real value of noncanonical forms of funeral practice in giv
ing expression to "feelings given no legitimacy in Confucian doctrine?
loathing for the decay of the corpse, fear of ghosts, relief that the burden of
caring for a sick or unpleasant relative was over, ambivalent anticipation of
taking on new authority, and the desire to reassert life, growth and fertility in
the face of death and decay" (Ebrey, 1991b: 216).
How could heteroprax forms in funeral practice spread under official
eyes and become standard over vast regions? Recent research points to the

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element of entertainment. Brook was puzzled that the Lower Yangzi region,
a great center of neo-Confucianism and lineage power, tended to stick to
Buddhist funerary rites even more obstinately than other regions, and espe
cially that the Huizhou prefectural gazetteer reported a preference for
Buddhist funeral rites in She county despite the universal use of Zhu Xi's
Family Rituals as a ritual guide. Perhaps, he suggests, the editor was mis
informed (Brook, 1989: 484).19 But this discrepancy is resolved if we con
sider a powerful dynamic running counter to Confucian pressure. It may be
significant that She county was the center of the tradition of the Mulian
opera from the mid-Ming, and that Huizhou merchant troupes helped to
spread the Mulian opera over the Lower Yangzi region (Guo, 2005). Its
Buddhist themes entwined with scenes of postmortem passage through the
courts of hell may have played a key role. Perhaps the appeal of that opera
was why, in choosing funeral ritualists, the gentry families "often chose to
side with popular custom."
A word on the content of the Mulian opera, well studied in recent years,
will support this inference. Its "wide diffusion and enormous popularity" in
various forms is thought to have resulted from its combination of festivity
with terror, especially terror of ghosts, and the story of their subjugation
(Johnson, 1989a: 4, 26). By the sixteenth century the filial Mulian story, at
least in the central Huizhou tradition, was thoroughly Confucianized by a
Huizhou script writer, as Qitao Guo (2005) has recently shown, but the back
ground and texture remained what one might call folk Buddhist. It gave
voice to ghosts, gods, spirits, and Buddhas (Teiser, 1989: 209) and made tan
gible the horrors of death and the hopes of redemption. It attended to the
position of in-marrying women in the family system (Seaman, 1989: 159).20
It offered moments of comedy and bawdiness (Lu, 1976). It did, in short,
what Zhu Xi rituals failed to do, speaking to audience members at a moment
of crisis in their own language about their deepest concerns. People needed
to relate the personal tragedy of a loss in the family to general beliefs and
needs. This need may help to explain why parts of the Mulian performance
were integrated into Taoist and Buddhist funerals. Such episodes were and
are conducted in the vernacular, which made the involved ritual acts and lan
guage more accessible (Dean, 1989: 46). The priestly actors often extempo
rized in scenes that resonated with the opera21 and had much the same folk
appeal; they amounted, claims Kristofer Schipper, to "one long expression
of ritualized scatology" (Schipper, 1989: 114-15).
Expressive aspects of funerals were not necessarily inconsistent with
Confucian ideology; late Ming literati views on mourning gave more attention
to emotion than had been usual in the past (Kutcher, 1999: 47-50). Qing

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142 Modern China
forms in many cases seem to result from a tension or compromise between

expressive performative possibilities and ideology. Some orthoprax require
ments became standard because of their emotional appeal rather than because
of the nagging of neo-Confucian gentry reformers or official pressure. Funeral
laments are presumably elaborations on the category of wailing, the first of
Watson's required acts, but Elizabeth Johnson (1988) showed them to be
filled with content, to have intense personal relevance, and to be conveyed
with emotional expression. Like funeral laments, and quite unlike sober and
formalized Confucian rituals, the naosang were participatory, collective,
spontaneous, synesthetic, and unhierarchical, and they won popularity at the
expense of official models; yet despite being heteroprax in the "performative
domain," such rituals served orthodox goals in the "ideological domain."22
It is likely that for many participants the pre- (and post-)expulsion filial
practices (orthodox in spirit but not specified as structurally essential by
Watson) were equally expressive. Fasting and sleeping by the coffin to serve
the dead could convey the sincere emotion of filial relationships, the ritual
requirement urged in innumerable orthodox written sources?no less so
when such privation won admiration and moral advantage for the performer.23
Seen in the field, festival performances and exorcistic rites (e.g., Sutton,
2003) suggest that the kind of efficacy most important to popularity (and
therefore standardization) is highly subjective.24 The ritual experience as a
whole must feel persuasive?persuasive in part because along with other
requirements it must convey authenticity and emotion, though observers can
not be sure what anyone actually feels. The gods or ancestors or ghosts really
seem to be present, as a result of the offerants ' proper ritual and proper feel
ings. This is a sort of performative efficacy, ling in the minds of participants.
There were no doubt several reasons why orthodox forms spread where they
did?their respectability invited the upwardly mobile to emulate local elites
and they had local social utility (a point I now turn to)?but the forms also
were performatively effective. They engaged minds and emotions, to some
extent by planting their audience on a cosmic stage. Conversely, as we have
seen, the failure of other orthodox rites to catch on, for all Zhu Xi's conces
sions to popular practice25 and the wide circulation of his manual, may be
explained by their inability to engage or represent the audience's emotions.
The Role of Local Politics and Status Competition

in Funerary Evolution
In contrast to Watson's essay (1985) on the Tianhou cult, his pieces on

death ritual paid little attention to the element of power and status and

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therefore did not note the ways in which competitive local politics may
have shaped ritual expression and expanded the ritual repertoire. Families,
lineages, and lineage segments needed to elevate themselves above rivals
they regarded as inferiors, especially in times of fluctuation in prosperity
and numbers. Watson believed that pre-expulsion rites were free of politics,
as distinct from the political jockeying at lineage graveside rituals (Watson,
1988b: 12, citing R. Watson, 1988) and of course geomancy, a belief that is
part of his justification for the pre-/post-expulsion division. But funerals
were a social statement, "an investment in social climbing" (Rawski, 1988a:
32). The many gradations of mourning dress, not exactly matching social
status (Wolf, 1974), were subject to manipulation by individuals with ambigu
ous status.26 An expensive or well-conducted funeral helped to rank impor
tant local families. The number of ritual staffs and ceremonial umbrellas
carried in procession could reflect the official rank of an ancestor (Laiyang
xianzhi, 1935). It was a means whereby the Wangs could keep up with the
Zhous, cross or confuse categories, and assert their rightful position on the
social scale. The history of sumptuary limits?imposed and then violated in
almost every dynasty, including the Qing (Kutcher, 1999: 128-32), and
again in the Republican period?proves the social importance of such com
petitive display.
This micropolitics could conceivably push funeral styles toward either
type of standardization. Showing off in funerals could take two forms, the
prosperous or the proper. One could simply do everything in extravagant
style and ignore orthopraxy; or one could try to follow the letter and spirit
of Family Rituals. So Confucian editors of some gazetteers wrote of three
kinds of status: the rich, the families of Confucian scholars, and the poor,
who could not afford to show off. An account from one county (Dongan),
based on a memoir and the zhou gazetteer, recorded that the rich dressed
in specially made silk clothes for mourning, called longevity clothes; the
common people (pingdengzhe) wore ordinary clothes without copper but
tons but with "Tang headscarves"; and the scholar families (xueshijia) wore
the Qing gown. The rich had a double coffin sealed with white wax, coated
with fresh paint, and ballasted with pottery fragments, costing more than
100 yuan in gold; ordinary people had what they could afford (Yongzhou
fuzhi, 1828: 570).
According to numerous gazetteer compilers, well-off locals thought
more of boosting family status with such forms of display than of con
forming to the simple standards laid down in Zhu Xi-style ritual guides, and
they hired experts catering to popular taste?yinyang masters to exorcise
and priests to recite scriptures before the coffin and "open the road." Compilers
might add wishfully, as in the case of Dongan county, "most Confucian

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144 Modern China
households don't do this" (Yongzhou fuzhi, 1828: 567); but as Brook has
commented for the sixteenth century, "public opinion rated every funeral,"
pressuring the gentry to "turn economic resources into symbolic capital,"
with the result that "few could afford to forego full Buddhist ceremonies"
(Brook, 1993: 100).
Families that eschewed Taoist and Buddhist ritualists and any show of
extravagance?shidafu (gentry elites) who proudly followed Zhu Xi-style
orthoprax funerals?did exist (Sihui xianzhi, 1925). It is clear that they
were not only acting out of principle but also underlining their superiority
to the mass of ordinary folk. They too were playing a game of "face."
Whether their sober funerals led to progress in orthoprax standardization is
uncertain.
Status display is reported in Republican funerals, but in the absence of the
Confucian ladder of success, twentieth-century accounts were more likely to
emphasize gradations of wealth, describing distinct local funeral practices
for the rich, the poor, and the middle classes. The editor of a PRC gazetteer
from Sichuan recalled that in the past the poor used thin coffins and the rich
used thick ones and buried late. Rich and powerful people made a great
show. The editor continues with an account of the funeral of one man, Gao
Junshi, whose procession including troupes numbered over a thousand,
complete with flags and banners, drums and music (Wuyang zhenzhi, 1983).
One Republican gazetteer from southwest Guangdong began by noting,
"The expense or economy of mourning rites is a statement of whether the
family is well off or not." Since people "still believed in the underworld,"
they "burned up paper money, houses, slaves, and goods, the rich putting to
the torch a hundred yuan in gold" (Yangjiang xianzhi, 1925: 841).
As in the case of emotion during funerals, funeral customs that permit
ted the expression of status distinctions were elaborated, whether these cus
toms were orthoprax or not. Take for example pre-disposal condolence
visits with elaborate gifts, sometimes in the form of money (among many
examples, see Baling xianzhi, 1872). Though Watson's nine required acts
omitted these, perhaps because like send-offs they took such varying forms,
Zhu Xi promoted them, and Naquin (1988) and Ebrey (1991b) have con
firmed their importance. The invited guests naturally expected proper enter
tainments in return (Liling xianzhi, 1948; Ebrey, 1991a: 100). In one region,
complained a magistrate, they would refuse to allow the coffin to leave
unless they had been given an extravagant all-night banquet (Chen, [1835]
1991: 3.51-52). The practice of erecting elaborate roadside altars or booths
alongside the road to the grave site, discussed above as part of the send-off,
was another way of showing off. Still more widespread was the custom of

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inviting the magistrate or a leading gentry member to dot the soul tablet
(dianzhu), Watson's fifth action?another ritual that conferred prestige on
the family (Liling xianzhi, 1948; Qujiang xianzhi, 1875; Wuxuan xianzhi,
1934; Zhaoyuan xianzhi, 1846; cf. Naquin, 1988: 42).
These examples betray ritual's active social utility: rather than simply
reflecting the social order or re-creating standard forms, it is used by par
ticular groups to improve their own status. Status making, or the manufac
ture of social difference, was a crucial aspect of funerals and must have
limited the homogenizing of local ritual practice.27 To focus on ritual as a
way of differentiation, no less than as the instrument of standardization, is
to reveal its dynamic and creative role as well as its society-sustaining,
culture-reproducing side.
The search for a common structure across regions and ethnicities should
not be allowed to obscure another kind of fundamental differentiation: the
use of funerals and other life cycle rituals to demarcate a group from its
neighbors. In remote places like western Guangxi, ethnic groups (Han or
Tu, Hakka and Yao) typically distinguished each other through their mortu
ary rituals (Lingyun xianzhi, 1942).28 While cultural inertia, which is usu
ally assumed to underlie local variation, may play a role in explaining the
persistence of certain sets of practices, it seems inadequate to account for
the extraordinary variation from one local society to another that gazetteers
reveal. Unconventional funeral practice from county to county, within a
core zone like the linguistically and subethnically diverse Canton delta or a
peripheral one like Yongzhou in Hunan, is another reminder of the role of
ritual in self-differentiation.29 Staying different, like keeping ahead, could
require ingenuity as well as expense. To repeat, agency on the part of numer
ous individual and local interests likely encouraged diversity in funeral
practice, though such agency, as in Watson's model, might in some cases
promote selective standardization in the orthoprax mode.
Like his coauthors, Watson assumed that orthopraxy was what had to be
explained. He argued that officials, leaving alone the ideological domain,
focused on pre-disposal rites and successfully standardized them. In con
trast, this essay has uncovered obstinate patterns of heteropraxy (not just
local variations) and official failure at most stages of the funeral cycle. The
cases examined?some confined to certain regions (e.g., buying water and
delayed burial), some found in several regions and perhaps across China
(e.g., doing the sevens, the send-off in its various forms)?display structural
variation, innovation and local agency, and implicit (i.e., sometimes veiled)
resistance to official models. Funeral ritual diversifies in response to local
need, in contrast to Watson's account (1985) of the Tianhou cult, where it

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146 Modern China
was belief or myth that flexibly adapted to the user. If there is a standard
(orthoprax or heteroprax) "Chinese funeral," its coherence seems to stem
from belief as much as from ritual, with filial devotion (Rawski, 1988a: 26),
along with the souls and the underworld of the ideological domain (see also
Cohen, 1988) accounting for a variety of ritual forms. Yet the English term
"belief coveys a deeper internal state than the emotion and "face" we have
detected as central motivating forces in ritual expressions.30
How did death rituals evolve? Instead of uncovering the straight-line march
of the standardizing state, this evidence from several disparate regions brings
to light three possible processes?orthodox standardization, heteroprax stan
dardization, and local (or regional) variability, the two latter processes some
times masked by "pseudo-standardization." Local choices do not follow any
officially sanctioned "elementary structure." What determined local patterns,
as well as minor variations, was neither assertion by reforming leaders nor
emulation of some China-wide orthopraxy, but new needs and engrained
habits. Where choices were offered by the presence of rival experts or the
chance of abbreviating or extending parts of a funeral, the decisive questions
were, I have suggested, immediate issues of individual sentiment and local
advantage: What forms best suit my family's needs and status? What rituals
are moving, evocative, impressive, and meaningful enough to demonstrate
what we feel and owe to our dead? How can we best serve the interests of
our locality as we compete with neighbors? The answers differed according
to local conditions and traditions. When people decided how to conduct their
family funerals, both personal and collective interests might be in play. The
desire to impress others and improve one's social standing could lead to
orthoprax standardization along Zhu Xi lines or to elaboration of new het
eroprax forms. And the wish to conform to community opinion could main
tain habitual distinctions with other communities and also depart from
orthopraxy. The sheer persuasiveness (performative efficacy) of certain ritu
als could explain which forms spread or persisted, whether the state approved
of them or not. Over the long term, decisions by families and lineages might
lead a county or market region to gravitate toward greater conformity with
(perceived) China-wide orthodoxy, but such decisions could also lead to
conformity with practices elsewhere that were heteroprax, or toward new or
persistent local or regional variation.
Certainly it would be possible to identify a funeral as "Chinese," as the
mark of a common culture, but the evidence of this essay points to much
looser and broader standards than are found in Watson's challenging hypoth
esis. The Chinese form would result from mingled heteroprax and ortho
prax impulses, a kind of flexible standardization that resisted narrow

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conformity with neo-Confucian models yet was influenced by their unify

ing rhetoric. It would be more a matter of dialogue framed by cosmologi
cal or ideological assumptions than a matter of precise ritual specifications.
And as Szonyi points out in his essay, just to assume what one is doing is
Chinese would promote the political unity that Watson saw as the result of
ritual integration.
Notes
1. In this preliminary survey, I rely chiefly on gazetteers from the multivolume collection of
customs (fengsu), Zhongguo difangzhi minsu ziliao huibian (abbreviated ZDMS), drawn from sev
eral regions (Shandong, Guangdong/Guangxi, Hunan/Hubei, and part of the Lower Yangzi). I
used only longer excerpts (which are mostly from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries),
because these are less likely to be formulaic and more likely to note where earlier gazetteers
are copied.
2. At places in Watson's article there is an ambiguity of vantage point, a slippage in his
analysis between emic and etic perspectives: "What makes Chinese culture Chinese? What, in
other words, are the basic elements of the cultural equation that allows some residents of that
vast country to call themselves Chinese {han) and be accepted as such while other peoples are
labeled 'barbarian' (fan; or more politely xiao[shao] shu minzu, minority peoples)?" (Watson,
1993: 86). The first sentence takes an external view, the second ("call themselves Chinese") a
partly subjective one, and it is assumed that the two are the same.
3. See, however, Ebrey (1993) on Song funerals and official policy, and Oxfeld (2004) on
post-reform PRC funerals.
4. See also conclusion of this essay, and my introduction to this special issue.
5. "My approach . . . stresses the active participation of people who cooperate (some will
ingly, some not) to 'construct' a unified culture" (Watson, 1993: 82).
6. Adam Chau's Shaanxi research (2004) indicates how extensively religious activities
can draw on everyday practices, and how important entertaining was for the bereaved host in
funerals. His recent article helped me to see what the actions described in this paragraph had
in common, but his terminology is different. He reserves "hosting" for social acts that were
not especially religious and were incumbent on the host, and he calls "rituals" the more for
mal activities in "folk event productions" such as funerals and festivals. I use "ritual" more
broadly and include "guest" activities for both people and ancestors.
7. In one county near Canton, there were banquets with musical accompaniment twenty
one and thirty-five days after death (Dongguan xianzhi, 1937). See also the discussion of
"doing the sevens" (zuoqi) later in this essay.
8.1 consider a practice involving a more blatant cover-up in the section headed "Pseudo
standardization."
9. This last part of the symbolism is archaic: Watson doesn't say if the old square-holed?
i.e., Qing?copper coins were still used at the time of his fieldwork.
10. One could also argue that taboo observances, in their various regional forms, should be
added as a standard though heteroprax element.
11. It would be very interesting to find out what locals actually said was most important
to do in order for funerals to do their work. Did they accept the preeminent importance of
Watson's standard nine acts as respectable, as efficacious, or neither?

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148 Modern China
12. In Liuzhou (Guangxi) ordinary families were reported to omit the post-burial rites,
which were followed appropriately only "by the rich and those who love ritual" (Wuxuan
xianzhi, 1934: 971). Note, contra Watson, the concern for post-burial rites by the latter groups.
13. Analyzing the medieval ghost festival as a rite of passage, Teiser (1988: 219-21) sim
ilarly distinguishes four kinds of transition, seeing the ghosts as liminal creatures between
humans and ancestors.
14. Ebrey notes, "In the ritual classics . . . [t]hose in mourning had to be constantly mind
ful of their status; they had to alter almost all details of daily living to make their behavior dis
tinct. Only after the dead were transformed into ancestors through burial and a series of
sacrifices held over a period of more than two years were the living free of ritual restrictions"
(Ebrey, 1991a: xvi).
15. Perhaps the local locus classicus is a Liuzhou report in Tang times using the standard
expression tingjiu, "delayed burial." A woman is killed by a tiger. A fire breaks out near the
unburied coffin, but her daughter refuses to leave and is burned to death. Mother and daughter
are buried side by side. The tiger appears by the graves, howling in repentance and tearing out
its own claws and teeth (Guangxi tongzhi, 1732: juan 88.6).
16. Contrast: "What is clear ... is that the preoccupation with ritual practice, rather than
beliefs, made it possible for imperial authorities, local elites, and ordinary peasants to agree
on the proper form for the conduct of funerals" (Watson, 1993: 92).
17. For a rearguard defense of Geertz, see Brown's essay in this issue. For critiques of Geertz,
see Roseberry, 1989; Biersack, 1989; Rosaldo, 1989: 93-96; Asad, 1993; Barth, 1993. Among
the criticisms that have been directed at the Geertzian approach to culture as a text to be deci
phered in the field are (a) its neglect of factors of emotion and political agency on the grounds
both are contingent and not typical (Roseberry, Rosaldo); (b) neglect of the diversity that
depends on social position (Rosaldo); (c) the presumption of a consistent relationship between
the operating rules of social institutions, patterns of behavior, and individual goals (Barth); and
(d) neglect of historical change (Biersack, with reference to Geertz's 1980 work Negara).
18. For a discussion of the role of emotion in death ritual that seeks to avoid the function
alist pitfalls of assuming universals in emotion or seeing a deterministic relationship between
ritual and emotion, see Metcalf and Huntington, 1991: 2-5, 43-61. For a similar argument on
the importance of the politics of death rituals, see Metcalf and Huntington, 1991: 5-6, 133-88.
19. Conversely, that Yangzhou, at the northern edge of the region, was an exception, pre
ferring Zhu Xi to Buddhist rites, may reflect the weakness of Mulian opera in the face of local
northern-influenced performing traditions, at least before the eighteenth-century incursion of
Huizhou people and their customs (see Finnane, 2004: 286-89).
20. But see also Dean, 1989: 89, who gives examples showing that the Mulian story was
not necessarily exclusively for females.
21. Such improvisation recalls Elizabeth Johnson's 1988 discussion of funeral laments and
may have been common at other segments of funerals, fostering inventive local or individual
variation that is invisible in the record.
22. As Ebrey (1991a: xvii) has shown, Confucian writers were not inflexible and expected
ritual forms to be changed if the times required it.
23. Evelyn Rawski points out that while imperial funerals followed Watson's (not, inci
dentally, Zhu Xi's) pre-disposal ritual acts, this scheme was interpreted flexibly enough to
accommodate extra expressions of filiality out of order (Rawski, 1988b: 248).
24. In this claim I go a little farther than Watson, who cites an article by Emily Martin
(Ahern, 1979) that defines efficacy as the realization of ritual's declared effect (on gods or on
people or on both).

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25. E.g., offerings to the Earth God (Ebrey, 1991a: 117). Some Ming writers came to
accept the use of portraits, bowing no doubt to family sentiment, though Zhu Xi had strongly
disapproved (Ebrey, 1991a: 78).
26. Arthur Wolf recalls a fuss at a funeral when someone appeared in a mourning dress out
fit that others believed exaggerated his status (personal communication).
27. Considered from the point of view of motivation, even conversion to Han or elite forms
is in one sense a process of differentiation, because the innovators are distancing themselves
from other "lower" social or ethnic groups as they try to convince skeptical elites of their own
respectability.
28. For Watson the serious business was to avoid looking like dangerous sectarians or non
Chinese: "This is why it was in everyone's interest to embrace the [standard] funeral rites as
an expression of cultural identity and as an affirmation of loyalty to the imperial state." At the
same time, the ritual system also allowed room for "regional and subethnic displays" and "cel
ebrating] . . . local or cultural distinctiveness" (Watson, 1988a: 17). I see no reason to believe
that these "displays" were not just as much an expression of identity and as important to a
proper ritual, in the eyes of locals, as what officials regarded as the standard forms.
A sobering example of the continuing power of local conceptions of proper burial, if it can
be taken at face value, appeared in a Reuters news report of 26 August 2004 describing a
Guangdong "sorcerer" charged with killing ten people and selling their bodies for officially
sanctioned cremation, so that the purchasers could cover up the illegal burial of their relatives.
29. Here we could also note that ritual differentiation, against expectations, might accom
pany cultural convergence, which casts some doubt on the assumption (Watson 1988a, 1993)
that ritual was China's means of cultural homogenization. When locals expend effort in demar
cating themselves from neighboring groups and in organizing ethnic communities, as G. William
Skinner (1958) demonstrated among Chinese in Thailand and Fred Blake (1981: chap. 4)
showed in his New Territories study, they may become more like them culturally even as they
emphasize their own identity.
30. See also my introduction to this special issue. I owe the notion of different levels of
internal state to Robert Weiler (personal communication) and, as he points out, it deserves a
fuller elaboration elsewhere.
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Donald S. Sutton, professor of history and anthropology at Carnegie Mellon University,

recently wrote Steps of Perfection: Exorcistic Performance and Chinese Religion in Twentieth
Century Taiwan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2003) and co-edited (with Pamela K.
Crossley and Helen F. Siu) Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early
Modern China (University of California Press, 2005).

202.185.215.149 on Thu, 15 Aug 2024 13:08:45 UTC

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Death Rites and Chinese Culture: Standardization and Variation in Ming and Qing Times

Author(s): Donald S. Sutton

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20062661

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Standardization and Variation in

This essay argues for a modification of James L. Watson's influential ideas

Keywords: cultural standardization; cultural integration; ritual; funerals;

w: hen introducing his co-edited conference volume about Chinese

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that bore directly on the issue of the standardization of Chinese culture in

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gazetteer-based study of the North China plain, Naquin, 1988). Watson

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always incomplete. I then look at those who claimed to standardize in order

Another Kind of Standardization? Heteroprax

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1. Beginning of the end 1. Notifying death by wailing and other

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washing?that is, by resonances that made subconscious sense to the par

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conforming to these prescriptions, the maishui/report to the god accommo

Post-expulsion Rites and the Case

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was the matter of Cantonese/Minnan secondary burial, in which the coffin

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disapproved customs and point optimistically to progress; others spell out

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rituals. Because the discourse is never-ending and is part of an essential

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Performing the Obligatory Emotions of Mourning

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demands, but it doesn't get to the roots of variability or heteropraxy. Why

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forms in many cases seem to result from a tension or compromise between

The Role of Local Politics and Status Competition

In contrast to Watson's essay (1985) on the Tianhou cult, his pieces on

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conformity with neo-Confucian models yet was influenced by their unify

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Donald S. Sutton, professor of history and anthropology at Carnegie Mellon University,

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