This talk examines the ritualization of death in a community in mountainous Southwest China, where people are heir to an extraordinary range of resources for working on the dead, including abundant poetic language. This talk examines the most important artifact of poetic heritage in this region, an eight-hour-long speech for the dead, abandoned in the 1950s and never revived. The speech, divided into 72 “songs”, is a massive construction project, which builds a world for the dead. The first group of songs create the world and establish the possibility for human persons, involving the dead in relations that extend beyond the concrete and personal to involve wider geographies and histories of immigration, settlement and ownership. In a second group of songs, closely structured sets of parallel songs outline two fates for the dead soul, connected to a 19th-century transition from cremation to burial under pressure from the Qing state and Han immigrants. One fate is for the soul to hang forever in the sky, swaddled together with its spouse, head to the west and feet to the stars. Another is to live forever beneath the tomb, subject to the Chinese-speaking bureaucracy of Yan Luo Wang 閻羅王, king of the underworld. These songs subject the dead to the imperialism of life, binding them to life by means of gifts from the living that force them into unending repayments for unending embursements. But they also sketch out lines of movement that might provide the dead with routes of escape. A final group of songs theorize the material bodies for the dead – corpse, ancestral effigy, and funeral effigy. Ultimately, the songs are analogous to anthropology; they are attempts to sympathetically understand a world of dead others, while giving a rich, methodical and thorough account of the genesis of that world’s subjects.
