Songs for Dead Parents: Corpse, Text, and World in Southwest China

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, So...