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Podcast: New Books in Anthropology
Episode: Huwy-min Lucia Liu, "Governing Death, Making Persons: The New Chinese Way of Death" (Cornell UP, 2023)
Description: Governing Death, Making Persons: The New Chinese Way of Death (Cornell UP, 2023) tells the story of how economic reforms and changes in the management of death in China have affected the governance of persons. The Chinese Communist Party has sought to channel the funeral industry and death rituals into vehicles for reshaping people into "modern" citizens and subjects. Since the Reform and Opening period and the marketization of state funeral parlors, the Party has promoted personalized funerals in the hope of promoting a market-oriented and individualistic ethos. However, things have not gone as planned.Huwy-min Luc...