Andrew KIPNIS, interviewed by Jun ZHANG and Gonçalo SANTOS on October 28, 2021

ABOUT THIS EPISODE

This podcast episode features a conversation with Andrew Kipnis on his recent work on China's changing funerary practices in the context of powerful forces of urbanization. It examines how spatial reorganization during Chinese urbanization problematized death, and how newly emerged forms of familial organization, stranger sociality, and economic restructuring were reflected in changing funerary rituals and the rise of the funerary industry. It also discusses some of the unique features of Chinese patterns of governing death and how existing frameworks of governance influence and are influenced by everyday practices of urban memorialization. Finally, it considers moral debates on the commercialization of death and the place of secularization and ghost stories in contemporary urban China.

FEATURED AUTHOR

Andrew B. Kipnis is a professor in the Dept. of Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His latest book is The Funeral of Mr. Wang: Life, Death, and Ghosts in Urbanizing China. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press (2021). He is also the author of From Village to City: Social Transformation in a Chinese County Seat (University of California Press 2016), Governing Educational Desire: Culture, Politics and Schooling in China (University of Chicago Press 2011), China and Post Socialist Anthropology (Eastbridge 2008), and Producing Guanxi (Duke University Press 1997). From 2006-2015 he was co-editor of The China Journal and he is currently co-editor of Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory.

AUTHOR’S WEBSITE

https://www.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/~ant/memberprofile/andrew-kipnis/

BOOK'S OFFICIAL WEBPAGE (Available for free download):

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520381971/the-funeral-of-mr-wang