This is a timely book on a timely topic. In this book, Andrew Kipnis describes the transformation of death management and death rituals in urban China after the Chinese Community Party adopted a market economy. As Kipnis points out, while death has been seen cross-culturally as a critical social transition, there were no prior monographs on death in the urban areas of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Such an absence of scholarly monographs is especially surprising considering the study of death had previously played a large, if not a defining, role in Sinophone studies (the study of Chinese languages speaking societies).
Through the funeral of Mr. Wang described in chapter 1, Kipnis tackles four key areas in which we see the transformation of death: in changing relationships between self and other (individuals and their kinships), in spatial changes and the urban economy, in regulatory changes and the politics of...
