The Social Life of Postmortem Ties: The Ongoing Relational Work of Grave Sweeping in China

• In Event: 50260 - Section on Asia and Asian America Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 8: Precarity, Labor, and Relational Work Across Asian and Asian American Contexts

Abstract

The way that social networks are written about and researched is always with the understanding that ties are severed when people die. However, in some contexts, people maintain relationships with those who have died as a naturalized part of life. This study uses the case of grave sweeping in China to push the boundaries of what is considered a social tie, and, at the same time, present a relational explanation for Tomb Sweeping Day (which over one billion people participate in annually). Relying on 158 interviews and ethnography in multiple regions in China, this article first establishes why postmortem ties have the same features as other social ties: there is time spent together, emotional intensity, and reciprocity. Participants felt an obligation to care for deceased parents by performing relational work through regular visits, gifts, and conversation. In the process, participants received intangible rewards, including feelings of connection to family, a sense that they mattered, and moral rewards of doing a good deed. Some asked the deceased for material help like protection and career success; others received messages in their dreams or sought other kinds of interaction. Second, I identify factors that facilitate and constrain these ties. Postmortem ties were embedded in overlapping family and community networks, shaped by local knowledge and logics of appropriateness, and reinforced by the changing narratives and national policies that redefined Chinese society from the 1979 reforms to the aims of Xi Jinping’s era. Migration and geographic dispersion, pressures from work, and a focus on the young resulting from China’s one-child policy decreased the prioritization and ability to visit graves. The postmortem tie is a concept that may be applied to ask whether reciprocity and relational work are features of how people approach mortality in other contexts.

Author

• Becky Yang Hsu, Georgetown University