Taboo as Cultural Infrastructure: Ritual Pollution and the Cultural Structuring of China’s Funeral Market

• In Event: Economic Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Roundtable 1: Relational Work

Abstract

China’s funeral industry has rapidly expanded despite enduring cultural taboos around death and profiting from death. Rather than asking how taboo goods become commodified, this paper asks how cultural prohibitions themselves can organize and sustain market life. Existing morals and markets scholarship argues that the commodification of taboo objects and relations occurs through the transformation of taboo’s meaning or through the obfuscation of morally troubling exchanges. Both mechanisms presuppose taboo as an obstacle to commodification. Drawing on eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork and over 520 hours of participant observation in private “one-dragon” funeral shops, state-run funeral parlors, cemeteries, and bereaved households, I show that in contemporary urban China, the death taboo operates as a cultural infrastructure that structures economic action. The pervasive fear of death pollution deters entry into the industry, limits competition, and positions funeral brokers as indispensable ritual specialists. At the same time, spiritual anxieties embedded in shared cultural understandings of ancestorhood, pollution, and ritual efficacy generate demand for professional management. Funeral brokers do not neutralize or bypass taboo. They actively invoke and sustain it to position themselves as ritual authorities and protective intermediaries. In doing so, they transform symbolic danger into economic value. This case contributes to the sociology of culture by showing how deeply embedded moral-symbolic classifications—such as sacred versus profane, pure versus polluted—can structure markets at both micro and meso levels. Rather than treating culture as a constraint on rational economic action, the paper demonstrates how shared meanings, ritual logics, and moral emotions generate economic niches and stabilize market authority. The funeral industry in China is thus not merely culturally embedded; it is culturally constituted. By theorizing taboo as generative rather than restrictive, the paper highlights how symbolic systems actively produce economic life.

Author

• Xinling Zhou, UC Irvine