Abstract
The People’s Republic of China has been urbanizing rapidly over the past four decades and this urbanization has had significant impacts on funerary rites and the ways in which people memorialize the dead. Urbanization in China has been accompanied by the growth of the cemetery industry, the establishment of new occupations in funerary related services and the creation of educational institutions to produce workers for these occupations, as well as a rise in the importance of Qing Ming as a national holiday, new forms of memorialization, and shifting conceptions of familial belonging. Subtle changes in beliefs about the soul, the afterlife and the place of religion in funerary ritual may also be occurring.
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Much of the information in the following paragraphs was derived from interviews. I conducted interviews in Changsha in October 2017, and did research on the funerary sector in Nanjing and Jinan from 2013 to 2016. For a written source on funerary studies at the Changsha Social Work College, see Lu (2015).
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Kipnis, A.B. (2019). The Evolution of Funerary Ritual in Urbanizing China. In: Selin, H., Rakoff, R.M. (eds) Death Across Cultures. Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18826-9_1
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