Jessey Choo, Associate Professor of Chinese History and Religion, Rutgers University
“The Loquacious Dead: Burial and Agency in Late Medieval Chinese Entombed Epitaphs”
Abstract: Late medieval Chinese entombed epitaphs are stone slabs interred with the deceased, inscribed with information about the tomb occupant's genealogy, life and death, burial details, and a eulogistic closing elegy. Thousands have been excavated in recent decades. These inscriptions could be quite lengthy, combining mundane information with sometimes colorful accounts of tomb occupant's exploit and debate over how they ought to be buried and remembered. I will focus on the negotiations within and outside grieving families over the burial arrangement and its signification as portrayed in late medieval entombed epitaphs. This talk is, in some ways, a response to Peter Metcalf's seminal work, Celebrations of Death. I feel that contrasting anthropological and historical methodologies and modern and pre-modern responses to death might generate interesting discussions.
Peter Metcalf, Professor of Anthropology Emeritus, University of Virginia
“Watching Death: an Ethnographic Encounter”
Abstract: Once while I was doing anthropological fieldwork in Borneo, I spent a Christmas watching an old woman with advanced TB cough herself to death. For my hosts I was only doing the proper thing; no one in the longhouse dies alone. But my motives were not sentimental. I wanted to see first hand the rites that occurred right after death, and they are striking. The corpse is talked to incessantly, carried into the kitchen and force fed—and that is only the beginning. What is inescapable is that those people die a death different to any we know in the west.
Peter Metcalf is emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Virginia. He has conducted fieldwork in Borneo over many years. He studied first at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and then at Harvard. He has also taught at the Universities of Papua-New Guinea and Singapore. He is author of several books including Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual.
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