The Funeral of Mr. Wang

In rural China funerals were conducted locally: on village land by village elders. But in urban areas people have neither land for burials nor elder relatives who can conduct a funeral. Chinese urbanization, which has picked up drastically in the last decades, has involved the creation of cemeteries, state-run funeral homes, and small private funerary businesses. The Funeral of Mr. Wang examines social change in urbanizing China through the lens of funerals, the funerary industry and practices of memorialization. It analyzes changes in family life, patterns of urban sociality, transformations in economic relations, the politics of memorialization and the echoes of these changes in beliefs about the dead and ghosts.