The Social Lives of Dead Bodies in China and Beyond

The dead are all around us, but how do we know it? This course aims to uncover how corpses interact with the living as participants in social relations, especially during times of community upheaval. We'll take China and Taiwan as jumping off points, but also look elsewhere in Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe since the 19th century, when the broadening scale and nature of warfare; state expansion; rapid development; global circulations of technology; and the interplay of international philanthropies with older forms of charity and ritual pacification significantly affected the treatment, conceptions, and actions of the dead.