Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Maryland Institute College of Art

“Coloring the Corpse: The Visual Culture of Chinese Death”

From the black of a widow’s weeds, to the sackcloth of a mourning gown, and the white of a shroud, death ritual is threaded through with color. In the English language, sorrow is described as “the blues,” while Chinese societies refer to the events that surround death as “white through and through.” Yet, while the study of mortuary rites is an enduring subject of humanistic inquiry, there has been little consideration of color as a pivotal way death is codified. Drawing on perspectives from material culture studies— color understood as a property of things—I interrogate how color structures grief, challenging current anthropological understandings of the connection between ritual, emotion, and materiality. My examples are drawn from ethnographic fieldwork in Chinese funeral parlors Singapore, where I worked as both anthropologist and embalmer. To consider color is, I argue, to attend to the very matter of life and death.