Mourning in Late Imperial China: Filial Piety and the State (review)

A more apt name for Norman Kutcher's Mourning in Late Imperial China: Filial Piety and the State would be Filial Piety and the State: Mourning in Late Imperial China. This is a chronicle of the devolution of filial piety in the Ming and Qing periods as evidenced through changing attitudes (official and nonofficial) toward mourning and mourning rituals. The narrative is concise and the argument tightly woven, centering exclusively on the changing imperial attitudes toward mourning rituals and how this affected social strata throughout Chinese society.

The first two of the book's six chapters give an overview of the traditional attitudes toward mourning in China, and the relevant rituals and laws. The stage set, Kutcher moves in the next three chapters to the core of his argument and the changes established in the early Qing regime under the reigns of the Kangxi, Yong-zheng, and Qianlong emperors, ending with the "shaving scandal" in the Qian-long reign. Kutcher's analysis relies heavily on several premises, and while the narrative is taut and the parts fit together well, the argument rests almost exclusively on the notion of a "parallel conception of society," which Kutcher briefly describes in the Introduction:

To my knowledge, there was no specific term Chinese people used to describe the worldview by which loyalty to the state emanated from devotion of young to old. Accordingly, I have coined the term "parallel conception of society" to serve as an etic description of it. This doctrine allowed the state to harness, rather than compete with, the familial bond by stating that the various devotions of people within the state to each other were parallel bonds of mutual obligation.

(p. 2)

This "parallel conception of society" is at the core of Kutcher's thesis throughout. While the book as a whole and its arguments are interesting and indeed even noteworthy, Kutcher treads dangerous ground when he assumes the infallibility of and general agreement with this "parallel conception of society" upon which his thesis is so totally dependent. He defines this term just once, without defense, and then uses it repeatedly throughout the rest of the book. Kutcher is in fact seeking to prove the decline of "parallel society" and the push to a more vertically stratified society by offering the example of mourning rituals and the laws associated with them. This being said, his methodology keeps the reader entertained even when he deals with dry imperial decrees and court documents.

For Kutcher, the shift in society from something parallel to something more vertical begins with the effort by the late Ming emperors to make ritual more "natural" or personal and expressive of emotions, rather than to dictate emotion and how it should be expressed. This effort manifested itself in an interesting way, as the idea of duoqing (restricting the emotions in mourning) became an open topic of discussion in imperial circles. The attempts to regulate duoqing on a more personal, case-by-case basis and the acknowledgment of individual emotions felt in each case opened the way for a more personal (as opposed to ritualistic or systematic) interpretation of mourning rituals and regulations. In the Qing dynasty with the Kangxi emperor, mourning became even more "privatized," as the emperor's "mourning of his grandmother amounted to the public espousal of privatization of grief" (p. 90). Mourning was reinterpreted less as a public ritual, and duoqing was transformed into "mourning at one's post," effectively delegating the act of mourning to the sphere of private emotions and no longer to the sphere of public expression encouraged by the state.

Mourning was further privatized under the Yongzheng emperor as changes were made to limit mourning's "effects on the functioning of the bureaucracy" (p. 191). Finally, under the Qianlong emperor, it became obvious to what extent grief had been relegated from the public to the private sphere...