Tom Mullaney

Panel II
Tom Mullaney, Stanford University
A War Between the Living and the Dead: On Grave Relocation in Contemporary China

This talk examines the phenomenon of grave relocation in late imperial and modern China, a campaign that has led to the exhumation and reburial of 10 million corpses in the past decade alone and has transformed China’s graveyards into sites of acute personal, social, political, and economic contestation. Reflecting upon The Chinese Deathscape project at Stanford – a bespoke spatial narrative platform and first-ever Chinese grave relocation database – this talk will reflect more broadly upon the importance and potential of augmented narrative within the contexts of both Digital Humanities and Asian Studies – particularly in the crafting of narratives capable of telling stories about very large-scale phenomena – in this case, the relocation of millions of bodies in a very short span of time – whose meaning nevertheless takes shape at the deepest, most intimate, and most local levels of family, individual, and community.