The Social Production of Tears: Perspectives from Chinese Societies

Our panel offers socio-cultural explanations to why and when people cry in various ritual contexts in China and Taiwan. Questioning some standard assumptions that people tend to hold about tears, we understand “tears” neither as a “natural” physical reflex nor a direct materialization of emotion. Rather, they roll through a critical intersection where social obligations and external expressions meet with individual desires and internal feelings. We suggest that how and when people try to cry or not to cry, what might count as “good” tears or “bad” tears, and who can or should shed tears are all culturally grounded physiological phenomena that reveal important information about the social expectations and ritual imperatives over bodily control and order maintenance in each of the Chinese communities that we examine.

Our papers ask how tears, while being socially produced in ritualized performances and controlled reactions, are often conceptualized as “authentic” materialization of internal feelings. By tackling collective and ritualized processes of producing and not producing tears at particular times in a diverse array of situations, our respective ethnographic works explore how different regimes of values – crystallized in various forms such as religious ideologies, state regulations, and modernist pursuits - propel tear producers and tear regulators to act in certain ways. Tracing the shifting contours of tears, our panel examines the socio-cultural implications of these transforming values and order in Chinese societies.