To Cry or not To Cry: Regulating Regimes of Tears in Urban Shanghai Funerals

When ordinary Shanghai people die today, they are primarily commemorated in religious variations of socialist civil funerals. These funerals contain at least four different regimes of tears. The first regime is socialist. It discourages excessive bodily expressions of grief because tears are associated with “superstition” and “feudalism.” The second regime is based on authenticity and sincerity. People are expected to cry (or not to cry) based on their internal feelings of the moment. It is complicated, however, by a third regime in which it is believed that to be modern, one must control their tears; only traditional, rural, and lower class people cannot. Finally, the fourth regime concerns religion. In Shanghai, this means that the majority of Protestant Christian and devoted Buddhists should not cry. Folk death ritual, on the other hand, despite often being combined with Protestant and Buddhist funeral variations contains moments of obligatory tears and necessarily excessive weeping. With all of these different regimes of tears, how do the bereaved know when and when not to cry? I argue that funeral professionals are the keys transmitters, mediators, and regulators of these different regimes of tears in urban Shanghai. This paper, based on participant observation fieldwork in Shanghai funeral parlors between June 2010 and January 2012, describes how funeral professionals use verbal instructions, tone of voices, discursive explanations, and other bodily enactments to induce and regulate the bereaved’s tears in various kinds of socialist-religious funerals.