Digitizing death: commodification of joss paper on Chinese online cemetery

ABSTRACT

This article explores the digitalization of traditional funeral joss paper into digital commodities through the case study of the Chinese online cemetery 00tang.com. Joss paper are paper replicas of everyday items such as money and objects that are ritually burned as a form of symbolic offering to the deceased in accordance with traditional Chinese practices of ancestor worship. Using both ethnographic interviews and discursive interface analysis, I look at how the remediation of spiritual joss paper into digital objects complicates perceived dichotomy between the gift and commodity that requires new ways of thinking about the acts of social reciprocity, indebtedness, and obligation. Drawing on established literature relating to gift and digital economies, I argue 00tang’s digitization of joss paper on internet cemeteries is reflexive of the biopolitical means by which the state and market forces work to subsume traditional ancestor worship into controllable and commodifiable labor of mourning. Here, the subversive wastefulness of the gift is replaced by its accumulation and preservation online. Digitization in this regard highlights the process by which objects take on different materiality, values, aesthetics, and productive labor practices, all of which fundamentally alters the symbolic regimes of death and the ritual gift economy in China.

KEYWORDS:

• Gift exchange
• digital commodities
• joss paper
• ancestor worship
• online cemetery
• digital mourning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Joss paper here refers to both spirit money (mingbi) which are imitation money as well as general paper replicas of everyday objects.

2 The Chinese surnames in this essay are alibis used to hide the interlocutors’ identity.

3 Paper imitations of fiat money are among the earliest forms of joss paper used in ancestor worship rituals. There are no standard translations for joss paper money in English where a variety of terms such as joss money, ghost money, hell money, hell notes, ancestor money, spirit money, etc. exist in the current lexicon. These terms are used interchangeably in this paper to refer to all joss paper money in general.

4 The invention of the binary numeral system is often attributed to Gottfried Leibniz who was inspired by the ancient Chinese text I Ching which represented the Yin and Yang binary through hexagrams (Ryan 1996).

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Yizhou Xu

Yizhou Xu is a PhD candidate in Media & Cultural Studies at UW–Madison's Department of Communication Arts. His research interest deals with the mobile tech industry in China, particularly at the intersections of platforms, labor, and state policy. Prior to the UW–Madison, he was a documentarian and broadcast journalist based in Beijing working for new agencies including CBS News, NPR, and Swiss TV. He has published in journals including Social Media + Society, and Communication and the Public.