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.