Of Bones and Flesh: The Social Meanings of the Dead in 19th Century China

Tobie Meyer-Fong from Johns Hopkins University will lecture on meanings attached to the war dead during the Taiping Rebellion at Columbia University.

This talk will consider the meanings attached to the war dead during the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864) through an examination of such related categories as cannibalism; corpses preserved, lost, and recovered; and charitable cemeteries that put the dead in their proper place, and allowed the living to gesture toward a hoped-for restoration of the moral and political order.

Tobie Meyer-Fong, Associate Professor, received her bachelor's degree from Yale University in 1989 and her doctoral degree from Stanford University in 1998. She is currently working on a book about the cultural and social impact of the Taiping rebellion. Other interests include Chinese literature, arts, and popular culture, the Cultural Revolution, gender, and nationalism in twentieth century Asia, urban history, and the history of travel and tourism. Prof. Meyer-Fong's first book, Building Culture in Early Qing Yangzhou, deals with the construction of cultural landmarks and the re-creation of elite identities in the city of Yangzhou after the Manchu conquest.