Depth and Delay: Burial as Medium in Medieval China

Speaker bio: Jeffrey Moser is Associate Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at Brown University. His research attends, broadly, to the conceptual and material processes whereby past things are made present, with particular attention to the ways in which these processes intersect in the artistic practices and scholarly techne of medieval China. He is the author of Nominal Things: Bronzes in the Making of Medieval China (University of Chicago Press, 2023), awarded the Bei Shan Tang Monograph Prize by the Association for Asian Studies, and co-editor of Countless Sands: Buddhists and Their Environments in Medieval Asia (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2025). Other publications include essays on antiquarianism, ceramics, and the geoaesthetics of rock-cut Buddhist sculpture. He is currently completing a book on the family cemetery of the Neo-Confucian antiquarian Lü Dalin (1040–1093), as well as several essays on print and its precursors in Tang and Song China.

Talk description: The burial practices associated with the assertive, polemical Confucianism of eleventh-century China used the disposition of bodies in the earth as a way of establishing expectations for the living. Represented most explicitly by the family cemetery of the Neo-Confucian antiquarian Lü Dalin (1040– 1093), these practices were fundamentally anticipatory, guiding the living to do what they should do to deserve their place among the dead. They encouraged the family to imagine a certain future, and they worked to bring that future into being. But they also provided a flexible means of integrating the exigencies and complexities of individual human lives into a shared and normative form. In this way, the physical matter of the cemetery—the three-dimensional mass of earth that constituted it and the relative disposition of the graves within that earth—operated in multiple ways as a medium: it was at once a material, a means, an intervening substance, and a conduit between the dead and the living. Much of the recent scholarship on Chinese funerary art focuses on the meanings conveyed by the disposition of objects within the walls of the tomb. In this talk, I turn to the earth between the tombs, and explore the interpretive possibilities provided when the cemetery is imagined less as a collection of bounded spaces and more as a means of cohering bodies—dead and living—into a sustainable social organism.

Location: Kent Hall Lounge | Hybrid

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