Songs for Dead Parents is a uniquely moving monograph that appears destined to have been written. Erik Mueggler shares this beautiful volume's history from the start, which began when he gathered much of its ethnography during the doctoral fieldwork that gave rise to his The Age of Wild Ghosts (2001). But the intricate materials on death rites and songs for the dead which underpin this newest volume on the Lòlop’ò (a branch of the Yi ethnic group in China) had been cached away for years. As we learn, Mueggler made several return visits since his first fieldwork among the Lòlop’ò, which enabled him and several key interlocutors to re-envision what they already knew to be their vital transcriptions of songs for the dead. Yet it was only when the moment for giving voice to these rich and, in some cases, almost forgotten Lòlop’ò death rites and songs had nearly passed that they (it appears) demanded to emerge in the present volume.

Perhaps no other work in the anthropology of China offers such an emotive discussion of how death rites become, in Mueggler's words, “the source of generative power, [by] producing living bodies as effects of work on the dead” (p. 7). It is certainly true that death and the regeneration of life is a familiar trope within anthropology; indeed, it is the namesake of a famous (1982) volume by Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry that includes an essay by James L. Watson on Cantonese death pollution. However, what Mueggler specifically wants to show are the processes by which Lòlop’ò death rites and songs produce “a formal and objectified image of the social world in the dead body” without simultaneously working to “restore a social order fractured by death, as the tradition of the anthropology of death would have it” (p. 7). Songs for Dead Parents is thus meant to break free from the familiar Durkheimian model in which rituals (including funerals) serve to maintain the social order, such that descendants who take on the responsibilities of their ancestors effectively replace them at death. In place of this, Mueggler offers an ethnographic-cum-textual approach to the study of Lòlop’ò death rites.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Mueggler pitches his analytical tent in adventurous anthropological camps which have been strongly influenced by Gilles Deleuze, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and other well-known figures of continental philosophy. In maverick fashion, he critiques and harnesses the studies of affinity (in-law relationships) produced by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, a leading anthropologist of Amazonia. He engages too with the oeuvre of Marilyn Strathern, a veritable giant in the anthropology of kinship in Melanesia and Euro-America. These streams of anthropology focus upon the production of relationships among persons, spirits, animals and other beings, including ghosts. By bringing his ethnography into dialogue with studies of relationality as well as with the anthropology of phenomenology (and I note these approaches are not always viewed as compatible), Mueggler throws light on the sensorial, bodily-specific and immaterial attributes of the Lòlop’ò person. While I am not sure this dual approach enables him to fully sidestep the classic anthropological take on death, Mueggler does evocatively show that Lòlop’ò death rites create both images of the social world and the Lòlop’ò world itself.

One remarkable contribution of this book is Mueggler's interleaving of the Lòlop’ò “poetic art called nèpi, ‘speaking to ghosts’” (p. 21), which are a major feature of their death rites, with the “effigies” (nègu) that contain ghosts during rituals (p. 75). Nèpi comprise a polyvalent repertoire of sung texts, filled with references to Lòlop’ò myths and the wider universe of human, spirit, animal and other relationships. Mueggler admirably anthropologizes nèpi songs for the dead in tandem with several now mostly abandoned Lòlop’ò rituals that required the production and, in some cases, subsequent destruction by fire of nègu effigies.

Mueggler's impressive ethnography does raise some questions concerning his treatment of “animism” and “fortune” as “idioms” bounded to the often-arcane meanings attributed to them by early anthropologists (p. 75). I prefer to envision these as concepts that are good to think with and as phenomena that pervade certain worlds, including perhaps that of the Lòlop’ò. As Mueggler vividly shows, nèpi songs are comprised of multiple verses that bring the Lòlop’ò social world into being and propagate it through time (p. 75). Nèpi songs even appear to animate the world with good things, including fortune, since Mueggler observes there are Lòlop’ò ritual procedures for producing “a stolen animating bit” (p. 79) and for assembling “the indeterminate crowd of immaterial beings in which harm and good fortune originate” (pp. 77–78; my emphases added). But these are small details. By illuminating the generative power of Lòlop’ò death rites, Mueggler has showcased anthropology's capacity to grow, expand, and shapeshift with the ethnographies it enlivens across time.