Politics of Death Time If imperial control anticipates the assimilation of productive life to a generalized time, then the personal and affective ties that produce social relations are likewise exposed to these political interventions. The particularized variety of time that figures and affirms social reproduction (e.g., marriage and funerals rites) offers a crucial lens into the effects of incorporation. When Han administrators discussed “barbarian” funerary practices, mourning was an oft-scrutinized behavior, deemed emotionally dangerous, and to be corrected through proper techniques of placing and clothing the body in line with classic proscriptions. Funerals thus appeared to juxtapose an affective encounter, one where a particular form of local time outside of economic or official space attracted imperial attention. To organize a funerary event implies setting time outside of labor, dispensing material resources, and, more importantly, coordinating others to visit a place that operates on a nonquotidian or heterotopic time (Foucault 1967). The production of funerals and affirmation of personal ties necessitate a return to Bronze Age cemetery locales, places that presumably were reduced by administrative order. The penetration of generalized time on funerary process can be examined in the frequency and rate of burial events, the attention or “care” paid to funerary preparation, and the particular sartorial style used to dress the deceased. These dimensions of funerary ritual infer not only on the timely actions of the living but also contrast the techniques of grieving in the Bronze Age and the imperial period. The expectation is that the material record and temporal structure of these funerary events are sensitive to discontinuities in settlements, land use, and monetary reforms, possibly with this impact most palpably felt among communities closely pulled into the administrative orbit.
particularized times. Cemeteries in the Qujing valley are built from accreted layers of soil to form large mounded features and require discrete spatial order to accommodate successive generations of inhumations (Figure 6) (Yunnan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology et al. 2002). Each earthen layer is constructed to achieve a sufficient thickness, thus enabling successive exhumations of vertically stacked pits. An unevenly erected layer would presumably offset the sequence that is the pretext for cemetery expansions and future interments. Coordination among the living to maintain mound integrity is evident in the consistent thickness of individual layers maintained across construction sequences at Hengdalu and Batatai, which allowed the exhumation of individual pits to an average depth of 50–80 centimeters below surface (Figure 6). Interments of this depth avoided crosscutting of grave chambers. This careful articulation of individual graves and cemetery form depicts what I refer to as vernacular architecture for the dead. The positioning of individual bodies along the same cardinal alignment was also crucial to articulating this structured cemetery space as shown in Batatai (Figure 7). Beginning with the earliest inhumations, mourners across the three valleys placed the deceased in tombs oriented along a strict east-west axis, aligning their bodies with the valley floor. Taken together, this nested order and concerted repetition reveal techniques of mourning distinctively attendant to the corporeality of the deceased. By the imperial period, the coordination of these funerary processes becomes increasingly difficult to uphold. The construction of earthen layers is halted after the second century BC in Qujing valley, limiting the expansion of cemetery space while forcing new burials to cut into earlier graves. In response to these spatial and depth constraints, mourners begin to dig shallower graves with pits measuring only 20 centimeters in depth at Batatai (Figure 6). The decline in frequency and rate of burial activity thus coincides with an inability to emplace the
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