Identifying the Dead in Medieval China Symposium

October 30-31, 2026

Brown University

In approaching the study of individuals in medieval China (here, 10th–14th centuries), art historians and historians often attempt to categorize people by “identity” to better understand and contextualize their lives. Identities might include social class and profession (scholar-official, merchant, military official), ethnicity (Han, Jurchen, Kitan, Mongol), geographic situation (urban, rural, northern, southern), and religious/philosophical affiliation (Buddhist, Daoist, Confucian, Nestorian), among others. Often, the textual record encourages this type of broad categorization—muzhiming often identify the profession, hometown, gender, and other characteristics of the subject, for example. However, when investigating individuals within their funerary context, the idiosyncratic, and sometimes fluid nature of identity markers becomes more pronounced. Indeed, the burial context of individuals often contradicts some of the categorizations implied by muzhiming or other texts. In this workshop, we bring together scholars working on aspects of China’s middle period to chart paths forward for our scholarship. How can we interpret signifiers of identity in medieval China broadly, and in the funerary context in particular? What are best practices for studying people largely excluded from the textual record?   

The rich funerary record for pre-modern China is both a boon and a hindrance in the pursuit of answers to these questions. On the one hand, the abundance of material that has survived in the funerary context provides substantial potential evidence for interrogating the relationship between an individual’s material expression and their representation in text. On the other hand, interpreting tomb assemblages as stable, factual markers of identity can obscure larger issues like survival bias (does an object’s survival automatically indicate importance?), idiosyncratic and evolving archaeological methods, and relative expertise in the interpretation of materials (i.e. ceramics, textiles, and epitaphs all demand specialized training). How do we bridge the gaps created by such issues? Several of our symposium participants have contributed to this pursuit, and it is our hope that by bringing together different methodological approaches, we will be able to identify productive paths forward.  

Looking outside the field of China Studies can also be beneficial. Scholars have explored identity formation in the premodern period in ways that might inform our approaches to medieval China. Finbar Barry Flood has written several works on identity formation and perception, including Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu-Muslim” Encounter (2009), which questions the static boundaries between “cultures” by showing the ways objects and people moved through Central and South Asia. Ulrika Rublack’s work on the role of dress in identity and class formation in Renaissance Europe, especially Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (2010) also reminds us to consider individual agency and specific circumstances in the premodern period. While these scholars do not, by and large, engage with funerary materials, the ways in which they approach premodern identity formation through material culture might inform our approaches to Song and Yuan tombs.