The Volokh Conspiracy

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Volokh Conspiracy

Funerals, in ancient Rome and (some places in) modern China

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From the Twelve Tables (the laws of the early Roman Republic, at least as we can best deduce what they were):

Women shall not during a funeral lacerate their faces, or tear their cheeks with their nails; nor shall they utter loud cries bewailing the dead.

From the Wall Street Journal's ChinaRealTime (Te-Ping Chen and Josh Chin):

In China, friends and family of the deceased may have to do without a special form of funereal entertainment: strippers.

According to a statement from the Ministry of Culture on Thursday, the government plans to work closely with the police to eliminate such performances. . . .

The government has been trying to fight the country's funereal stripper scourge for some time now. In 2006, the state-run broadcaster China Central Television's leading investigative news show Jiaodian Fangtan aired an exposé on the practice of scantily clad women making appearances at memorial services in Donghai in eastern China's Jiangsu province.

The point of inviting strippers, some of whom performed with snakes, was to attract large crowds to the deceased's funeral—seen as a harbinger of good fortune in the afterlife. "It's to give them face," one villager explained. "Otherwise no one would come."