Mortuary rituals constitute the social nature of death and mourning, often working to ease painful transitions for the deceased and bereaved. In Vietnam, such rituals involve objects, including commodified yet personalized text‐artifacts like banners and placards bearing inscriptions in various scripts that are associated with various affects and different political‐economic regimes. The material, orthographic, semantic, spatial, and temporal organization of these text‐artifacts mobilize sentiments and structure ethical relations at a funeral. Together, they act as prescriptive affordances intended to discipline mourners’ grief. Yet while these objects reflect how subjects valorize “tradition,” their affective force exceeds the bounded subjunctive world fostered by ritual, and it may retrospectively limit possibilities for moral personhood.My research was generously supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Abroad Research Program, the UC Pacific-Rim Research Program, the UCLA Graduate Division and Asia Institute Wagatsuma Fellowships, and institutional grants from the Centre for Ethnography and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council at the University of Toronto. I am also indebted to many colleagues who over years helped me develop earlier versions for invited lectures at the University of Toronto, the College of the Holy Cross, and the University of Michigan's Center for Southeast Asian Studies, and presentations at meetings of the American Anthropological Association, the Association for Asian Studies, the Harvard East Asia Society, and the Society for Psychological Anthropology. I further benefited from extremely helpful comments from multiple American Ethnologist reviewers and editor-in-chief Niko Besnier. The tragedies that this article describes continue to leave me painfully grateful to the families in whose sorrows I share, and I remain committed, but struggling, to honor their loved ones. (Social Science Research Council; Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Abroad Research Program; UC Pacific-Rim Research Program; UCLA Graduate Division; Asia Institute Wagatsuma Fellowships; Centre for Ethnography; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council at the University of Toronto)https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/amet.12599Accepted manuscriptPublished versio
