Afterlife economics: Ghost marriage and the future of grief
The first in an occasional series thinking about the intersection of society, economics, and death.
What do you do when someone dies too young? For some cultures, the answer is to find someone for them to spend the rest of their afterlife with.
The tradition of ghost marriage — a marriage where one or both partners are dead — goes back thousands of years. Today, the center of ghost marriage is the rural regions of China, particularly Shanxi. But it’s been practiced in places as far-flung as Sudan, India, and France.1
The evolution of this practice provides insight into how people experience grief and the ways that outside forces become intertwined with cultural traditions — up to and including theft and violence.
What is a ghost marriage?
Most ghost marriages follow the same process as any other traditional marriage, with the notable exception that the betrothed are dead. In rural China, the process starts when the groom’s family proposes marriage to the bride’s. From there, dowries are sorted out and the families ritually seek the approval of the couple to be married.
The actual wedding is conducted in line with local custom, although the bride and groom are rarely physically present (which might be a bit macabre). Instead, the couple is represented symbolically by items ranging from a spirit tablet2 to full-sized paper mannequins dressed in real wedding clothes.
Sometimes, the couple is surrounded by papier-mâché versions of everything they need for their new (after)life: clothing, furniture, even cars and appliances. After the ceremony is concluded, these items may be burned to symbolically send them to the next world. Finally (and most importantly), the newly weds are buried together — ready to go into an afterlife of matrimony.
Why marry a ghost?
There’s no single rationale for ghost marriages.
Spiritually, some traditional religions hold that marriage is critical for the dead. Being buried alone symbolically represents an afterlife alone; these romantically unfulfilled spirits may become restless and haunt the family or the village. Marrying the dead provides companionship to both parties, allowing for a happier eternity together.
Personally, this process is a way of grieving for the families of the deceased. In traditional cultures where most people get married young, dying single often suggests an early death — likely as the result of some sort of tragedy. By finding a partner for them, the bereaved family can offer their loved one a final gift as they enter the afterlife.
Socially, marriage joins two families together. A ghost marriage connects the dead to a living family, allowing (for example) their nephew in-law to participate in ancestor veneration. In some cultures, unmarried adults may not be considered part of any family, requiring them to be buried separate from the village entirely. A posthumous marriage allows for traditional burial to continue unimpeded.
And finally: these marriages can play distinct economic roles for the living. A surviving fiancé or fiancée may go through with marrying their dead partner to collect their dowry or brideprice.3 In more traditional economies, it can also be a way to aggregate resources between families.
So people have a number of strong reasons to value a ghost marriage. But in the modern world, this can’t always happen; there are gender imbalances, less connected villages, and changing cultural norms. Those who want a ghost marriage to happen may need to look to other sources. Sometimes, that means the black market.
Crime networks and spiritual matchmakers
A study by T. Wing Lo, a professor of Criminology at the City University of Hong Kong, looked into the criminal networks that emerged to procure corpse brides to be sold and married off posthumously to dead bachelors. There is real money in facilitating these ghost marriages, with an average price of over $3,000 — roughly three times the average monthly salary in Shanxi.
This process often takes the form of ad-hoc grave robbing, but local hospitals have been caught taking bribes to dispense both corpses and documentation. Morgue workers have gone so far as to preemptively reach out to brokers after a recent death.
In some cases, the people organizing these crimes are a matchmaker for the living that saw the economic opportunity in becoming a matchmaker for the dead. Informal networks of matchmakers find families seeking a ghost marriage, people willing to supply a corpse, and ideally documentation (real or forged) from the family of the deceased agreeing to the nuptials.
These crimes make the news every few years in China. In 2013, four men in Shanxi were sentenced for stealing ten corpses that they had sold for 250,000 RMB (approximately $30,000 today). Tragically, the demand for ghost marriages also drives gender-based violence; there have been multiple cases of women being murdered to feed the ghost bride market.
It goes without saying that all of this activity is extremely illegal: you can’t forge documents, steal and sell corpses, or murder someone in China. Beyond the direct criminal practices, there is a long history of cultural disapproval. Confucian scholars explicitly denounced the practice, and Chinese courts today generally (but not always4) denounce the legitimacy of these marriages.
The consequences of ghost marriage
In some ways, this is just a fascinating (if somewhat disturbing) cultural phenomenon. But the core needs that ghost marriages resolve are deeply human: the feeling that you want to do right by the dead, and that you can find closure in service to them. What’s interesting is how the same need looks different across mediums.
Traditional ghost marriage sought to find a partner for the dead; this implies that there’s a selection process analogous to finding a partner in an arranged marriage. The version driven by criminal networks replaces that process with a commodity: a body to bury with your child.
This line between these two versions can be blurry. In one case, a ghost couple from the same village was married with full family agreement. Still, the groom’s side paid a few thousand yuan to the bride’s family. In another case, a girl who had died of cancer was given a ghost marriage in part over concerns her body may otherwise be stolen. The existence of the criminal market alone changed the way decisions were made.
To the people arranging these marriages for their family, this is all a practice of doing one last thing for a loved one. As the deathcare industry explodes and offers new ways to honor loved ones, it’s easy to imagine that commercialization may reshape our relationship with grief as well.
Creating new ghosts
The logic of the ghost marriage comes from the idea that the dead aren’t entirely gone — something remains to be honored and interacted with. In the future, there could be more literal versions of this idea.
Replika is an AI chatbot that famously got started as an interactive memorial for a friend who had died. The idea feels more relevant today than ever; for a slice of people, nearly all of their life is online. A chatbot trained on somebody’s digital life today has orders of magnitude more data and is orders of magnitude more capable.
It’s very easy to imagine grieving in the future including a version of the deceased you can talk to. With more interactions happening in digital mediums, a chatbot trained on a loved one’s content has the ability to feel like an ongoing conversation with them. These digital ghosts have the potential to haunt us, creating new markets to serve and honor them. A version of ancestor veneration that moves from rituals and tradition to a subscription service.
What this looks like might also be found in Replika. Pivoting from its original concept, Replika now is mostly a service to provide virtual relationships, famously sexting and occasionally breaking the hearts of its users. Why wouldn’t an AI truly trained on our loved ones’ data maintain the desire for love they had in life? How long until we see the first digital ghost marriage, where two digitized versions of the dead get offered a chance to marry each other?
And much like modern ghost marriage, such an outcome opens the possibility of exploitation. It’s easy to imagine a grey market selling digital twins of people to be married to those who die too young. Who owns the right to sell your digital likeness for posthumous companionship? Could your replica be sold or become open source, copied to be a companion for the lonely digital dead? Does it matter what you want, or could a service emerge that facilitates your digital ghost marriage anyway?
It’s deeply uncomfortable, and deeply believable.
Buying a sense of closure
Ghost marriage is a rarely practiced tradition, but the need it services is real. Many people die with something unfulfilled; a marriage, relationships, a missed creation, a regret. The desire for closure will drive old and new traditions for those left behind.
You are in the process of creating your digital ghost — text messages, recordings, and maybe even chatbots. Unlike the old ones, these ghosts might remain in the physical world, ready to speak again. Someday, we may start to wonder how to put them to rest.
Sources:
When Religious Folk Practice Meet Karl Marx: Courts’ Response to Ghost Marriage in Modern China
Corpse Brides: Yinhun and the Macabre Agency of Cadavers in Contemporary Chinese Ghost Marriages
Ghost Brides and Crime Networks in Rural China
France’s version is a bit unique. Starting in 1915, France allowed for proxy marriages to soldiers at the front in WWI; this entitled their potential widows to payments in the event of their deaths. Since the 1950’s, France has allowed the posthumous marriage of couples engaged to be married before the death of one partner. This is a fairly restricted process, requiring the approval of the French president — but it does happen, with a 2017 posthumous marriage of a police officer killed in a terrorist attack making international news.
A physical tablet representing the spirit of past ancestors
A dowry is paid by the bride’s family to the groom; a brideprice is paid by the groom to the bride’s family
While Chinese courts do not recognize the legitimacy of ghost marriages, in a small minority of cases it has been tolerated as a non-harmful cultural tradition when done with the consent of the families.
Capitalism has gotten to the afterlife. Fml. Love this exposé
This is very interesting, more of these types of articles. I think a lot about the avatar I want to leave behind and what personal data I want it to be trained on. This is a very real thing people should think about.