Ritualizing Grief: Mixed Affective Complexes in Early Confucian Mourning

Contemporary debates on mixed emotions focus largely on how opposite valences coexist within individual experience, typically under controlled laboratory conditions. This paper broadens the discussion by developing a relational and ritual-based account of mixed affective complexes in early Confucian thought. Using grief for deceased parents as a paradigm case, we show that Confucius understands mourning not as a mere expression of grief but as a structured process in which an initial sorrow is deliberately sustained, guided, and gradually transformed through a shared temporal and ritual framework. Mencius further identifies specific forms of unease that burial rites are designed to resolve, while Xunzi explains how ritual structures recalibrate and integrate intense grief into a stabilized mixed affective complex. Taken together, these perspectives reveal a social-relational model in which affective complexity emerges not only within individual minds but through patterned interactions, communal norms, and ritual practices that reshape emotional life over time. While mourning provides a paradigmatically clear instance, the model we articulate offers a broader framework for understanding how emotions in general become mixed, stabilized, and ethically meaningful through ritual and relational processes.