The New Death
Mortality and Death Care in the Twenty-First Century
Edited by Shannon Lee Dawdy and Tamara Kneese
There is perhaps no object as uncanny as the corpse, and few topics yield as much cross-cultural anxiety as human mortality. Yet beliefs and practices around death never stand still. This book brings together scholars who are intrigued by today’s rapidly changing death practices and attitudes. New and different ways of treating the body and memorializing the dead are proliferating across global cities. What are the beliefs, values, and ontologies entwined with these emergent death practices? Are we witnessing a shifting relationship between the living and the dead?
Using ethnographic, historical, and media-based approaches, the contributors to this volume focus on new attitudes and practices around mortality and mourning. Together, the chapters coalesce around the argument that two major currents run through the new death—reconfigurations of temporality and of intimacy. Whether they draw on “tradition” or on evolving technologies, people are reaching for new memorial objects to keep the dead present in their lives and new rituals to manage the timing and tempo of death. Pushing back against the folklorization endemic to anthropological studies of death practices and the whiteness of death studies as a field, the chapters strive to override divisions between the Global South and the Anglophone world, focusing instead on syncretization, globalization, and magic within the mundane.
2022. 352 pp., 6 x 9, 15 halftones
Contributors: Ellen Badone, Anya Bernstein, Shannon Lee Dawdy, Matthew Engelke, Abou Farman, Casey Golomski, LaShaya Howie, Jenny Huberman, Tamara Kneese, Huwy-min Lucia Liu, Philip R. Olson, Stephanie Schiavenato, Margaret Schwartz, Ruth E. Toulson
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Acknowledgments
Introduction
Shannon Lee Dawdy and Tamara Kneese
Part I. Mortality
Chapter One. Terminality: Technoscientific Eschatology in the Anthropocene
Abou Farman
Chapter Two. Old Men, Young Blood: Transhumanism and the Promise and Peril of Immortality
Jenny Huberman
Chapter Three. A Responsible Death: Valuing Life from Mortality Tables to Wearables
Tamara Kneese
Chapter Four. Deathnography: Writing, Reading, and Radical Mourning
Casey Golomski
Chapter Five. “For the One Life We Have”: Temporalities of the Humanist Funeral in Britain
Mathew Engelke
Interlude. Notes from the Field
Chapter Six. Loss in/of the Business of Black Funerals
LaShaya Howie
Chapter Seven. Cuddling Death: Exploring the Materiality of Reproductive Loss
Stephanie Schiavenato
Part II. Death Care
Chapter Eight. The Haptics of Grief: A Taxonomy of Touch in Death Care
Margaret Schwartz
Chapter Nine. The Embalmer’s Magic
Shannon Lee Dawdy
Chapter Ten. To Bear a Corpse: Home Funerals and Epistemic Cultures in US Death Care
Philip R. Olson
Chapter Eleven. Making a Living from Death: Chinese State Funeral Workers under the Market Economy
Huwy-min Lucia Liu
Chapter Twelve. Grief Transformed: New Rituals in a Singaporean Chinese Funeral Parlor
Ruth Toulson
On Endings
Commentary: The New Death
Ellen Badone
Afterword: Atoms, Star Dust, and Fungi: Death and Secular Eschatologies
Anya Bernstein
References
List of Contributors
Index
- Breathing New Life into the Evidence of Death: Contemporary Approaches to Bioarchaeology, edited by Aubrey Baadsgaard, Alexis T. Boutin, and Jane E. Buikstra, 2012
- Disturbing Bodies: Perspectives on Forensic Anthropology, edited by Zoë Crossland and Rosemary A. Joyce, 2015
- Gray Areas: Ethnographic Encounters with Nursing Home Culture, edited by Philip B. Stafford, 2003
- Memory Work: Archaeologies of Material Practices, edited by Barbara J. Mills and William H. Walker, 2008
- Remaking Life & Death: Toward an Anthropology of the Biosciences, edited by Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock, 2003
- American Afterlives: Reinventing Death in the Twenty-First Century, by Shannon Lee Dawdy, Princeton University Press, 2021
- I Like Dirt, a documentary short co-produced, co-directed, written, and co-edited by Shannon Lee Dawdy, 2021