Death in the Early Twenty-first Century

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

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2. Introduction

   • Sébastien Penmellen Boret, Susan Orpett Long, Sergei Kan

   Pages 1-27

3. Culture, Religion, and the Uses of Tradition

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 29-29

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   2. Fear and Prayers: Negotiating with the Dead in Apiao, Chiloé (Chile)

      • Giovanna Bacchiddu

      Pages 31-62

   3. Quelling the “Unquiet Dead”: Popular Devotions in the Borderlands of the USSR

      • Catherine Wanner

      Pages 63-84

   4. Life After Death/Life Before Death and Their Linkages: The United States, Japan, and China

      • Gordon Mathews, Miu Ying Kwong

      Pages 85-111

4. Personhood, Memory, and Technology

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 113-113

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   2. Reincarnation, Christianity and Controversial Coffins in Northwestern Benin

      • Sharon Merz

      Pages 115-150

   3. For the Solace of the Young and the Authority of the Old Death: Photography in Acholi, Northern Uganda

      • Sophie H. Seebach

      Pages 151-178

   4. Mediating Mortality: Transtemporal Illness Blogs and Digital Care Work

      • Tamara Kneese

      Pages 179-213

5. Individual, Choice, and Identity

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 215-215

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   2. Agency and the Personalization of the Grave in Japan

      • Sébastien Penmellen Boret

      Pages 217-253

   3. Remembering the Dead: Agency, Authority, and Mortuary Practices in Interreligious Families in the United States

      • Susan Orpett Long, Sonja Salome Buehring

      Pages 255-289

6. Back Matter

   Pages 291-295

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Focusing on tradition, technology, and authority, this volume challenges classical understandings that mortuary rites are inherently conservative. The contributors examine innovative and enduring ideas and practices of death, which reflect and constitute changing patterns of social relationships, memorialisation, and the afterlife. This cross-cultural study examines the lived experiences of men and women from societies across the globe with diverse religious heritages and secular value systems. The book demonstrates that mortuary practices are not fixed forms, but rather dynamic processes negotiated by the dying, the bereaved, funeral experts, and public institutions. In addition to offering a new theoretical perspective on the anthropology of death, this work provides a rich resource for readers interested in human responses to mortality: the one certainty of human existence.

• Death and societal relationships
• mortuary rites
• Death customs
• History of death
• Bereavement
• funerals
• death rites
• memorialisation
• mortuary practices
• funeral experts
• bereaved
• dying
• anthropology of death
• mortality
• grieving
• grief
• religion and society

“This book is an analysis of how this generation views death and the remembering of those who have left this earth through death. … This was a very interesting book with different perspectives on death.” (Justin Dilliplane, Resolved for Christ, resolvedfc.blogspot.de, January, 2018)

• IRIDeS Bureau, Tohoku University, Aoba, Sendai, Japan

  Sébastien Penmellen Boret

• John Carroll University , University Heights, USA

  Susan Orpett Long

• Department of Anthropology, Dartmouth College, Hanover, USA

  Sergei Kan

Sébastien Penmellen Boret is an anthropologist at the International Research Institute of Disaster Sciences of Tohoku University, Japan. 

 
Susan Orpett Long is Professor of Anthropology at John Carroll University, USA. 
 
Sergei Kan is Professor of Anthropology and Native American Studies at Dartmouth College, USA.

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