Download or read book The Materiality and Spatiality of Death Burial and Commemoration written by Christoph Klaus Streb and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Death, dying and burial produce artefacts and occur in spatial contexts. The interplay between such materiality and the bereaved who commemorate the dead yields interpretations and creates meanings that can change over time. Materiality is more than simple matter, void of meaning or relevance. The apparent inanimate has meaning. It is charged with significance, has symbolic and interpretative value—perhaps a form of selfhood, which originates from the interaction with the animate. In our case, gravestones, bodily remains and the spatial order of the cemetery are explored for their material agency and relational constellations with human perceptions and actions. Consciously and unconsciously, by interacting with such materiality, one is creating meaning, while materiality retroactively provides a form of agency. Spatiality provides more than a mere context: it permits and shapes such interaction. Thus, artefacts, mementos and memorials are exteriorised, materialised, and spatialized forms of human activity: they can be understood as cultural forms, the function of which is to sustain social life. However, they are also the medium through which values, ideas and criteria of social distinction are reproduced, legitimised, or transformed. This book will explore this interplay by going beyond the consideration of simple grave artefacts on the one hand and graveyards as a space on the other hand, to examine the specific interrelationships between materiality, spatiality, the living, and the dead. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Mortality.
Download or read book The Materiality of Death written by European Association of Archaeologists. Meeting and published by BAR International Series. This book was released on 2008 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 16 papers presented from an EAA session held at Krakow in 2006, exploring various aspects of the archaeology of death.
Download or read book Death Materiality and Mediation written by Barbara Graham and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Death, Materiality and Mediation, Barbara Graham analyzes a diverse range of objects associated with remembrance in both the public and private arenas through ethnography of communities on both sides of the Irish border. In doing so, she explores the materially mediated interactions between the living and the dead, revealing the physical, cognitive, emotional, and spiritual roles of the dead in contemporary communities. Through this study, Graham expands the concept of materiality to include narrative, song, senses, emotions, ephemera and embodied experience. She also examines how modern practices are informed by older beliefs and folk religion.
Download or read book The Matter of Death written by J. Hockey and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-07-16 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection opens up spaces where lives end, bodies are disposed of and memories generated: hospitals, hospices, care homes, coroners' courts, funeral premises, cemeteries, roadsides, the spirit world. Using material culture studies it illuminates the ways human beings make meaningful the challenges of death, dying and bereavement.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Death and Burial written by Sarah Tarlow and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-06-06 with total page 872 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Death and Burial reviews the current state of mortuary archaeology and its practice, highlighting its often contentious place in the modern socio-politics of archaeology. It contains forty-four chapters which focus on the history of the discipline and its current scientific techniques and methods. Written by leading, international scholars in the field, it derives its examples and case studies from a wide range of time periods, such as the middle palaeolithic to the twentieth century, and geographical areas which include Europe, North and South America, Africa, and Asia. Combining up-to-date knowledge of relevant archaeological research with critical assessments of the theme and an evaluation of future research trajectories, it draws attention to the social, symbolic, and theoretical aspects of interpreting mortuary archaeology. The volume is well-illustrated with maps, plans, photographs, and illustrations and is ideally suited for students and researchers.
Download or read book Women and the Material Culture of Death written by Maureen Daly Goggin and published by PHP研究所. This book was released on 2013 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women and the Material Culture of Death is a book that is at once ambitious, compelling and poignant. The nineteen, cross-disciplinary, generously illustrated essays that comprise this collection reveal the hidden history of women's role in mourning the dead through a range of material practices from the early modern period to the present."--Publisher's description.
Download or read book Death Memory and Material Culture written by Elizabeth Hallam and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-26 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: - How do the living maintain ongoing relationships with the dead in Western societies? - How have the residual belongings of the dead been used to evoke memories? - Why has the body and its material environment remained so important in memory-making? Objects, images, practices, and places remind us of the deaths of others and of our own mortality. At the time of death, embodied persons disappear from view, their relationships with others come under threat and their influence may cease. Emotionally, socially, politically, much is at stake at the time of death. In this context, memories and memory-making can be highly charged, and often provide the dead with a social presence amongst the living. Memories of the dead are a bulwark against the terror of forgetting, as well as an inescapable outcome of a life's ending. Objects in attics, gardens, museums, streets and cemeteries can tell us much about the processes of remembering. This unusual and absorbing book develops perspectives in anthropology and cultural history to reveal the importance of material objects in experiences of grief, mourning and memorializing. Far from being ‘invisible', the authors show how past generations, dead friends and lovers remain manifest - through well-worn garments, letters, photographs, flowers, residual drops of perfume, funerary sculpture. Tracing the rituals, gestures and materials that have been used to shape and preserve memories of personal loss, Hallam and Hockey show how material culture provides the deceased with a powerful presence within the here and now.
Download or read book A Companion to the Anthropology of Death written by Antonius C. G. M. Robben and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-05-11 with total page 541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thought-provoking examination of death, dying, and the afterlife Prominent scholars present their most recent work about mortuary rituals, grief and mourning, genocide, cyclical processes of life and death, biomedical developments, and the materiality of human corpses in this unique and illuminating book. Interrogating our most common practices surrounding death, the authors ask such questions as: How does the state wrest away control over the dead from bereaved relatives? Why do many mourners refuse to cut their emotional ties to the dead and nurture lasting bonds? Is death a final condition or can human remains acquire agency? The book is a refreshing reassessment of these issues and practices, a source of theoretical inspiration in the study of death. With contributions written by an international team of experts in their fields, A Companion to the Anthropology of Death is presented in six parts and covers such subjects as: Governing the Dead in Guatemala; After Death Communications (ADCs) in North America; Cryonic Suspension in the Secular Age; Blood and Organ Donation in China; The Fragility of Biomedicine; and more. A Companion to the Anthropology of Death is a comprehensive and accessible volume and an ideal resource for senior undergraduate and graduate students in courses such as Anthropology of Death, Medical Anthropology, Anthropology of Violence, Anthropology of the Body, and Political Anthropology. Written by leading international scholars in their fields A comprehensive survey of the most recent empirical research in the anthropology of death A fundamental critique of the early 20th century founding fathers of the anthropology of death Cross-cultural texts from tribal and industrial societies The collection is of interest to anyone concerned with the consequences of the state and massive violence on life and death
Download or read book Mirrors of Passing written by Sophie Seebach and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2018-08-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Without exception, all people are faced with the inevitability of death, a stark fact that has immeasurably shaped societies and individual consciousness for the whole of human history. Mirrors of Passing offers a powerful window into this oldest of human preoccupations by investigating the interrelationships of death, materiality, and temporality across far-flung times and places. Stretching as far back as Ancient Egypt and Greece and moving through present-day locales as diverse as Western Europe, Central Asia, and the Arctic, each of the richly illustrated essays collected here draw on a range of disciplinary insights to explore some of the most fundamental, universal questions that confront us.
Download or read book The Materiality of Mourning written by Zahra Newby and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-07-17 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tangible remains play an important role in our relationships with the dead; they are pivotal to how we remember, mourn and grieve. The chapters in this volume analyse a diverse range of objects and their role in the processes of grief and mourning, with contributions by scholars in anthropology, history, fashion, thanatology, religious studies, archaeology, classics, sociology, and political science. The book brings together consideration of emotions, memory and material agency to inform a deeper understanding of the specific roles played by objects in funerary contexts across historical and contemporary societies.
Download or read book Staging Death written by Anastasia Dakouri-Hild and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-12-19 with total page 634 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Places are social, lived, ideational landscapes constructed by people as they inhabit their natural and built environment. An ‘archaeology of place’ attempts to move beyond the understanding of the landscape as inert background or static fossil of human behaviour. From a specifically mortuary perspective, this approach entails a focus on the inherently mutable, transient and performative qualities of 'deathscapes': how they are remembered, obliterated, forgotten, reworked, or revisited over time. Despite latent interest in this line of enquiry, few studies have explored the topic explicitly in Aegean archaeology. This book aims to identify ways in which to think about the deathscape as a cross between landscapes, tombs, bodies, and identities, supplementing and expanding upon well explored themes in the field (e.g. tombs as vehicles for the legitimization of power; funerary landscapes as arenas of social and political competition). The volume recasts a wealth of knowledge about Aegean mortuary cultures against a theoretical background, bringing the field up to date with recent developments in the archaeology of place.
Download or read book Death Rituals and Social Order in the Ancient World written by Colin Renfrew and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume, with essays by leading archaeologists and prehistorians, considers how prehistoric humans attempted to recognise, understand and conceptualise death.
Download or read book The Corpse in the Middle Ages written by Romedio Schmitz-Esser and published by Harvey Miller Publishers. This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To what extent are the dead truly dead? In medieval society, corpses were assigned special functions and meanings in several different ways. They were still present in the daily life of the family of the deceased, and could even play active roles in the life of the community. Taking the materiality of death as a point of departure, this book comprehensively examines the conservation, burial and destruction of the corpse in its specific historical context. A complex and ambivalent treatment of the dead body emerges, one which necessarily confronts established modern perspectives on death. New scientific methods have enabled archaeologists to understand the remains of the dead as valuable source material. This book contextualizes the resulting insights for the first time in an interdisciplinary framework, considering their place in the broader picture drawn by the written sources of this period, ranging from canon law and hagiography to medieval literature and historiography. It soon becomes obvious that the dead body is more than a physical object, since its existence only becomes relevant in the cultural setting it is perceived in. In analogy to the findings for the living body in gender studies, the corpse too, can best be understood as constructed. Ultimately, the dead body is shaped by society, i.e. the living. This book examines the mechanisms by which this cultural construction of the body took place in medieval Europe. The result is a fascinating story that leads deep into medieval theories and social practices, into the discourses of the time and the daily life experiences during this epoch.
Download or read book Corpse Encounters written by Jacqueline Elam and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-06-13 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book sustains a critical glance at the ways in which we attend to the corpse, tracing a trajectory from encounter toward considering options for disposal: veneered mortuary internment, green burial and its attendant rot, cremation and alkaline hydrolysis, donation and display, and ecological burial. Through tracing the possible futures of the dead that haunt the living, through both the stories that we tell and physical manifestations following the end of life, we expose the workings of aesthetics that shape corpses, as well as the ways in which corpses spill over, resisting aestheticization. This book creates a space for ritualized practices surrounding death: corpse disposal; corpse aesthetics that shape both practices attendant upon and representations of the corpse; and literary, figural, and cultural representations that deploy these practices to tell a story about dead bodies—about their separation from the living, about their disposability, and ultimately about the living who survive the dead, if only for a while. There is an aesthetics of erasure persistently at work on the dead body. It must be quickly hidden from sight to shield us from the certain trauma of our own demise, or so the unspoken argument goes. Experts—scientists, forensic specialists, death-care professionals, and law enforcement—are the only ones qualified to view the dead for any extended period of time. The rest of us, with only brief doses, inoculate ourselves from the materiality of death in complex and highly ritualized ceremonies. Beyond participating in the project of restoring our sense of finitude, we try to make sense of the untouchable, unviewable, haunting, and taboo presence of the corpse itself.
Download or read book Taming Time Timing Death written by Professor Dorthe Refslund Christensen and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-06-28 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Departing from a persisting current in Western thought, which conceives of time in the abstract, and often reflects upon death as occupying a space at life's margins, this book begins from position that it is in fact through the material and perishable world that we experience time. As such, it is with death and our encounters with it, that form the basis of human conceptions of time. Presenting rich, interdisciplinary empirical studies of death rituals and practices across the globe, from the US and Europe, Asia, The Middle East, Australasia and Africa, Taming Time, Timing Death explores the manner in which social technologies and rituals have been and are implemented to avoid, delay or embrace death, or communicate with the dead, thus informing and manifesting humans' understanding of time. It will therefore be of interest to scholars and students of anthropology, philosophy, sociology and social theory, human geography and religion.
Download or read book Residues of Death written by Taylor & Francis Group and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-18 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a critical overview of the changing ways people mourn, commemorate and interact with the remains of the dead, including bodies, materials and digital artefacts. It focuses on how residues of death persist and circulate through different spaces, materials, data and mediated memories, refiguring how the disposal of the dead is understood, enacted and contested across the globe. The volume contains contributions by scholars from a number of disciplines and includes a diverse range of case studies drawn from Asia, Europe and North America. Together they reveal how rapidly changing practices, industries and experiences around death's remains involve the entwining of digital technologies with other material and ritualised forms of commemoration, as well as with shifting boundaries between the sacred and the profane, the institutional and the vernacular, the public and the private.
Download or read book The Archaeology of Death and Burial written by Mike Parker Pearson and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2021-09-03 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The archaeology of death and burial is central to our attempts to understand vanished societies. Through the remains of funerary rituals we can learn not only about the attitudes of prehistoric people to death and the afterlife, but also about their way of life, their social organisation and their view of the world. This ambitious book reviews the latest research in this huge and important field, and describes the sometimes controversial interpretations that have led to rapid advances in our understanding of life and death in the distant past. A unique overview and synthesis of one of the most revealing fields of research into the past, it covers archaeology's most breathtaking discoveries, from Tutankhamen to the Ice Man, and will find a keen market among archaeologists, historians and others who have a professional interest in, or general curiosity about, death and burial.
