Download or read book American Deathways The Meaning of Death in the American Indian Society written by Claudia Casagrande and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2002-04-16 with total page 39 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2000 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,0 (A), LMU Munich (American Cultural History), course: American Cultural History, language: English, abstract: Introduction To examine the meaning of death in the American Indian society, it is neces-sary to know about the general facts of American Indians. First of all, it is not possible, to write about any topic concerning “ the American Indian society”, because there is not one single culture for all those different American Indian nations. The following paper uses examples and explanations from all Indian tribes and, even tough there is a huge diversity, the common endured history and today’s American Indian inner fights between past and tradition unite all North American Indians to some kind of “American Indian society.” To approach the topic of death after common information, a focus on North American Indian statistics concerning death will follow. These statistics will show the differences in life expectations literally and metaphorically. Whereas some specific forms of American Indian death, like infanticide, disappeared through the centuries, others, well known likewise in “white” and “black” society, such as homicide and suicide, changed their causes, but consist within and outside the reservation boundaries. As the causes of death altered since the colonization of America, death has also become a new face for the American Indians. Skirmishes between tribes changed to extinguishing wars between “new” Americans and “native” Americans. The surviving American Indians were forced to leave their homelands and move to special reservation areas. Thereby, the traditional death rites modified through a change of living conditions, surroundings, and environment. To recall all the gathered aspects of “American Indian death ways”, the Na-vajo nation as today’s largest American Indian tribe, will serve as example to re-view and explain old rites, changes their gone through, and history’s effects on their present day appearance. At the end of the journey through various aspects of the meaning of death for the American Indian society, examples from four American Indian authors shall highlight the importance of death as well in American Indian daily life, as in their history and their philosophy. [...]
Download or read book Death in the New World written by Erik R. Seeman and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-09-28 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reminders of death were everywhere in the New World, from the epidemics that devastated Indian populations and the mortality of slaves working the Caribbean sugar cane fields to the unfamiliar diseases that afflicted Europeans in the Chesapeake and West Indies. According to historian Erik R. Seeman, when Indians, Africans, and Europeans encountered one another, they could not ignore the similarities in their approaches to death. All of these groups believed in an afterlife to which the soul or spirit traveled after death. As a result all felt that corpses—the earthly vessels for the soul or spirit—should be treated with respect, and all mourned the dead with commemorative rituals. Seeman argues that deathways facilitated communication among peoples otherwise divided by language and custom. They observed, asked questions about, and sometimes even participated in their counterparts' rituals. At the same time, insofar as New World interactions were largely exploitative, the communication facilitated by parallel deathways was often used to influence or gain advantage over one's rivals. In Virginia, for example, John Smith used his knowledge of Powhatan deathways to impress the local Indians with his abilities as a healer as part of his campaign to demonstrate the superiority of English culture. Likewise, in the 1610-1614 war between Indians and English, the Powhatans mutilated English corpses because they knew this act would horrify their enemies. Told in a series of engrossing narratives, Death in the New World is a landmark study that offers a fresh perspective on the dynamics of cross-cultural encounters and their larger ramifications in the Atlantic world.
Download or read book Death and the American South written by Craig Thompson Friend and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Death and the American South is an edited collection of twelve never-before-published essays, featuring leading senior scholars as well as influential up-and-coming historians. The contributors use a variety of methodological approaches for their research and explore different parts of the South and varying themes in history.
Download or read book Chinese American Death Rituals written by Sue Fawn Chung and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2005-09-15 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Death is a topic that has fascinated people for centuries. In the English-speaking world, eulogies in poetic form could be traced back to the 1640s, but gained prominence with the 'graveyard school' of poets in the eighteenth century often stressing the finality of death. Chinese American Death Rituals examines Chinese American funerary rituals and cemeteries from the late nineteenth century until the present in order to understand the importance of Chinese funerary rites and their transformation through time. The authors in this volume discuss the meaning of funerary rituals and their normative dimension and the social practices that have been influenced by tradition. Shaped by individual beliefs, customs, religion, and environment, Chinese Americans have resolved the tensions between assimilation into the mainstream culture and their strong Chinese heritage in a variety of ways. This volume expertly describes and analyzes Chinese American cultural retention and transformation in rituals after death.
Download or read book The Huron Wendat Feast of the Dead written by Erik R. Seeman and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2011-03 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Appreciating each other's funerary practices allowed the Wendats and French colonists to find common ground where there seemingly would be none. This title analyzes these encounters, using the Feast of the Dead as a metaphor for broader Indian-European relations in North America." -- WorldCat.
Download or read book Approaching Death written by Committee on Care at the End of Life and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 1997-10-30 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the end of life makes its inevitable appearance, people should be able to expect reliable, humane, and effective caregiving. Yet too many dying people suffer unnecessarily. While an "overtreated" dying is feared, untreated pain or emotional abandonment are equally frightening. Approaching Death reflects a wide-ranging effort to understand what we know about care at the end of life, what we have yet to learn, and what we know but do not adequately apply. It seeks to build understanding of what constitutes good care for the dying and offers recommendations to decisionmakers that address specific barriers to achieving good care. This volume offers a profile of when, where, and how Americans die. It examines the dimensions of caring at the end of life: Determining diagnosis and prognosis and communicating these to patient and family. Establishing clinical and personal goals. Matching physical, psychological, spiritual, and practical care strategies to the patient's values and circumstances. Approaching Death considers the dying experience in hospitals, nursing homes, and other settings and the role of interdisciplinary teams and managed care. It offers perspectives on quality measurement and improvement, the role of practice guidelines, cost concerns, and legal issues such as assisted suicide. The book proposes how health professionals can become better prepared to care well for those who are dying and to understand that these are not patients for whom "nothing can be done."
Download or read book Passages and Afterworlds written by Maarit Forde and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-15 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributors to Passages and Afterworlds explore death and its rituals across the Caribbean, drawing on ethnographic theories shaped by a deep understanding of the region's long history of violent encounters, exploitation, and cultural diversity. Examining the relationship between living bodies and the spirits of the dead, the contributors investigate the changes in cosmologies and rituals in the cultural sphere of death in relation to political developments, state violence, legislation, policing, and identity politics. Contributors address topics that range from the ever-evolving role of divinized spirits in Haiti and the contemporary mortuary practice of Indo-Trinidadians to funerary ceremonies in rural Jamaica and ancestor cults in Maroon culture in Suriname. Questions of alterity, difference, and hierarchy underlie these discussions of how racial, cultural, and class differences have been deployed in ritual practice and how such rituals have been governed in the colonial and postcolonial Caribbean. Contributors. Donald Cosentino, Maarit Forde, Yanique Hume, Paul Christopher Johnson, Aisha Khan, Keith E. McNeal, George Mentore, Richard Price, Karen Richman, Ineke (Wilhelmina) van Wetering, Bonno (H.U.E.) Thoden van Velzen
Download or read book The Reaper s Garden written by Vincent Brown and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-10-30 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Merle Curti Award Winner of the James A. Rawley Prize Winner of the Louis Gottschalk Prize Longlisted for the Cundill Prize “Vincent Brown makes the dead talk. With his deep learning and powerful historical imagination, he calls upon the departed to explain the living. The Reaper’s Garden stretches the historical canvas and forces readers to think afresh. It is a major contribution to the history of Atlantic slavery.”—Ira Berlin From the author of Tacky’s Revolt, a landmark study of life and death in colonial Jamaica at the zenith of the British slave empire. What did people make of death in the world of Atlantic slavery? In The Reaper’s Garden, Vincent Brown asks this question about Jamaica, the staggeringly profitable hub of the British Empire in America—and a human catastrophe. Popularly known as the grave of the Europeans, it was just as deadly for Africans and their descendants. Yet among the survivors, the dead remained both a vital presence and a social force. In this compelling and evocative story of a world in flux, Brown shows that death was as generative as it was destructive. From the eighteenth-century zenith of British colonial slavery to its demise in the 1830s, the Grim Reaper cultivated essential aspects of social life in Jamaica—belonging and status, dreams for the future, and commemorations of the past. Surveying a haunted landscape, Brown unfolds the letters of anxious colonists; listens in on wakes, eulogies, and solemn incantations; peers into crypts and coffins, and finds the very spirit of human struggle in slavery. Masters and enslaved, fortune seekers and spiritual healers, rebels and rulers, all summoned the dead to further their desires and ambitions. In this turbulent transatlantic world, Brown argues, “mortuary politics” played a consequential role in determining the course of history. Insightful and powerfully affecting, The Reaper’s Garden promises to enrich our understanding of the ways that death shaped political life in the world of Atlantic slavery and beyond.
Download or read book Do Funerals Matter written by William G. Hoy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do Funerals Matter? is a creative interweaving of historical, sociocultural, and research-based perspectives on death rituals, drawing from myriad sources to create a picture of what death rituals have been; and where, especially in the Western world, they are going. Death educators, researchers, counselors, clergy, funeral-service professionals, and others will appreciate the book’s theory- and research-based approach to the ways in which different cultural groups memorialize their dead. They will also find clear clinical and practical applications in the author’s exploration of the five ritual anchors of death-related ceremonial practice and help for professionals counseling the bereaved surrounding funerals. Based on nearly three decades of research and teaching on funeral rites, this volume promises to fill an important gap in the cross-cultural literature on bereavement, while answering an important question for our generation: Do funerals matter?
Download or read book The Taking and Displaying of Human Body Parts as Trophies by Amerindians written by Richard J. Chacon and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-08-21 with total page 694 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume mainly focuses on the practice of taking and displaying various body parts as trophies in both North and South America. The editors and contributors (which include Native Peoples from both continents) examine the evidence and causes of Amerindian trophy taking. Additionally, they present objectively and discuss dispassionately the topic of human proclivity toward ritual violence. This book fills the gap in literature on this subject.
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 921 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 Mortal Remains written by Nancy Isenberg and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-07-05 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mortal Remains introduces new methods of analyzing death and its crucial meanings over a 240-year period, from 1620 to 1860, untangling its influence on other forms of cultural expression, from religion and politics to race relations and the nature of war. In this volume historians and literary scholars join forces to explore how, in a medically primitive and politically evolving environment, mortality became an issue that was inseparable from national self-definition. Attempting to make sense of their suffering and loss while imagining a future of cultural permanence and spiritual value, early Americans crafted metaphors of death in particular ways that have shaped the national mythology. As the authors show, the American fascination with murder, dismembered bodies, and scenes of death, the allure of angel sightings, the rural cemetery movement, and the enshrinement of George Washington as a saintly father, constituted a distinct sensibility. Moreover, by exploring the idea of the vanishing Indian and the brutality of slavery, the authors demonstrate how a culture of violence and death had an early effect on the American collective consciousness. Mortal Remains draws on a range of primary sources—from personal diaries and public addresses, satire and accounts of sensational crime—and makes a needed contribution to neglected aspects of cultural history. It illustrates the profound ways in which experiences with death and the imagery associated with it became enmeshed in American society, politics, and culture.
Download or read book The Odd the Unusual and the Strange written by Tracy K. Betsinger and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2019-12-03 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abnormal burial practices have long been a source of fascination and debate within the fields of mortuary archaeology and bioarchaeology. The Odd, the Unusual, and the Strange investigates an unparalleled geographic and temporal range of burials that differ from the usual customs of their broader societies, emphasizing the importance of a holistic, context-driven approach to these intriguing cases. From an Andean burial dating to 3500 BC to mummified bodies interred in the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, Sicily, during the twentieth century, the studies in this volume cross the globe and span millennia. The unusual cases explored here include Native American cemeteries in Illinois, “vampire” burials in medieval Poland, and a mass grave of decapitated soldiers in ancient China. Moving away from the simplistic assumption that these burials represent people who were considered deviant in society, contributors demonstrate the importance of an integrated biocultural approach in determining why an individual was buried in an unusual way. Drawing on historical, sociocultural, archaeological, and biological data, this volume critically evaluates the binary of “typical” versus “atypical” burials. It expands our understanding of the continuum of variation within mortuary practices, helping researchers better interpret burial evidence to learn about the people and cultures of the past. A volume in the series Bioarchaeological Interpretations of the Human Past: Local, Regional, and Global Perspectives, edited by Clark Spencer Larsen
Download or read book Violence and the Sacred in the Ancient Near East written by Ian Hodder and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-14 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is primarily for researchers and students in the archaeology of the Ancient Near East. The volume results from intense interaction between archaeologists at these sites and a group of theorists studying the scholarship of René Girard.
Download or read book Cities of the Dead written by Joseph Roach and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early eighteenth century, a delegation of Iroquois visited Britain, exciting the imagination of the London crowds with images of the “feathered people” and warlike “Mohocks.” Today, performing in a popular Afrodiasporic tradition, “Mardi Gras Indians” or “Black Masking Indians” take to the streets of New Orleans at carnival time and for weeks thereafter, parading in handmade “suits” resplendent with beadwork and feathers. What do these seemingly disparate strands of culture share over three centuries and several thousand miles of ocean? Interweaving theatrical, musical, and ritual performance along the Atlantic rim from the eighteenth century to the present, Cities of the Dead explores a rich continuum of cultural exchange that imaginatively reinvents, recreates, and restores history. Joseph Roach reveals how performance can revise the unwritten past, comparing patterns of remembrance and forgetting in how communities forge their identities and imagine their futures. He examines the syncretic performance traditions of Europe, Africa, and the Americas in the urban sites of London and New Orleans, through social events ranging from burials to sacrifices, auctions to parades, encompassing traditions as diverse as Haitian Voudon and British funerals. Considering processes of substitution, or surrogation, as enacted in performance, Roach demonstrates the ways in which people and cultures fill the voids left by death and departure. The twenty-fifth anniversary edition of this classic work features a new preface reflecting on the relevance of its arguments to the politics of performance and performance in contemporary politics.
Download or read book Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier written by José Rabasa and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the representations of violence in colonial Nuevo Mexico as seen in history and fiction literature of the period.
Download or read book Clarel written by Herman Melville and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 940 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Melville's long poem Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876) was the last full-length book he published. Until the mid-twentieth century even the most partisan of Melville's advocates hesitated to endure a four-part poem of 150 cantos of almost 18,000 lines, about a naïve American named Clarel, on pilgrimage through the Palestinian ruins with a provocative cluster of companions. But modern critics have found Clarel a much better poem than was ever realized. Robert Penn Warren called it a precursor of The Waste Land. It abounds with revelations of Melville's inner life. Most strikingly, it is argued that the character Vine is a portrait of Melville's friend Hawthorne. Based on the only edition published during Melville's lifetime, this scholarly edition adopts thirty-nine corrections from a copy marked by Melville and incorporates 154 emendations by the present editors, an also includes a section of related documents and extensive discussions. This scholarly edition is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).
