The New Death

Mortality and Death Care in the Twenty-First Century

Shannon Lee Dawdy, Tamara Kneese

• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press Published in Association with School for Advanced Research Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780826363466
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The New Death 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. Using ethnographic, historical, and media-based approaches, the contributors to this volume focus on new attitudes and practices around mortality and mourning—from the possibilities of digitally enhanced afterlives to industrialized "necro-waste, " the ethics of care, the meaning of secular rituals, and the political economy of death. Together, the chapters coalesce around the argument that there are two major currents running through the new death—reconfigurations of temporality and of intimacy. 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.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. Mortality
• Interlude. Notes from the Field
• Part II. Death Care
• On Endings
• References
• List of Contributors
• Index