The New Death

"There is perhaps no object as uncanny as the corpse--or more subject to elaborate taboos--and few topics yield as much cross-cultural anxiety as human mortality. Yet beliefs and practices around death never stand still. 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. 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 attittudes 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. Some aspects of the new death represent a remaking of older ideas and practices. But 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" --