The Blackwell Companions to Anthropology offers a series of comprehensive syntheses of the traditional subdisciplines, primary subjects, and geographic areas of inquiry for the field. Taken together, the series represents both a contemporary survey of anthropology and a cutting edge guide to the emerging research and intellectual trends in the field as a whole.
Forthcoming
A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa, edited by Roy Richard Grinker, Stephen Lubkemann, and Christopher B. Steiner
A Companion to Witchcraft and Sorcery, edited by Bruce Kapferer
A Companion to Anthropological Genetics, edited by Dennis H. O’Rourke
A Companion to Oral History, edited by Mark Tebeau
A Companion to Cross‐Cultural Research, edited by Douglas R. White, E. Anthon Eff, and J. Patrick Gray
This edition first published 2018
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: Robben, Antonius C. G. M., editor.
Title: A companion to the anthropology of death / edited by Antonius C.G.M. Robben.
Description: Hoboken, NJ : Wiley, 2018. | Series: Blackwell companions to anthropology ; 32 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2017049158 (print) | LCCN 2018002969 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119222361 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119222316 (epub) | ISBN 9781119222293 (cloth)
Subjects: LCSH: Funeral rites and ceremonies–Cross‐cultural studies. | Death–Social aspects–Cross‐cultural studies.
Classification: LCC GT3190 (ebook) | LCC GT3190 .C58 2018 (print) | DDC 306.9–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017049158
Cover Image: (From top to bottom) Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo; © miralex/Gettyimages; © Majority World/Contributor/Gettyimages
Cover Design: Wiley
Olivier Allard teaches social anthropology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, PSL Research University) in Paris, and is a member of the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale. He has been working with the Warao in Venezuela since 2007: his PhD was centered on the ethical and emotional dimensions of kinship, and he has subsequently researched the involvement of the Warao in wider political and economic processes, for instance their dealings with bureaucracy.
Élisabeth Anstett is a social anthropologist, tenured senior researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris. Her recent works deal with the social impact of mass exhumations, and more broadly with the legacy of genocide and mass violence in Europe. She coedits the Human Remains and Violence book series published by Manchester University Press, and is also one of the three general editors of Human Remains & Violence: An Interdisciplinary Journal.
Ana Mariella Bacigalupo is Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo. Her research has focused on cultural transformation, systems of knowledge, and power – all from the perspective of Mapuche shamans from Chile and Argentina, their communities, and their critics. Her recent books include Thunder Shaman: Making History with Mapuche Spirits in Chile and Patagonia (2016); Shamans of the Foye Tree: Gender, Power and Healing among the Chilean Mapuche (2007); and La Voz del Kultrun en la Modernidad: Tradición y Cambio en la Terapéutica de Siete machi Mapuche (2001).
Ellen Badone is Professor of Anthropology and Religious Studies at McMaster University. In addition to North America, she has worked in Brittany and southern France on topics including death and dying, medical and psychological anthropology, popular Roman Catholicism and pilgrimage. Her publications include The Appointed Hour: Death, Worldview and Social Change in Brittany (1989), Religious Orthodoxy and Popular Faith in European Society (1990), and Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism (coedited with Sharon R. Roseman, 2004).
Sophie Bolt is a cultural anthropologist and Lecturer at the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen. Her PhD research investigated the practice of body donation in the Netherlands, while her recent research focuses on the wish of organ donors’ families and organ recipients to establish contact.
Judith Bovensiepen is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Kent who has been conducting fieldwork in Timor‐Leste since 2005. She has published a range of articles on the political and religious transformations of independence‐era Timor‐Leste, and she is the author of The Land of Gold: Post‐Conflict Recovery and Cultural Revival in Independent Timor‐Leste (2015).
Jennie E. Burnet is Associate Professor of Global Studies and Anthropology and Associate Director of the Global Studies Institute at Georgia State University in the United States. Her research explores the social, cultural, and psychological aspects of war, genocide, and mass violence and the micro‐level impact of large‐scale social change in the context of conflict. Her award‐winning book Genocide Lives in Us: Women, Memory and Silence in Rwanda was published in 2012.
Helen Stanton Chapple is an associate professor at Creighton University. She is the author of No Place for Dying: Hospitals and the Ideology of Rescue (2010), based on her research on how dying happens in the hospital. Her research interests include dying persons as an underserved population, the social implications of rescue and transplantation, and state policies regarding end‐of‐life care.
Beth A. Conklin is Associate Professor and Chair of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University. An ethnographer and medical anthropologist, she has worked with indigenous people in the Brazilian Amazon since the 1980s. She is the author of Consuming Grief: Compassionate Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society (2001) and numerous articles on the anthropology of the body, sociality, and emotion; ritual, cosmology, healing, and warfare in historical and comparative perspectives; and the cultural politics of indigenous environmental advocacy.
Jason Danely is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Oxford Brookes University. He is the author of Aging and Loss: Mourning and Maturity in Contemporary Japan (2015) and is currently conducting cross‐cultural research on the lived experiences of family caregivers of older adults in Japan and the United Kingdom with the support of an Enhancing Life Project award from the John Templeton Foundation.
Robert Desjarlais is a cultural anthropologist from Massachusetts and has taught anthropology at Sarah Lawrence College since 1994. He has conducted anthropological research in several settings, ranging from the Nepal Himalayas to Queens, New York, and from chess clubs in Manhattan to a shelter for the homeless in downtown Boston. He has also conducted extensive and collaborative research in Nepal among Hyolmo people, an ethnically Tibetan Buddhist people, since the late 1980s.
Abou Farman, an anthropologist, writer, and artist, is the author of Clerks of the Passage (2012). He is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research. As part of the artist duo caraballo‐farman, he has exhibited internationally, including at the Tate Modern in London and at PS1/MOMA in New York. He has received several grants and awards, including New York Film Academy and Guggenheim fellowships. He is the producer and cowriter of several feature films, most recently Icaros: A Vision (2017).
Jacqueline Fear‐Segal is Professor of American and Indigenous Histories at the University of East Anglia. Her publications include White Man’s Club: Schools, Race, and the Struggle of Indian Acculturation (2007), Indigenous Bodies: Reviewing, Relocating, Reclaiming (2013), and Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Histories, Memories, and Reclamations (2016). She is currently completing a study of the Carlisle Indian School photographs. Her next project Beyond the Spectacle (funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council) will investigate Native North American presence in Britain up to the present day.
Francisco Ferrándiz is researcher at the Spanish National Research Council. Since 2002, he has studied the politics of memory in contemporary Spain through the analysis of the exhumations of mass graves from the Civil War. His main books on this topic are El pasado bajo tierra: Exhumaciones contemporáneas de la Guerra Civil (2014) and Necropolitics: Mass Graves and Exhumations in the Age of Human Rights (coedited with Antonius C. G. M. Robben, 2015). He has published in journals such as American Ethnologist, Anthropology Today, Current Anthropology, Critique of Anthropology, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, and Ethnography.
Devin Flaherty is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She studies aging, end of life, and care on the Caribbean island of St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands. She recently completed 14 months of fieldwork and is currently writing her dissertation, which explores aging, dying, caretaking, and mourning in the (post)colonial context of this unincorporated American territory.
Joost Fontein is Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa. His first monograph The Silence of Great Zimbabwe (2006) drew on doctoral research that won the ASA Audrey Richards Prize in 2004. His second book, Remaking Mutirikwi (2015), was shortlisted for the 2016 ASA USA Herskovits prize. He has edited the Journal of Southern African Studies (2008–2014), cofounded and coedited Critical African Studies (2009–2017), and cofounded the Bones Collective research network.
Alexander Laban Hinton is Director of the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, Professor of Anthropology, and UNESCO Chair in Genocide Prevention at Rutgers University. He is the author of the award‐winning Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide (2005) and nine edited or coedited collections. His most recent book is Man or Monster? The Trial of a Khmer Rouge Torturer (2016).
Charlotte Ikels is Professor of Anthropology Emerita at Case Western Reserve University. Her earlier work focused on the impact on the lives of the urban elderly of China’s shift to a market economy. Her most recent research focuses on the development of the field of bioethics in China by noting the changing discourse and practice around key ethical questions such as organ sourcing and assistive reproductive technologies.
Carol A. Kidron is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Haifa, Israel. Ethnographically exploring personal and collective Holocaust and genocide commemoration, Kidron has undertaken comparative work with Holocaust descendants in Israel and the children of Cambodian genocide survivors in Cambodia and Canada. Kidron has examined the localization of Euro‐Western discourses on memorialization, justice and reconciliation, victimhood, and trauma in Cambodia, exploring sites of friction in the contact zones of local–global encounters.
Michael Lambek holds a Canada Research Chair at the University of Toronto Scarborough, where he is Professor of Anthropology. Among his books are Human Spirits (1981); Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte (1993); The Weight of the Past (2002), and The Ethical Condition (2015), as well as edited collections on religion, irony, memory, and ethical life. He has taught at the London School of Economics and recently served as editor of HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory.
Uli Linke is Professor of Anthropology at Rochester Institute of Technology. Her principal areas of interest include the political anthropology of the body, visual culture, violence, memory, and genocide. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in Europe, with long‐term projects in Germany. Her major publications include Blood and Nation: The European Aesthetics of Race (1999) and German Bodies: Race and Representation After Hitler (1999).
Ivana Maček is Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer at the Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University. Her major publications are Sarajevo under Siege: Anthropology in Wartime (2009) and an edited volume Engaging Violence: Trauma, Memory and Representation (2014). Her current research and writing addresses Swedes’ engagements in global war zones, intergenerational transmission of experiences of war among Bosnians in Sweden, and anthropological methods.
Hudson McFann is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography at Rutgers University. He holds a BA from Ohio State University and an MA from New York University. McFann’s work has been funded by the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, the National Science Foundation, and the Center for Khmer Studies. He was named the MA Degree Representative for NYU Gallatin’s Class of 2013 and received the 2010 Provost’s Distinguished Senior Award at Ohio State University.
Erik Mueggler is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. His books include The Age of Wild Ghosts: Memory Violence and Place in Southwest China (2001), The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet (2011), and Songs for Dead Parents: Corpse, Text and World in Southwest China (2017).
Isak Niehaus teaches anthropology at Brunel University London. He has done extensive fieldwork in South African rural areas on the topics of population relocations, witchcraft, masculinity, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and local‐level politics. His most recent monograph is Witchcraft and a Life in the New South Africa (2013).
Liv Nilsson Stutz, an archaeologist specializing in burials and mortuary practices, is Senior Lecturer at Emory University. She has published widely on Mesolithic mortuary practices, archaeothanatology, and archaeological theory. She coedited The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Death and Burial (2013) and is an editor for the journal Archaeological Dialogues.
Frances Norwood is Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Anthropology at George Washington University. With a PhD in medical anthropology from the University of California San Francisco/Berkeley, she has 20 years’ experience conducting research on innovations in home‐ and community‐based care, long‐term care and end‐of‐life support for those who are elderly and disabled. She is the recipient of the Margaret Mead Award for her book The Maintenance of Life (2009).
Istvan Praet is Reader in Anthropology at the University of Roehampton in London. He has an interest in both Western and non‐Western conceptions of life. He is the author of Animism and the Question of Life (2014), a comparative study based on ethnographic fieldwork with Chachi people in northwestern Ecuador. More recently he has developed an interest in the anthropology of science; he currently works with astrobiologists and planetary scientists.
Ruth J. Prince is Associate Professor in Medical Anthropology at the University of Oslo’s Institute of Health and Society. Her recent research focuses on the state, citizenship, and biomedicine in Kenya. She is coauthor of The Land is Dying: Contingency, Creativity and Conflict in Kenya, with Wenzel Geissler, which won the 2010 Royal Anthropological Society’s Amuary Talbot Prize for best African ethnography; and has edited several books including Making and Unmaking Public Health in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (with Rebecca Marsland, 2014) and The Politics and Ethics of Voluntary Labour in Africa (with Hannah Brown, 2016).
Antonius C. G. M. Robben is Professor of Anthropology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. His books include Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina (2005), which won the Textor Prize from the American Anthropological Association in 2006 for Excellence in Anthropology; Argentina Betrayed: Memory, Mourning, and Accountability (2018); and the edited volumes Necropolitics: Mass Graves and Exhumations in the Age of Human Rights (with Francisco Ferrándiz, 2015) and Death, Mourning, and Burial: A Cross‐Cultural Reader (2nd ed. 2017).
George Sanders is Associate Professor of Sociology at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. His research explores the relationship between consumer capitalism and sacred rituals.
Daniel Jordan Smith is Professor of Anthropology at Brown University. His books include A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria (2007), AIDS Doesn’t Show Its Face: Inequality, Morality, and Social Change in Nigeria (2014), and To Be a Man Is Not a One‐Day Job: Masculinity, Money, and Intimacy in Nigeria (2017).
Finn Stepputat is a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS). He works in the Peace, Risk and Violence research group, and has published extensively on issues of armed conflict, forced migration, state, sovereignty, and the politics of dead bodies, including Governing the Dead (2014).
C. Jason Throop is Professor of Anthropology and Chair at the Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles. He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork on pain, suffering, empathy, and morality on the island of Yap in Micronesia. He is the author of Suffering and Sentiment: Exploring the Vicissitudes of Experience and Pain in Yap (2010) and the coeditor of Toward an Anthropology of the Will (with Keith M. Murphy, 2010) and The Anthropology of Empathy (with Douglas W. Hollan 2011).
Yohko Tsuji is Adjunct Associate Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University. Born in Japan, she came to America as a student in 1976. Her experience of living in a foreign culture led her to study anthropology. She received her PhD from Cornell University in 1991 after studying old age in America. She has also conducted fieldwork in China, Taiwan, and Thailand and continued her research on aging and death in Japan for more than two decades.