Death in the Early Twenty-first Century PDF Download

Author: Sébastien Penmellen Boret
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319523651
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296

View

Book Description
Focusing on tradition, technology, and authority, this volume challenges classical understandings that mortuary rites are inherently conservative. The contributors examine innovative and enduring ideas and practices of death, which reflect and constitute changing patterns of social relationships, memorialisation, and the afterlife. This cross-cultural study examines the lived experiences of men and women from societies across the globe with diverse religious heritages and secular value systems. The book demonstrates that mortuary practices are not fixed forms, but rather dynamic processes negotiated by the dying, the bereaved, funeral experts, and public institutions. In addition to offering a new theoretical perspective on the anthropology of death, this work provides a rich resource for readers interested in human responses to mortality: the one certainty of human existence.

Author: Marius Rotar
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443832561
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 365

View

Book Description
This book features a selection of the most representative papers presented during the international conference Dying and Death in 18th-21st Century Europe (ABDD). It invites you on a fascinating journey across the last three centuries of Europe, with death as your guide. The past and present realities of the complex phenomena of death and dying in Romania, the United Kingdom, Bulgaria, Serbia, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, and Italy are dealt with, by authors from varying backgrounds: historians, sociologists, priests, humanists, anthropologists, and doctors. This is yet more proof that death as a topic cannot be confined to one science, the deciphering of its meanings and of the shifts it effects requiring a joint, interdisciplinary effort.

Author: Shannon Lee Dawdy
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691228450
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

View

Book Description
A mesmerizing trip across America to investigate the changing face of death in contemporary life Death in the United States is undergoing a quiet revolution. You can have your body frozen, dissected, composted, dissolved, or tanned. Your family can incorporate your remains into jewelry, shotgun shells, paperweights, and artwork. Cremations have more than doubled, and DIY home funerals and green burials are on the rise. American Afterlives is Shannon Lee Dawdy’s lyrical and compassionate account of changing death practices in America as people face their own mortality and search for a different kind of afterlife. As an anthropologist and archaeologist, Dawdy knows that how a society treats its dead yields powerful clues about its beliefs and values. As someone who has experienced loss herself, she knows there is no way to tell this story without also reexamining her own views about death and dying. In this meditative and gently humorous book, Dawdy embarks on a transformative journey across the United States, talking to funeral directors, death-care entrepreneurs, designers, cemetery owners, death doulas, and ordinary people from all walks of life. What she discovers is that, by reinventing death, Americans are reworking their ideas about personhood, ritual, and connection across generations. She also confronts the seeming contradiction that American death is becoming at the same time more materialistic and more spiritual. Written in conjunction with a documentary film project, American Afterlives features images by cinematographer Daniel Zox that provide their own testament to our rapidly changing attitudes toward death and the afterlife.

Author: Danielle Fuentes Morgan
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252085307
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

View

Book Description
By subverting comedy's rules and expectations, African American satire promotes social justice by connecting laughter with ethical beliefs in a revolutionary way. Danielle Fuentes Morgan ventures from Suzan-Lori Parks to Leslie Jones and Dave Chappelle to Get Out and Atlanta to examine the satirical treatment of race and racialization across today's African American culture. Morgan analyzes how African American artists highlight the ways that society racializes people and bolsters the powerful myth that we live in a "post-racial" nation. The latter in particular inspires artists to take aim at the idea racism no longer exists or the laughable notion of Americans "not seeing" racism or race. Their critique changes our understanding of the boundaries between staged performance and lived experience and create ways to better articulate Black selfhood. Adventurous and perceptive, Laughing to Keep from Dying reveals how African American satirists unmask the illusions and anxieties surrounding race in the twenty-first century.

Author: Candi K. Cann
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813145422
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212

View

Book Description
For millennia, the rituals of death and remembrance have been fixed by time and location, but in the twenty-first century, grieving has become a virtual phenomenon. Today, the dead live on through social media profiles, memorial websites, and saved voicemails that can be accessed at any time. This dramatic cultural shift has made the physical presence of death secondary to the psychological experience of mourning. Virtual Afterlives investigates emerging popular bereavement traditions. Author Candi K. Cann examines new forms of grieving and evaluates how religion and the funeral industry have both contributed to mourning rituals despite their limited ability to remedy grief. As grieving traditions and locations shift, people are discovering new ways to memorialize their loved ones. Bodiless and spontaneous memorials like those at the sites of the shootings in Aurora and Newtown and the Boston Marathon bombing, as well as roadside memorials, car decals, and tattoos are contributing to a new bereavement language that crosses national boundaries and culture-specific perceptions of death. Examining mourning practices in the United States in comparison to the broader background of practices in Asia and Latin America, Virtual Afterlives seeks to resituate death as a part of life and mourning as a unifying process that helps to create identities and narratives for communities. As technology changes the ways in which we experience death, this engaging study explores the culture of bereavement and the ways in which it, too, is being significantly transformed.

Author: Ruth McManus
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527544362
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 284

View

Book Description
Death is one of the most challenging aspects of living, demanding inventive and meaningful responses. This insightful collection demonstrates cultural commitment to improving the conditions of the dying and dead and also documents the varied, creative ways that we, the living, already respond to death. Collectively, the 16 essays are an interrogation of the commonly held assumption that death is somehow hidden, denied, or done badly as standard practice. The underpinning themes and narratives in this anthology make a significant contribution to death studies debates and conversations by offering examples of post-colonial, multi-cultural practices that span professional and every-day points of intersection. Death studies can be a challenging and complex field; nevertheless each contributor here highlights specific ways in which assumptions and beliefs about contemporary death practices can be unpicked, nuanced and challenged.

Author: Keith Wailoo
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469617412
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 352

View

Book Description
This groundbreaking book chronicles the history of sickle cell anemia in the United States, tracing its transformation from an "invisible" malady to a powerful, yet contested, cultural symbol of African American pain and suffering. Set in Memphis, home of one of the nation's first sickle cell clinics, Dying in the City of the Blues reveals how the recognition, treatment, social understanding, and symbolism of the disease evolved in the twentieth century, shaped by the politics of race, region, health care, and biomedicine. Using medical journals, patients' accounts, black newspapers, blues lyrics, and many other sources, Keith Wailoo follows the disease and its sufferers from the early days of obscurity before sickle cell's "discovery" by Western medicine; through its rise to clinical, scientific, and social prominence in the 1950s; to its politicization in the 1970s and 1980s. Looking forward, he considers the consequences of managed care on the politics of disease in the twenty-first century. A rich and multilayered narrative, Dying in the City of the Blues offers valuable new insight into the African American experience, the impact of race relations and ideologies on health care, and the politics of science, medicine, and disease.

Author: Leon R. Hayduchok
Publisher: WestBow Press
ISBN: 9781449758202
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 0

View

Book Description
The story of Adam and Eve one of the oldest and most widely cherished stories in human history has been misused and abused in the battleground of America's culture war. Dating back to the Scopes Trial of 1925, evolutionists and creationists have been tearing this story apart in their fight over the origin of man, losing sight of one significant detail: the story of Adam and Eve was not written as a scientific treatise but as an account of human nature and our relationship with God and one another. Dying to Control offers a fresh and provocative look at the Garden of Eden drama, revealing how the story of Adam and Eve is our story. This penetrating work exposes our obsession with control and the extreme lengths we go to preserve and promote the self. This overdue commentary on American culture offers a compelling perspective on how to experience the fullness of life in a world dying to control."

Author: L.S. Dugdale
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062932659
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 215

View

Book Description
A Columbia University physician comes across a popular medieval text on dying well written after the horror of the Black Plague and discovers ancient wisdom for rethinking death and gaining insight today on how we can learn the lost art of dying well in this wise, clear-eyed book that is as compelling and soulful as Being Mortal, When Breath Becomes Air, and Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. As a specialist in both medical ethics and the treatment of older patients, Dr. L. S. Dugdale knows a great deal about the end of life. Far too many of us die poorly, she argues. Our culture has overly medicalized death: dying is often institutional and sterile, prolonged by unnecessary resuscitations and other intrusive interventions. We are not going gently into that good night—our reliance on modern medicine can actually prolong suffering and strip us of our dignity. Yet our lives do not have to end this way. Centuries ago, in the wake of the Black Plague, a text was published offering advice to help the living prepare for a good death. Written during the late Middle Ages, ars moriendi—The Art of Dying—made clear that to die well, one first had to live well and described what practices best help us prepare. When Dugdale discovered this Medieval book, it was a revelation. Inspired by its holistic approach to the final stage we must all one day face, she draws from this forgotten work, combining its wisdom with the knowledge she has gleaned from her long medical career. The Lost Art of Dying is a twenty-first century ars moriendi, filled with much-needed insight and thoughtful guidance that will change our perceptions. By recovering our sense of finitude, confronting our fears, accepting how our bodies age, developing meaningful rituals, and involving our communities in end-of-life care, we can discover what it means to both live and die well. And like the original ars moriendi, The Lost Art of Dying includes nine black-and-white drawings from artist Michael W. Dugger. Dr. Dugdale offers a hopeful perspective on death and dying as she shows us how to adapt the wisdom from the past to our lives today. The Lost Art of Dying is a vital, affecting book that reconsiders death, death culture, and how we can transform how we live each day, including our last.

Author: Sallie Tisdale
Publisher: Gallery Books
ISBN: 1501182188
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 256

View

Book Description
A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK CRITICS’ TOP 10 BOOK OF THE YEAR “In its loving, fierce specificity, this book on how to die is also a blessedly saccharine-free guide for how to live” (The New York Times). Former NEA fellow and Pushcart Prize-winning writer Sallie Tisdale offers a lyrical, thought-provoking, yet practical perspective on death and dying in Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them). Informed by her many years working as a nurse, with more than a decade in palliative care, Tisdale provides a frank, direct, and compassionate meditation on the inevitable. From the sublime (the faint sound of Mozart as you take your last breath) to the ridiculous (lessons on how to close the sagging jaw of a corpse), Tisdale leads us through the peaks and troughs of death with a calm, wise, and humorous hand. Advice for Future Corpses is more than a how-to manual or a spiritual bible: it is a graceful compilation of honest and intimate anecdotes based on the deaths Tisdale has witnessed in her work and life, as well as stories from cultures, traditions, and literature around the world. Tisdale explores all the heartbreaking, beautiful, terrifying, confusing, absurd, and even joyful experiences that accompany the work of dying, including: A Good Death: What does it mean to die “a good death”? Can there be more than one kind of good death? What can I do to make my death, or the deaths of my loved ones, good? Communication: What to say and not to say, what to ask, and when, from the dying, loved ones, doctors, and more. Last Months, Weeks, Days, and Hours: What you might expect, physically and emotionally, including the limitations, freedoms, pain, and joy of this unique time. Bodies: What happens to a body after death? What options are available to me after my death, and how do I choose—and make sure my wishes are followed? Grief: “Grief is the story that must be told over and over...Grief is the breath after the last one.” Beautifully written and compulsively readable, Advice for Future Corpses offers the resources and reassurance that we all need for planning the ends of our lives, and is essential reading for future corpses everywhere. “Sallie Tisdale’s elegantly understated new book pretends to be a user’s guide when in fact it’s a profound meditation” (David Shields, bestselling author of Reality Hunger).