Dead Bodies that Matter: Toward a New Ecology of Human Death in American Culture (original) (raw)
Related papers
Green Death: Sustainability and the Administration of the Dead
cultural geographies, 2018
This article explores changing American death care – the handling of the dead body and its materiality beyond death – in the context of US-based power relations over administration of human remains. The article briefly surveys efforts to make the afterlife of the dead more ‘sustainable’. I argue that this expanding governance entails intensified bioremediation: the reuse and reprocessing of dead bodies/parts, intensified forms of material-biological extraction, and the conversion of afterlife to forms of biovalue beyond death. First, some disposal efforts encourage an economy of body/parts and a utilitarian ethic of ‘no remains’. Accordingly, the afterlife is not ‘the end’ but a renewable material resource and opportunity to economize the body in death and put the dead body to work. Second, a range of practices now reimagine death as an opportunity for personal legacy and redeem the dead body’s decomposition as natural/as part of the natural world. Bioremediation in this case conceptually recuperates death into life so that death is not wasted; instead, the corpse serves as a material input for nature and a vehicle for personal ‘biopresence’. The article then considers some of the paradoxes and costs of greening the dead and outlines future research directions that might advance our understanding of the ways new sustainable disposal and commemorative technologies of the dead entrench racism and impact civil, consumer, and environmental rights. How bodies affect our environments today will impact people and landscapes in years to come. Because US governance of the dead has historically entailed the differential treatment of bodies after life, the article critically reflects on ‘death equity’ issues that operate across the living and the dead. The article concludes by querying how conduct for the dead might advance social justice through a material politics of human remains.
Death Matters: Cultural Sociology of Mortal Life
2019
It is often said that 'death is a part of life,' and yet death scholarship has always treated it as a separate domain. Death Matters overcomes this problematic tendency by broadening its scope beyond the usual concerns of dying, disposal, and funerals. The contributors consider a wide range of fascinating topics including the 'remains' of abandoned industrial sites, representations of civilian casualties of war and police shooting victims, public concern about antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and high-risk sexual activity. The anthology will be a game-changer. In addition to expanding and redefining the object of study, the editors present an innovative approach from cultural sociology. For scholars working in death studies, it offers a new perspective for studying the cultural dimension of mortality, memorialization and grief, and it will challenge them to reconsider the boundaries and foundational premises of their field. For scholars in cultural sociology, it will open new areas of research, reveal the importance of mortality in more established ones, and spark debate about the meaning of death. I congratulate the editors for assembling such thought-provoking collection, and for leading the way in such a promising direction for research.
Posthuman Ecologies of the Corpse
Kvinder, Køn & Forskning
Book review of Erin E. Edwards: The Modernist Corpse: Posthumanism and the Posthumous. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2018, 240 pages.
Re-Feminizing Death: Gender, Spirituality and Death Care in the Anthropocene
Religions, 2021
Critiques of ecologically harmful human activity in the Anthropocene extend beyond life and livelihoods to practices of dying, death, and the disposal of bodies. For members of the diffuse ‘New Death Movement’ operating in the post-secular West today, such environmental externalities are symptomatic of a broader failure of modern death care, what we refer to here as the ‘Death Industrial Complex’. According to New Death advocates, in its profit-driven, medicalised, de-ritualized and patriarchal form, modern death care fundamentally distorts humans’ relationship to mortality, and through it, nature. In response, the Movement promotes a (re)new(ed) way of ‘doing death’, one coded as spiritual and feminine, and based on the acceptance of natural cycles of decay and rebirth. In this article, we examine two examples from this Movement that demonstrate how the relationship between death, religion, and gender is re-configured in the Anthropocene: the rise of death doulas as alternates to f...
DEATH AND POP CULTURE. MODERN INNOVATIONS IN BODY DISPOSAL AND THEIR CULTURAL IMPACT
III. INTERNATIONAL KORKUT ATA SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH CONFERENCE November 22-24, 2024 Osmaniye, Türkiye FULL TEXTS BOOK (VOLUME-3), 2024
The paper will allow an argument about the changing landscape of body disposal methods in Western society with the introduction and acceptance of water cremation and body recomposition. First, it looks into traditional practices of burial and cremation with regard to the effect they have on the environment and the culture. The paper then outlines the structure of the study, which includes analysis of the reasons underlying new body disposal methods and synthesis of the responses from Western Europe and the USA. It also puts into focus some investigations regarding the changeable ways in which death has been perceived during the last few decades of the past, underscoring an initiative that is recent: the death positivity movement. Attention is finally turned to its impact on popular culture and its role in raising awareness about green burial. Popular culture in the twenty-first century also remains a discussion topic in the study, specifically representing values that characterize contemporary society, economic trends, and identity construction. The paper draws on a range of theoretical frameworks, from the cultural studies approach to that of the culture industry, for explaining these phenomena. Indeed, these emerging trends and cultural shifts could be seen to have a significant bearing on contemporary attitudes toward death and body disposal.
OMEGA - Journal of Death and Dying, 2020
provocative questions to arouse even the most reticent reader. It adds a distinctly sociological perspective to a field-at least in the United States (less so in the United Kingdom)-dominated by psychological and individualistic models. Death in the Modern World would make a Death in the modern world text for a sociology of death class. However, this provocative work should be read by anyone interested in the ways that social forces shape a society's approach to and understanding of death.
Becoming Dead: Burial Assemblages as Vitalist Devices
Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 2020
This text comprises a critical discussion of assemblage theory and its application to burial studies. In recent research, burials have been viewed as fluid and indeterminate assemblages that 'become' in varied ways depending on different perceptions (concepts and ideas) and apparatuses (e.g. excavation tools and measuring instruments). The past and the present are thus mixed in potentially ever-new configurations which run the risk of replacing epistemological relativism with ontological fluidity. It is argued here that the hypothetical mutability of burial assemblages can be reduced significantly by addressing the varying speed and degree of the involved processes of integration and disintegration. By doing this, the main focus is shifted to the animacy of such processes and how they may have been understood and utilized in burials. Using both general and specific examples, it is argued that cremation burials can be studied as carefully compiled amalgamations that utilize the properties and animacies of different materialities to deal with death, corpses and the afterlife. This is a proof, you can find the final version here: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959774320000116 It is Open Access.