Dead Bodies that Matter: Toward a New Ecology of Human Death in American Culture (original) (raw)

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 in the Early 21st Century

2017

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.

Necro-Eco: The Ecology of Death in Jim Crace's Being Dead

Mosaic 48.3

While modernist literary representations of death and the dissolution of the modern subject are often signaled by the breakdown of language, Jim Crace’s Being Dead (1999) situates the decomposition of the corpse at the forefront of the human’s un-becoming. Laying upon the beach of Baritone Bay, the bodies of two zoologists, Joseph and Celise, are host to a number of tiny micro-organisms, bacteria, vermin, and sea creatures that come into intimate proximity with their putrefying and decaying flesh. Through their participation in the decomposition of Joseph and Celise, these non-human creatures initiate a lively animacy that incites the demarcation (and dissolution) of the bounds of animal and human, life and death, object and subject. As active, subjective-objective participants in their own putrid mortifications, the corpses of Joseph and Celise are necro-ecological organisms: vibrant, organic, and vital, their bodies enact an enlivened post-mortem “subjectivity” that enables life to go on after death. The possibility for a post-mortem “subjectivity” arises from Donna Haraway’s contention that the living body is itself a site of multiplicitous, proliferating interactions with non-human animals. For Haraway, the flesh is a “material-semiotic node” (When Species Meet 4) that is home to the “bacteria, fungi, protists, and such,” that constitute ninety-percent of the human genome (4). Calling into question the unity and self-sameness of human flesh, Haraway suggests that “to be one is always to become with many” (4). So in life, as in death: the living body and the putrefying corpse are both sites of metamorphosis and cross-species interaction. Thus, in exploring the necro-ecological as a mode that represents death as an active and intimate process of human-animal participations, I argue that the corpse opens up new ways of thinking through the mechanisms of becoming and being dead. In considering how we might understand the ontological category of “being” dead, I draw from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who suggests that flesh is an ontological “fold” (Phenomenology of Perception 250) that produces emergent and contingent relations with animate and inanimate matter. A burgeoning locus point for the convergence of organic life, the corpse unravels humanist notions of selfhood, language, and rationality. Since Joseph and Celise are powerless to specify and name the creatures that take up residence in their bodies, they are effectively unseated as the sole proprietors, and propagators, of natural scientific discourse, zoology, and taxonomy. As such, Being Dead productively illustrates the capacity of dead flesh to destabilize the notion of the human through the generation and articulation of inter-corporeal and inter-subjective experience. Exerting pressure on the fields of critical animal studies, post-humanism, and new materialism, Crace’s novel re-imagines human and non-human post-mortality, and suggests that to be dead is to be an active participant in vital, organic (de)compositions.