When Julia Ridley Smith's parents died, they left behind a virtual museum of furniture, books, art, and artifacts. Between the contents of their home, the stock from their North Carolina antiques shop, and the ephemera of two lives lived, Smith faced a monumental task. What would she do with her parents' possessions? Smith's wise and moving memoir in essays, The Sum of Trifles, peels back the layers of meaning surrounding specific objects her parents owned, from an eighteenth-century miniature to her father's prosthetics. A vintage hi-fi provides a view of her often tense relationship with her father, whose love of jazz kindled her own artistic impulse. A Japanese screen embodies her mother's principles of good taste and good manners, while an antebellum quilt prompts Smith to grapple with her family's slaveholding legacy. Along the way, she turns to literature that illuminates how her inheritance shaped her notions of identity and purpose. The Sum of Trifles offers up dark humor and raw feeling, mixed with an erudite streak. It's a curious, thoughtful look at how we live in and with our material culture and how we face our losses as we decide what to keep and what to let go.

Die geliefde skrywer Dana Snyman deel sy waarnemings en belewenisse van die vreemdste tye wat ons nog beleef het: Die boek begin triomfantelik met die Springbokke wat die Rugbywêreldbeker wen, en toegejuig word tydens optogte deur die hoofstede van ons land. Maar baie vinnig verander alles. Die koronavirus slaan toe, en die hele wêreld word onderstebo gekeer. “Dinge is anders nou, meneer, in die tyd van die gif,” soos ’n ou oom by die plaaslike kafee vir Dana vertel.

Dana beskryf die eerste veertig dae van die eerste inperking; dan ry hy trein om sy sterwende vriend in Gauteng te gaan groet. Hy skryf oor die treinrit, en ook oor die treine wat nie meer ry nie. Laastens praat hy met die mense wat die grootste gevaar loop ter wille van ander – die dokters en verpleegsters wat die siekes versorg. Dan kry hy self ook Covid19.

Dana se kenmerkende fyn waarneming maak In Die Tyd Van Die Gif ’n leesmoet. Daar is pyn en verlies, maar ook geloof en hoop. Dit alles met ’n goeie skeut humor.

Forensic science provides information and data behind the circumstances of a particular death, but it is culture that provides death with meaning. With this in mind, Rite, Flesh, and Stone proposes cultural matters of death as its structuring principle, operating as frames of the expression of mortality within a distinct set of coordinates. The chapters offer original approaches to how human remains are handled in the embodied rituals and social performances of contemporary funeral rites of all kinds; furthermore, they explore how dying flesh and corpses are processed by means of biopolitical technologies and the ethics of (self-)care, and how the vibrant and breathing materiality of the living is transformed into stone and analogous kinds of tangible, empirical presence that engender new cartographies of memory. Each coming from a specific disciplinary perspective, authors in this volume problematize conventional ideas about the place of death in contemporary Western societies and cultures using Spain as a case study. Materials analyzed here-ranging from cinematic and literary fictions, to historical archives and anthropological and ethnographic sources-make explicit a dynamic scenario where actors embody a variety of positions towards death and dying, the political production of mortality, and the commemoration of the dead. Ultimately, the goal of this volume is to chart the complex network in which the disenchantment of death and its reenchantment coexist, and biopolitical control over secularized bodies overlaps with new avatars of the religious and non-theistic desires for memorialization and transcendence.