When the topic of death is a taboo subject to a population, how can life insurance companies create a market for their business? In Marketing Death, Cheris Shun-ching Chan examines the development of the life insurance market in China to address how culture impacts economic practice. Based on an extensive ethnographic study of various life insurance companies in China, Chan found a clear disparity in the way transnational and domestic life insurers dealt with local resistance to the idea of insuring against early death. While the transnational insurers attempted to remove this resistance by introducing new concepts about risk management, the locally-founded insurers redefined these concepts as money management to avoid the taboo subject. The domestic players' strategies proved to be more effective, but conflicted with the profit-oriented institutional logic of life insurance in the Chinese context. Having learned a lesson from significant losses, the domestic insurers eventually collaborated with their transnational counterparts to create a risk-management market. Nonetheless, local potential buyers, with their ingrained cultural values, continue to negotiate with insurance providers about their preferred product features. Chan argues that the life insurance business is growing rapidly in China despite these incompatible local cultural values largely because insurance practitioners strategically mobilized the local cultural tool-kit to circumvent the resistance. In Chan's account, the interplay of two forms of culture-a shared meaning system on one hand and a repertoire of strategies on the other-has significantly shaped the trajectory of the emergent Chinese market. Marketing Death is the first book to offer an analysis of the emergence of a life insurance market outside of the Euro-American context. It documents the processes and politics by which local cultures shape the way a market is formed and, hence, sheds light on the dynamics through which modern capitalist enterprises diffuse to regions with different cultural traditions.

Across Africa, funerals and events remembering the dead have become larger and even more numerous over the years. Whereas in the West death is normally a private and family affair, in Africa funerals are often the central life cycle event, unparalleled in cost and importance, for which families harness vast amounts of resources to host lavish events for multitudes of people with ramifications well beyond the event. Though officials may try to regulate them, the popularity of these events often makes such efforts fruitless, and the elites themselves spend tremendously on funerals. This volume brings together scholars who have conducted research on funerary events across sub-Saharan Africa. The contributions offer an in-depth understanding of the broad changes and underlying causes in African societies over the years, such as changes in religious beliefs, social structure, urbanization, and technological changes and health.

Contributors to this landmark volume demonstrate that ancestor veneration was about much more than claiming property rights-the spirits of the dead were central to domestic disputes, displays of wealth, and power and status relationships. Case studies from China, Africa, Europe, and Mesoamerica use the evidence of art, architecture, ritual, and burial practices to explore the complex roles of ancestors in the past. Including a comprehensive overview of nearly two hundred years of anthropological research, The Archaeology of Ancestors reveals how and why societies remember and revere the dead. Through analyses of human remains, ritual deposits, and historical documents, contributors explain how ancestors were woven into the social fabric of the living.

An inevitable and universal experience, dying is experienced by individuals in different ways, often related to the character of our relationships, family structures, gender identities, cultural backgrounds, and economic means. Drawing on extensive qualitative fieldwork with patients, carers and health professionals in Australia and the United Kingdom, Dying: A Social Perspective on the End of Life provides a critical examination of the different spheres of dying, in social and cultural context. Exploring complex issues such as the politics of assisted dying, negotiating medical futility, gender and dying, the desire for redemption, the moralities of 'the good fight' and the lived experience of bodily disintegration, this book links novel theoretical ideas within sociology to cutting-edge empirical data collected in palliative and end-of-life care contexts. A theoretically engaged understanding of the social mediation of the end of life, Dying: A Social Perspective on the End of Life also sheds light on the manner in which the end of life can be shaped by major economic, cultural and socio-cultural shifts including neo-liberalism, individualisation, medicalisation, professionalisation and detraditionalisation. As such, it will appeal to social science, health and medical researchers interested in the end of life, as well as those working in palliative and end-of-life care settings.

This volume visits death in children's literature from around the world, making a substantial contribution to the dialogue between the expanding fields of Childhood Studies, Children's Literature, and Death Studies. Considering both textual and pictorial representations of death, contributors focus on the topic of death in children's literature as a physical reality, a philosophical concept, a psychologically challenging adjustment, and/or a social construct. Essays covering literature from the US, Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Canada, the UK, Sweden, Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, Brazil, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, India, and Iran display a diverse range of theoretical and cultural perspectives. Carefully organized sections interrogate how classic texts have been adapted for the twenty-first century, how death has been politicized, ritualized, or metaphorized, and visual strategies for representing death, and how death has been represented within the context of play. Asking how different cultures present the concept of death to children, this volume is the first to bring together a global range of perspective on death in children's literature and will be a valuable contribution to an array of disciplines.

An encounter with the death of another is often an occasion when the bereaved need to be sustained in their loss, relieved of the anxiety that the meeting with death engenders, and comforted in their grief. It is a time when those left behind often seek to redress wrongs in themselves or in the relationships that death has shaken and upset. In both collective and individual responses to the trauma of encountering death, we witness efforts to counter the misfortune and to explain the meaning of the loss, to turn memory into blessing, to reconcile life with death, to regenerate life, and redeem both the bereaved and the dead. Sometimes loss may transform the bereaved in ways that lead to growth and maturity; other times a loss leads to unremitting anger or melancholia. There may be a variety of spiritual expressions that the bereaved experience in their time of loss, but there appears to be some common elements in all of them. Overtime, survivors' feelings are transformed into growing exploration of the spiritual, a profound sense of rebirth, newfound feelings of self-mastery or confidence, and a deeply held conviction that "life goes on." The contributions to this volume are based on a conference held in New York on the first anniversary of September 11, 2001. Contributors include Peter Metcalf, Robert Jay Lifton, Ilana Harlow, Robert A. Neimeyer, Samuel Heilman, and Neil Gillman. This sensitive and heartfelt volume relates specifically to issues of death, bereavement, and mourning in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center, but the applications to other individual and catastrophic events is obvious. The contributions do not simply explore how people deal with bereavement or are psychologically affected by extreme grief: they address how people can try to find meaning in tragedy and loss, and strive to help restore order in the wake of chaos. The multidisciplinary perspectives include those of anthropology, psychology, theology, social work, and art.

"[S]heds light not only on the obstacles to making motherhood safer, but to improving the health of poor populations in general."-Social Anthropology Since 1987, when the global community first recognized the high frequency of women in developing countries dying from pregnancy-related causes, little progress has been made to combat this problem. This study follows the global policies that have been implemented in Solola, Guatemala in order to decrease high rates of maternal mortality among indigenous Mayan women. The author examines the diverse meanings and understandings of motherhood, pregnancy, birth and birth-related death among the biomedical personnel, village women, their families, and midwives. These incongruous perspectives, in conjunction with the implementation of such policies, threaten to disenfranchise clients from their own cultural understandings of self. The author investigates how these policies need to meld with the everyday lives of these women, and how the failure to do so will lead to a failure to decrease maternal deaths globally. From the Introduction: An unspoken effect of reducing maternal mortality to a medical problem is that life and death become the only outcomes by which pregnancy and birth are understood. The specter of death looms large and limits our full exploration of either our attempts to curb maternal mortality, or the phenomenon itself. Certainly women's survival during childbirth is the ultimate measure of success of our efforts. Yet using pregnancy outcomes and biomedical attendance at birth as the primary feedback on global efforts to make pregnancy safer is misguided.

From the hiding of the bones of Kamehameha the Great, to the half-mile-long funeral procession of King Kamehameha III, to the somber return of the embalmed remains of King Kalakaua from San Francisco, Hawaii experienced changing responses to the deaths of Hawaiian royalty. Missionary journals, government publications, and articles in Hawaiian and English language newspapers provide the source material for the first comprehensive look at the transformation of funerary practices following permanent contact with the West. The documentary evidence tells the story of the adoption of new ways of honoring Hawaii royalty and the persistence of traditional practices. Although the funeral observances for British royalty provided an extravagant model for their Hawaii counterparts, indigenous practices survived. While mourners no longer knocked out their teeth or tattooed their tongues, other traditional forms-the mass wailing, feather standards, and composing of funeral dirges-continued well into the twentieth century. Besides the contemporaneous accounts, dozens of historic drawings and photographs provide rarely seen glimpses of the obsequies of the Kamehameha and Kalakaua dynasties. Burial locations, too, saw transformation as secret burial caves and thatched structures housing ancient bones gave way to coral sepulchers, Gothic mausoleums and underground crypts. The description of the burial sites includes the locations of the final resting places of the royalty of Hawaii.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence. This book is a multidisciplinary work that investigates the notion of posthumous harm over time. The question what is and when is death, affects how we understand the possibility of posthumous harm and redemption. Whilst it is impossible to hurt the dead, it is possible to harm the wishes, beliefs and memories of persons that once lived. In this way, this book highlights the vulnerability of the dead, and makes connections to a historical oeuvre, to add critical value to similar concepts in history that are overlooked by most philosophers. There is a long historical view of case studies that illustrate the conceptual character of posthumous punishment; that is, dissection and gibbetting of the criminal corpse after the Murder Act (1752), and those shot at dawn during the First World War. A long historical view is also taken of posthumous harm; that is, body-snatching in the late Georgian period, and organ-snatching at Alder Hey in the 1990s.

Someone dies. What happens next?

One family inters their matriarch's ashes on the floor of the ocean. Another holds a memorial weenie roast each year at a greenburial cemetery. An 1898 ad for embalming fluid promises, "You can make mummies with it " while a leading contemporary burial vault is touted as impervious to the elements. A grieving mother, 150 years ago, might spend her days tending a garden at her daughter's grave. Today, she might tend the roadside memorial she erected at the spot her daughter was killed. One mother wears a locket containing her daughter's hair; the other, a necklace containing her ashes.

What happens after someone dies depends on our personal stories and on where those stories fall in a larger tale--that of death in America. It's a powerful tale that we usually keep hidden from our everyday lives until we have to face it.

"American Afterlife" by Kate Sweeney reveals this world through a collective portrait of Americans past and present who find themselves personally involved with death: a klatch of obit writers in the desert, a funeral voyage on the Atlantic, a fourth-generation funeral director--even a midwestern museum that takes us back in time to meet our deathobsessed Victorian progenitors. Each story illuminates details in another until something larger is revealed: a landscape that feels at once strange and familiar, one that's by turns odd, tragic, poignant, and sometimes even funny.

Drawing on ethnography of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities across Australia, Mortality, Mourning and Mortuary Practices in Indigenous Australia focuses on the current ways in which indigenous people confront and manage various aspects of death. The contributors employ their contemporary and long-term anthropological fieldwork with indigenous Australians to construct rich accounts of indigenous practices and beliefs and to engage with questions relating to the frequent experience of death within the context of unprecedented change and premature mortality. The volume makes use of extensive empirical material to address questions of inequality with specific reference to mortality, thus contributing to the anthropology of indigenous Australia whilst attending to its theoretical, methodological and political concerns. As such, it will appeal not only to anthropologists but also to those interested in social inequality, the social and psychosocial consequences of death, and the conceptualization and manipulation of the relationships between the living and the dead.

Fred Feldman, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, is widely recognized for his subtle defense of hedonistic consequentialism and for his plain-spoken and exact philosophical style. This book collects new and original articles from an international team of scholars to celebrate his philosophical contributions. The three main topics of the book - moral goodness, moral rightness and the ethical and metaphysical puzzles posed by death - are topics that have occupied Professor Feldman throughout his philosophical career. Each contribution advances the state of the art in analytical ethics and metaphysics through critical analysis of previous work and the formulation of new positions. As a collection, these essays represent a sustained reflection on the merits and limitations of a whole, integrated research program in moral philosophy: hedonistic consequentialism.

Mass violence and terrorism are a salient phenomenon in the late modern society, showing no sign of decline. Proactive results from the long, ongoing debate of how to address these issues are therefore increasingly necessary - not just in the context of prevention, but also in the context of the aftermath. Shared Experiences of Mass Shootings develops an understanding of the collective experience, consequences and recovery processes after mass shootings. Drawing from in-depth case studies of two mass shootings in Finland and comparing them with other international cases, it explores how communities work through violent tragedies employing social memory and memorialization practices that can be seen as either tools for recovery, or as something that needs to be restricted. Contributing a novel understanding of how experiencing mass violence is deeply gendered through the social patterns and narratives of men's and women's emotions, this timely monograph will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as postdoctoral researchers, interested in fields such as: Sociology of Violence, Criminology, Social Work, Memory Studies, Media Studies and Cultural Trauma.

Somewhere in the world, in the next forty seconds, a person is going to commit suicide. Globally, suicides account for 50 percent of all violent deaths among men and 71 percent for women. Despite suicide prevention programs, therapy, and pharmacological treatments, the suicide rate is either increasing or remaining high around the world. Media and Suicide holds traditional and emergent media accountable for influencing an individual's decision to commit suicide. Global experts present research, historical analysis, theoretical disputes (including discussion on the Werther and Papageno effects), and policy regarding the media's impact on suicide. They answer questions about the effects of different types of media and storytelling, show how the impact of social media can be diminished, discuss internet bullying, mass-shootings and mass-suicides, show the effects of recovery stories, and much more. The editors also present examples of suicide policy in the United States, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Hong Kong on how to best communicate reporting guidelines to decrease the copycat effect, especially in less developed nations where most of the world's nearly one million suicides occur each year. Although there is much work to be done to prevent media-influenced suicide, this innovative volume will contribute a large piece to this complex puzzle.

How do you continue to find God as dementia pulls your loved one into the darkness? Nothing is simple for a person suffering from dementia, and for those they love. When ordinary tasks of communication, such as using a phone, become complex, then difficult, and then impossible, isolation becomes inevitable. Helping becomes excruciating. In these pages philosopher Douglas Groothuis offers a window into his experience of caring for his wife as a rare form of dementia ravages her once-brilliant mind and eliminates her once-stellar verbal acuity. Mixing personal narrative with spiritual insight, he captures moments of lament as well as philosophical and theological reflection. Brief interludes provide poignant pictures of life inside the Groothuis household, and we meet a parade of caregivers, including a very skilled companion dog. Losses for both Doug and Becky come daily, and his questions for God multiply as he navigates the descending darkness. Here is a frank exploration of how one continues to find God in the twilight.

The introduction of the continuing bonds model of grief near the end of the 20th century revolutionized the way researchers and practitioners understand bereavement. Continuing Bonds in Bereavement is the most comprehensive, state-of-the-art collection of developments in this field since the inception of the model. As a multi-perspectival, nuanced, and forward-looking anthology, it combines innovations in clinical practice with theoretical and empirical advancements. The text traces grief in different cultural settings, asking questions about the truth in our interactions with the dead and showing how new cultural developments like social media change the ways we relate to those who have died. Together, the book's four sections encourage practitioners and scholars in both bereavement studies and in other fields to broaden their understanding of the concept of continuing bonds.

A recurring theme of the public discourse on immigration in Europe today is that migrants are primarily young people, of working age. Against this short-sighted view, the main contribution of this book is to propose that processes of ageing and dying constitute a critical juncture in the settlement of migrant-origin communities, precipitating novel intercultural negotiations in societies characterized by post-migration diversity. Bringing together seven studies reflecting different institutional and (trans)national contexts, the chapters fall under two main themes. A key issue when facing death is the organization of adequate care for the dying, which may be a challenging task in pluralized settings involving both migrant patients and migrant carers. Facing the end of life furthermore involves the practice of rituals in order to make sense of the transition from life to death. Whether through care or ritual, the studies presented here show that the need to reconcile different cultural, religious and administrative norms relating to death is infused with ontological insecurities which may result in new or renewed interrogations of identities and belongings. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Intercultural Studies.

The third edition of Hospice and Palliative Care is the essential guide to the hospice and palliative care movement both within the United States and around the world. Chapters provide mental-health and medical professionals with a comprehensive overview of the hospice practice as well as discussions of challenges and the future direction of the hospice movement. Updates to the new edition include advances in spiritual assessment and care, treatment of prolonged and complicated grief, provision of interdisciplinary palliative care in limited-resource settings, significant discussion of assisted suicide, primary healthcare including oncology, and more. Staff and volunteers new to the field along with experienced care providers and those using hospice and palliative care services will find this essential reading.

Seventeenth-century England was a country obsessed with property rights. For only those who owned property were considered to have a vested interest in the maintenance of law, order and social harmony. As such, establishing the ownership of 'things' was a constant concern for all people, and nowhere is this more evident than in the cases of disputed wills. Based on a wealth of surviving evidence from the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, the probate jurisdiction which probated wills of the more wealthy English property owners as well as some of those with a more modest quantity of property, this book investigates what litigation over the validity of wills reveals about the interplay between society and law. The volume investigates, catalogs, and systematizes the legal issues that were raised in will disputes in the Canterbury Court in the last half of the seventeenth century. However, this is not just a book about law and legal practice. The records from which it draws plunge us into deeply personal and often tragic situations, revealing how the last requests of the dead and dying were often ignored or misinterpreted by family, friends and creditors for their own benefit. By focusing on property law as reflected in cases of disputed wills, the book provides a glimpse at a much fuller spectrum of society than is often the case. Even people of relatively modest means were concerned to pass on their possessions, and their cases provide a snapshot of the type of objects owned and social relationships revealed by patterns of bequests. This too is true for women, who despite being denied full participation in many areas of civic life, are frequently encountered as key players in court cases over disputed wills. What emerges from this study is a picture of a society for which notions of law and private property were increasingly intertwined, yet in which courts were less concerned with formality than with ensuring that the intentions of will-makers were properly carried out.

Exploring the religious category of dying to self, this book aims to resolve contemporary issues that relate to detachment. Beginning with an examination of humility in its general notion and as a religious virtue that detachment presupposes, Kellenberger draws on a range of ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary sources that address the main characteristics of detachment, including the work of Meister Eckhart, St. Teresa, and Simone Weil, as well as writers as varied as Gregory of Nyssa, Rabi'a al-Adawiyya, SAren Kierkegaard, Andrew Newberg, John Hick and Keiji Nishitani. Kellenberger explores the key issues that arise for detachment, including the place of the individual's will in detachment, the relationship of detachment to desire, to attachment to persons, and to self-love and self-respect, and issues of contemporary secular detachment such as inducement via chemicals. This book heeds the relevance of the religious virtue of detachment for those living in the twenty-first century.

The Handbook of the Sociology of Death, Grief, and Bereavement sets issues of death and dying in a broad and holistic social context. Its three parts explore classical sociology, developments in sociological thought, and the ways that sociological insights can be useful across a broad spectrum of grief-related topics and concerns. Guidance is given in each chapter to help spur readers to examine other topics in thanatology through a sociological lens. Scholars, students, and professionals will come away from the handbook with a nuanced understanding of the social context -cultural differences, power relations, the role of social processes and institutions, and various other sociological factors - that shape grief experiences.

The Handbook of the Sociology of Death, Grief, and Bereavement sets issues of death and dying in a broad and holistic social context. Its three parts explore classical sociology, developments in sociological thought, and the ways that sociological insights can be useful across a broad spectrum of grief-related topics and concerns. Guidance is given in each chapter to help spur readers to examine other topics in thanatology through a sociological lens. Scholars, students, and professionals will come away from the handbook with a nuanced understanding of the social context -cultural differences, power relations, the role of social processes and institutions, and various other sociological factors - that shape grief experiences.

This study explores the female experience of death in early modern England. By tracing attitudes towards gender through the occasion of death, it advances our understanding of the construction of femininity in the period. Becker illustrates how dying could be a positive event for a woman, and for her mourners, in terms of how it allowed her to be defined, enabled and elevated. The first part of the book gives a cultural and historical overview of death in early modern England, examining the means by which human mortality was confronted, and how the fear of death and dying could be used to uphold the mores of society. Becker explores particularly the female experience of death, and how women used the deathbed as a place of power from which to bestow dying maternal blessings, or leave instructions and advice for their survivors. The second part of the study looks at 'good' and 'bad' female deaths. The author discusses the motivation behind the reporting of the deaths and the veracity of such accounts, and highlights the ways in which they could be used for religious, political and patriarchal purposes. The third section of the book considers how death could, paradoxically, liberate a woman. In this section Becker evaluates the opportunity for female involvement in dying and posthumous rituals, including funeral rites and sermons, commemorative and autobiographical writing and literary legacies. While accounts of dying women largely underpinned the existing patriarchy, the experience of dying allowed some women to express themselves by allowing them to utilise an established male discourse. This opportunity for expression, along with the power of the deathbed, are the focus for this study.

Death is an unanswerable question for humanity, the question that always remains unanswered because it lies beyond human experience. Music represents one of the most profound ways in which humanity struggles, nevertheless, to accommodate death within the scope of the living by giving a voice to death and the dead and a voice that responds. This book engages with the question of how music expresses and responds to the profound existential disturbance that death and loss present to the living. Each chapter offers readers an encounter with music as a way of speaking or responding to human mortality. Each chapter, in its own way, addresses these questions: How are death and the dead made present to us through music? How does music, as composed, performed and heard, respond to the brute fact of death for the living, the dying and the bereaved? These questions are addressed from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives: musicology, ethnomusicology, literature, history, philosophy, film studies, psychology and psychoanalysis. Singing Death also covers a wide range of musical genres from medieval love song to twenty-first-century horror film music. The collection is accompanied by a website including some of the music associated with each of its chapters.

Throughout history mankind has struggled to reconcile itself with the inescapability of its own mortality. This book explores the themes of immortality and survivalism in contemporary culture, shedding light on the varied and ingenious ways in which humans and human societies aspire to confront and deal with death, or even seek to outlive it, as it were. Bringing together theoretical and empirical work from internationally acclaimed scholars across a range of disciplines, Postmortal Society offers studies of the strategies adopted and means available in modern society for trying to 'cheat' death or prolong life, the status of the dead in the modern Western world, the effects of beliefs that address the terror of death in other areas of life, the 'immortalisation' of celebrities, the veneration of the dead in virtual worlds, symbolic immortality through work, the implications of understanding 'immortality' in chemical-neuronal terms, and the apparent paradox of our greater reverence for the dead in increasingly secular, capitalist societies. A fascinating collection of studies that explore humanity's attempts to deal with its own mortality in the modern age, this book will appeal to sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers and scholars of cultural studies with interests in death and dying.