* PRE-ORDER YOUR COPY TODAY * The compelling and moving memoir of forensic psychiatrist Dr Duncan Harding

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 Through analyses of human remains, ritual deposits, and historical documents, contributors explain how ancestors were woven into the social fabric of the living.

The evidence of death and dying has been removed from the everyday lives of most Westerners. Yet we constantly live with the awareness of our vulnerability as mortals. Drawing on a range of genres, bands and artists, Mortality and Music examines the ways in which popular music has responded to our awareness of the inevitability of death and the anxiety it can evoke. Exploring bereavement, depression, suicide, violence, gore, and fans' responses to the deaths of musicians, it argues for the social and cultural significance of popular music's treatment of mortality and the apparent absurdity of existence.

This book draws on original material and approaches from the developing fields of the history of emotions and childhood studies and brings together scholars from history, literature and cultural studies, to reappraise how the early modern world reacted to the deaths of children. Child death was the great equaliser of the early modern period, affecting people of all ages and conditions. It is well recognised that the deaths of children struck at the heart of early modern families, yet less known is the variety of ways that not only parents, but siblings, communities and even nations, responded to childhood death. The contributors to this volume ask what emotional responses to child death tell us about childhood and the place of children in society. Placing children and their voices at the heart of this investigation, they track how emotional norms, values, and practices shifted across the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries through different religious, legal and national traditions. This collection demonstrates that child death was not just a family matter, but integral to how communities and societies defined themselves. Chapter 5 of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.

Corporate coach Allison Clarke was on a plane to Atlanta when she realized that in order to fully live, she had to first be surrounded by death. Sounds strange, doesn't it? Not to Allison: a fearless mother of two who built her own consulting firm from the ground up. To Allison, it felt like a challenge, and as soon as she got home, she met with a funeral director. Her idea was simple: attend the funerals of exceptional strangers and learn from their adventurous lives. It began with the newspaper. She read countless obituaries, looking for people who interested her. It didn't matter specifically what they had done. Her thirty funerals ranged in scope from basketball fan to hundred-and-four-year-old Austrian immigrant. What mattered was the effect they'd had on the lives of their friends and families. Once the choice was made, Allison donned her black dress and headed to the cemetery. Some people might scoff at this behavior. However, when Allison thought back to the funeral of her own grandmother, she realized she would have been proud to have strangers there -- proud to tell them, "That was my grandma, and she was amazing." In the end, Allison attended thirty funerals over the course of sixty days. At each, she learned a little more about living life to the fullest ... and what is life if not lived bravely, passionately, and with heart? Allison Clarke is the founder and president of Allison Clarke Consulting, a company that teaches corporations, associates, and individuals how to reach their full potential. Previously, she was a master trainer with Dale Carnegie Training. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her two daughters, Jenna and Jamie. Allison is a member of the National Speakers Association. To find out how to hire Allison to speak for or to train your company, visit her website: www.allisonclarkeconsulting.com.

Describing a great variety of funeral ritual from major world religions and from local traditions, this book shows how cultures not only cope with corpses but also create an added value for living through the encouragement of afterlife beliefs. The explosion of interest in death in recent years reflects the key theme of this book - the rhetoric of death - the way cultures use the most potent weapon of words to bring new power to life. This new edition is one third longer than the original with new material on the death of Jesus, the most theorized death ever which offers a useful case study for students. There is also empirical material from contemporary/recent events such as the death of Diana and an expanded section on theories of grief which will make the book more attractive to death counsellors.

Periods of transition are often symbolically associated with death, making the latter the paradigm of liminality. Yet, many volumes on death in the social sciences and humanities do not specifically address liminality. This book investigates these "ultimate ambiguities," assuming they can pose a threat to social relationships because of the disintegrating forces of death, but they are also crucial periods of creativity, change, and emergent aspects of social and religious life. Contributors explore death and liminality from an interdisciplinary perspective and present a global range of historical and contemporary case studies outlining emotional, cognitive, artistic, social, and political implications.

This is an examination of human encounter with death in Germany from the eve of the Reformation to the rise of Pietism. The Protestant Reformation transformed the funeral more profoundly than any other ritual of the traditional church. Luther's doctrine of salvation by faith alone made the foundation of the traditional funeral, intercession for the dead in Purgatory, obsolete. By drawing on anthropological interpretations of death ritual, this study explores the changing relationships between the body, the soul, the living and the dead in the daily life of early modern Germany.

The inevitability of death-that of others and our own-is surely among our greatest anxieties. Mortality's Muse: The Fine Art of Dying explores how art, mainly literary art, addresses that troubling reality. While religion and philosophy offer important consolations for life's end, art responds in ways that are perhaps more complete and certainly more deeply human. Among subjects treated: the ars moriendi or "art of dying" tradition; the contrast between past and more recent cultural values; the religious consolation's value but shortcoming for some people; the role of art in offering a secular consolation; dying as a performing art; the philosophic ideal of good death; the lively appeal of carpe diem or living for the present moment; the elegiac sense of life; and the two opposite parts Mortality's Muse has played in dealing with war, the most senseless and unnecessary cause of death. The idea of an aesthetic sense of life forms the basis of these discussions. Human beings are makers in the largest sense of the word, and art represents everything they make-civilization itself with all its greatness and failings. Our civilization may ultimately be nothing but an evanescent blip in the cosmos. Even so, the creation of beauty, meaning, and purpose from disorder and suffering defines us as human beings. In the words of Robinson Jeffers, even if monuments eventually crumble and all art perish, yet for thousands of years carved stones have stood and "pained thoughts found the honey of peace in old poems."

The Last Choice establishes that preemptive suicide in advanced age can be rational: that it can make good sense to evade age-related personal diminishment even at the cost of good time left. Criteria are provided to help determine whether soundly reasoned, cogently motivated,and prudently timed self-destruction can be in one's interests late in life. In our time suicide and assisted suicide are being increasingly tolerated as ways to escape unendurable mental or physical suffering, but it isn't widely accepted that suicide may be a rational choice before the onset of such suffering. This book's basic claim is that it can be rational to choose to die sooner as oneself than to survive as a lessened other: that judicious appropriation of one's own inevitable death can be an identity-affirming act and a fitting end to life. Discussion of preemptive suicide goes beyond contributing to current widespread debate about assisted suicide. It is a matter tightly interrelated with other right to die questions and one bound to become a national issue. If there are good arguments for escaping intolerable situations caused by age-related deteriorative conditions, most of those arguments will equally support avoidance of those conditions. If assisted suicide becomes more generally acknowledged and accepted, preemptive suicide will almost certainly follow. It is crucial, then, to examine whether preemptive suicide constitutes a rational option for reflective aging individuals.

With the aspiration for a long life now achievable for many individuals, the status of old age as a distinct social position has become problematic. In this radical re-examination of the nature of old age, Paul Higgs and Chris Gilleard reveal the emergence of a 'fourth age' that embodies the most feared and marginalised aspects of old age, conceptually linked to and yet distinct from traditional models of old age. Inspired by the authors' ground-breaking work on the third and fourth age and supported by extensive sociological, medical and historical research, Rethinking Old Age offers a unique and timely analysis of the fourth age as a 'social imaginary' that is shaped and maintained by the social, cultural and political discourses and practices that divide later life. It stands as a significant resource for students, academics and practitioners of sociology, ageing studies, gerontology, social policy, health studies, social work and nursing.

Death, violent or otherwise, is a matter of widespread concern with ongoing debates about such matters as euthanasia and the nature of brain death. Philosophers have often argued about the rationality of fear of death. This book argues that that dispute has been misconceived: fear of death is not something that follows or fails to follow from reason, but rather, it forms the basis of reasoning and helps to show why people must be cooperating beings who accept certain sorts of facts as reasons for acting. Within the context of this account of reasons, the book gives a new understanding of brain death and of physician-assisted suicide.

'I have quite a bit of understanding of white man's ways, but it is difficult for me to understand this one.' An Australian Senate committee investigation of the Northern Territory's Rights of the Terminally Ill Act 1995, the first legislation in the world that allowed doctors to actively assist patients to die, found that for the vast majority of Indigenous Territorians, the idea that a physician - or anyone else - should help end a dying, suffering person's life was so foreign that in some instances it proved almost impossible to translate. The Good Death Through Time asks how such a death became a 'thinkable'-even desirable-way to die for so many others in Western cultures. For centuries a good death - the 'euthanasia' - meant a death blessed by God that might well involve pain, for suffering was seen as ultimately redemptive. But in the Victorian age, when doctors started to treat the dying with painkillers as well as prayers, a painful death came to be thought of as an aberrant, dehumanising experience. As this book explores, the modern idea that a good death should be painless spurred sometimes troubling developments in palliative medicine as well as an increasingly well-organised assisted dying movement. Delving into what euthanasia activists, doctors, lawyers, religious leaders and lay people have thought and felt about dying, The Good Death Through Time shows that understanding the radical historical shift in Western attitudes to managing dying and suffering helps us better grasp the stakes in today's contestations over what it means to die well.

Western culture has always been obsessed with death, but now death has taken on a new, anonymous form. The twentieth century saw the mass production of corpses through war and the triumph of technology over the human body. The new millennium has opened with global terrorism and the suspension of human rights in far-flung prison camps.We live in an age of panic, when the fear of death at any time and in any place is present. And we live in an age of apathy towards both science and institutional politics, an age which has sanctioned the rise of techno-medical and political powers which can deny our control over our own bodies and lives and the lives of others. "The Culture of Death" explores this moment to analyze our exposure to death in modern culture.

Louise Till, mother of two, has inherited her father's hardware store after her parents' unexpected deaths. She begins to cut copies of her customers' keys for herself, each one a talisman against grief and the terrible guilt she feels at not having realized that her parents were desperately unhappy. Louise could use the keys, but she doesn't. Not until her life is overturned, again, when her marriage falls apart. Lou gives in to temptation, letting herself into Euphemia Rosenbaum's home. What follows is a tale of blackmail, break-ins, an unsolved mystery, and more secrets than Lou ever wanted to know. Lou must confront not only the lives of her neighbors, but the unspoken truths of her family and the doors within herself for which there are no keys. Told over the course of one long winter, Unlocking is a poignant and penetrating exploration of grief, community, family, and the secrets we keep, even from ourselves.

This book addresses the dying process and the nature of death itself with the intention that it might help us to accept and embrace both these things as a part of life. Intended to provide a shift in perception, this book aims to alleviate some of the fear, resistance and denial surrounding death. Much has been written about death by spiritual teachers, psychologists, philosophers and palliative specialists, but this book is an entry into the conversation from a viewpoint that is not medical, religious, nor postulating any form of belief system. It is partly a survey of our attitude and resistance to dying and death, and partly an examination of the options available that could serve as a non-denominational enquiry into this unavoidable eventuality. The principle belief is that the tools required for this shift in perception are to be found within us - we already possess what we need that would allow us to drop the heavy weight of fear and anxiety. This book will help the reader to find these tools, guiding the reader towards their own, most direct route, and focuses on the validity of individual experience.

In Death, Materiality and Mediation, Barbara Graham analyzes a diverse range of objects associated with remembrance in both the public and private arenas through ethnography of communities on both sides of the Irish border. In doing so, she explores the materially mediated interactions between the living and the dead, revealing the physical, cognitive, emotional, and spiritual roles of the dead in contemporary communities. Through this study, Graham expands the concept of materiality to include narrative, song, senses, emotions, ephemera and embodied experience. She also examines how modern practices are informed by older beliefs and folk religion.

The study of death has the capacity to bring together a range of policy areas. Yet death is often overlooked within policy debates in the UK and beyond, and within gerontology. Bringing together a range of scholars engaged in policy associated with death, this collection provides a holistic account of how death factors in social policy. Within this, issues covered include inheritance, palliative care, euthanasia, funeral costs, bereavement support, marginalised deaths and disposal practices. At the heart of the book, the volume recognises that the issues identified are likely to intensify and expand over the next twenty years, as death rates continue to rise.

How do doctors and nurses communicate with frightened patients who are dying, address the needs and concerns of the patients, and help the patients arrive at an acceptance of death? This work deals with the relationship that the health care team has with the dying and how well that team is prepared to address the fears of the dying. In addition, the health care team must learn to deal with their own emotions and ignorance concerning death. This work should be of interest to those professions that deal closely with dying people.

Are you ready to discover what lies beyond the ordinary experience of grief?

Sacred Grief offers an intriguing exploration of the far-reaching rippleeffect of our present-day opinions about surviving grief's emotionalroller-coaster and the unnecessary suffering our judgments unconsciouslypromote. You'll find comfort in discovering that there's anotherdimension to this universal experience--a dimension that fosters trust, kindness and compassion, peacefully heals, and steadfastly moves youtowards your soul's deepest desires and dreams.
Praise for Sacred Grief
"Because we will all have the experience, Sacred Grief is a compellingguide for everyone searching for the sweetness in life's great passages."
--Gregg Braden, author, "The Divine Matrix" and "The God Code"
"Sacred Grief is a holy handbook for gleaning the gifts of the journeycalled grief."
--Mary Manin Morrissey, Co-founder, Association for Global New Thought
"Sacred Grief is a welcome departure from the conventional advice about'surviving' grief."
--Jill Carroll, Ph.D., Executive Director, Boniuk Center for the Study andAdvancement of Religious Tolerance, Rice University
"I highly recommend this book to anyone that has experienced any type of loss in their livesand is willing to look at the loss through a different set of eyes. Tessman, in Sacred Grief, willlead the reader to a place of compassion for oneself, create a relationship with his/her own grief, and ultimately create a place of understanding and a healed soul."
--Irene Watson, Managing Editor, Reader Views
Learn more about this book at www.SacredGrief.com
Another great self-help book from Loving Healing press www.LovingHealing.com
SEL010000 Self-Help: Death, Grief, Bereavement
FAM014000 Family & Relationships: Death, Grief, Bereavement
SOC036000 Social Science: Death & Dying

Attitudes towards death are shaped by our social worlds. This book explores how beliefs, practices and representations of dying and death continue to evolve and adapt in response to changing global societies. Introducing students to debates around grief, religion and life expectancy, this is a clear guide to a complex field for all sociologists.