On the Way to Death completes Eckardt's astonishing trilogy on the interrelationship of comedy, death, and God. It addresses itself to the question of death as the basic incongruity of life. Here is opened to human view the final divine comedy: a total reversal of the traditional roles assigned to God and humankind, a comical denouncement of the terror of death. On the Way to Death follows Sitting in the Earth and Laughing and How to Tell God From the Devil to complete Roy Eckardt's trilogy on comedy, the devil, and God.

This companion provides an indispensable overview of contemporary and classical issues in social and cultural anthropology. Although anthropology has expanded greatly over time in terms of the diversity of topics in which its practitioners engage, many of the broad themes and topics at the heart of anthropological thought remain perennially vital, such as understanding order and change, diversity and continuity, and conflict and co-operation in the reproduction of social life. Bringing together leading scholars in the field, the contributors to this volume provide us with thoughtful and fruitful ways of thinking about a number of contemporary and long-standing arenas of work where both established and more recent researchers are engaged. The companion begins by exploring classic topics such as Religion; Rituals; Language and Culture; Violence; and Gender. This is followed by a focus on current developments within the discipline including Human Rights; Globalization; and Diasporas and Cosmopolitanism. It provides an interesting and challenging look at the state of current thinking in anthropology, serving as a rich resource for scholars and students alike.

Seventy per cent of British families now choose cremation for their funerals, a rapid change in traditional death customs. This is the first book to investigate why cremation replaced burial. It examines the political, religious, economic and social reasons behind personal choice and sets them in a European context. This study is doubly timely with the expanding scholarly interest in death studies, and the new media interest in the British way of death.

This book examines research on death, dying and bereavement, and how our approaches, perceptions and expectations shapes what we can know about the end of life. The contributions include personal and professional reflections, and practical suggestions for conducting research in this field. The volume stems from the resurgence of the international and interdisciplinary study of death in the last 20 years. Within this, empirical research is often viewed as sensitive, but little has been written about the experience of conducting research in this area. There has thus been little reflection on the opportunities and challenges faced in undertaking research as the field of death studies grows, including the accommodation and recognition of cultural differences. This volume seeks to in part address this gap. The chapters in this book were originally published in the Mortality journal and the Death Studies journal.

Intended to supplement standard texts on death and dying, this book covers a range of issues, including the self, family, culture, institutions, suicide, and AIDS. The 78 structured activities motivate high-school and college-age students to do more reading, increase attendance, and become more active participants in class -- and to examine their own personal and cultural attitudes and assumptions about death.

Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Decides? looks at several of the most contentious issues in many societies. The book asks, whose rights are protected? How do these rights and protections change over time, and who makes those decisions? This book explores the fundamentally sociological processes which underlie the quest for morality and justice in human societies. The author sheds light on the social movements and social processes at the root of these seemingly personal moral questions. The third edition contains a new chapter on torture entitled, "Taking Life and Inflicting Suffering."

Facing Death is a unique handbook for educators, healthcare professionals and counselors. It uses materials from the visual arts, excerpts from poetry, fiction, drama, and examples from popular culture to sensitize the reader to important, universal issues confronting the dying, and those responsible for their care.

This work grew out of the International Conference on Children and Death held in Athens, Greece in October 1989. The conference brought together professionals from different cultures, backgrounds, theoretical perspectives and clinical settings to share their knowledge, insight and support in promoting the philosophy of death education, hospice care and bereavement support to children and families in need. Some of the questions addressed include: How can we educate children about death? How can we best support them when they are grieving? How can we best understand the bereavement process experienced by family members when a child dies?

This highly original work provides a thought-provoking and valuable resource for researchers and academics with an interest in genocide, criminology, international organizations, and law and society. In her book, Caroline Fournet examines the law relating to genocide and explores the apparent failure of society to provide an adequate response to incidences of mass atrocity. The work casts a legal perspective on this social phenomenon to show that genocide fails to be appropriately remembered due to inherent defects in the law of genocide itself. The book thus connects the social response to the legal theory and practice, and trials in particular. Fournet's study illustrates the shortcomings of the Genocide Convention as a means of preventing and punishing genocide as well as its consequent failure to ensure the memory of this heinous crime.

Coming at a time of renewed interest in the developmental changes of the life cycle, Psychotherapy and the Widowed Patient is a rich resource that examines the impact of a spouse's death on an individual's mental health. Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts address a wide range of issues concerning loss, grief, and bereavement, and provide practical and creative approaches for both widowed persons and the helping professionals charged with treating their grief. Chapters in this compassionate volume discuss the characteristics of individuals who are more likely to seek professional help in coping with grief, widowhood as a time of growth and development, the value of openness instead of denial in dealing with death, the grieving process in young widowed spouses, the similarities of widowhood to separation and divorce, the role of dependency in how well widowed patients develop emotionally, and the role of loyalty in the process of grief. The more clinical chapters examine strategies for carrying out experiential psychotherapy with widowed patients, rational-emotive therapy, grief therapy, the effects of new perspectives on spousal bereavement on clinical practice, and aspects of bereavement response to loss, with a timeframe for viewing psychotherapeutic intervention. A review of the psychological literature regarding widowhood completes this comprehensive new book.

Focused content, layout and price - Routledge competes and wins in relation to all of these factors - Craig Lind, University of Sussex, UK The best value and best format books on the market. - Ed Bates, Southampton University, UK Routledge Student Statutes present all the legislation students need in one easy-to-use volume. Developed in response to feedback from lecturers and students, this book offer a fully up-to-date, comprehensive, and clearly presented collection of legislation - ideal for LLB and GDL course and exam use. Routledge Student Statutes are: Exam Friendly: un-annotated and conforming to exam regulations Tailored to fit your course: 80% of lecturers we surveyed agree that Routledge Student Statutes match their course and cover the relevant legislation Trustworthy: Routledge Student Statutes are compiled by subject experts, updated annually and have been developed to meet student needs through extensive market research Easy to use: a clear text design, comprehensive table of contents, multiple indexes and highlighted amendments to the law make these books the most student-friendly Statutes on the market Competitively Priced: Routledge Student Statutes offer content and usability rated as good or better than our major competitor, but at a more competitive price Supported by a Companion Website: presenting scenario questions for interpreting Statutes, annotated web links, and multiple-choice questions, these resources are designed to help students to be confident and prepared.

Few issues apply universally to people as poignantly as death and dying. All religions address concerns with death from the handling of human remains, to defining death, to suggesting what happens after life. The Routledge Companion to Death and Dying provides readers with an overview of the study of death and dying. Questions of death, mortality, and more recently of end-of-life care, have long been important ones and scholars from a range of fields have approached the topic in a number of ways. Comprising over fifty-two chapters from a team of international contributors, the companion covers: funerary and mourning practices; concepts of the afterlife; psychical issues associated with death and dying; clinical and ethical issues; philosophical issues; death and dying as represented in popular culture. This comprehensive collection of essays will bring together perspectives from fields as diverse as history, philosophy, literature, psychology, archaeology and religious studies, while including various religious traditions, including established religions like Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism as well as new or less widely known traditions such as the Spiritualist Movement, the Church of Latter Day Saints, and Raelianism. The Routledge Companion to Death and Dying is essential reading for students and researchers in religious studies, philosophy and literature.

Most aged in India are experiencing a highly protracted death in hospitals, entangled in tubes and machines. Such 'medicalised death' entails huge psychological, social and financial costs for both patients and their caregivers. There are also many who are dying in abject neglect. However, Government response to end-of-life care has been almost negligible and there is an acute information deficit on dying matters. This book examines different settings where elderly die, including hospitals, family homes and palliative set-ups. The discourse is set in the backdrop of international attempts to restructure and reconfigure the health delivery system for ageing population. It makes critical commentaries on global developments, offers state-of-art reviews of recent advances, substantiates and corroborates facts by personal narratives and case histories. The book overcomes a segmental understanding of the field by weaving various sociological, medical, legal and cultural issues together. Finally, the authors critically examine biomedicine's potential to meet the complex needs of the dying elderly. In an attempt to bring cultural sensitivity in end-of-life care, they explore the lost Indic 'art of dying' which has the potential to de- medicalise death. Increasing public sensitivity to poor dying conditions of the elderly in India and facilitating changes to improve care systems, this book also demonstrates the limitations of the western specialization of death. It will be of interest to academics in the field of Medical Sociology/Anthropology, Medicine, Palliative care, Public Health and Social Work, Social Policy and Asian Studies.

The middle-aged women described within the chapters of "Common Threads" are ordinary yet extraordinary. They have faced one of life's greatest challenges, working day-in and day-out to design new lives for themselves. As readers witness the resilience of the human spirit, they come to a new perspective on their own experiences, recognizing the good still in their lives. "Common Threads" is a tender and warm embrace, a story of faith and love, of insight, determination, independence and strength. These women's large and small victories are metaphors for hope and continuity.

Artist and scholar Marcia Brennan serves as Artist in Residence at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, and the experience of seeing, close-up, the transitional states and transformational visions involved in the approaching end of life raised countless questions about the intersection of life, death and art. Those questions are at the heart of this unique book. Bridging disparate fields, including art history, medical humanities, and religious studies, Life at the End of Life explores the ways in which art can provide a means for rendering otherwise abstract, deeply personal and spiritual experiences vividly concrete and communicable, even as they remain open-ended and transcendent. In the face of death, suffering and uncertainty, Brennan shows how artistic expression can offer valuable aesthetic and metaphysical avenues for understanding and for making meaning.

Clergy are in a natural position to help people who experience a variety of losses, including death, divorce, moves, and develop-mental transitions. Historically, clergy have been involved as supporters of the bereaved, yet many clergy say that their educa-tion lacked substantive teachings in this area of caring. This book is a response to this apparent need. While directed at clergy, anyone involved in this area of caregiving will find the contents of value.

In this unique book, Sidney Dekker tackles a largely unexplored dilemma. Our scientific age has equipped us ever better to explain why things go wrong. But this increasing sophistication actually makes it harder to explain why we suffer. Accidents and disasters have become technical problems without inherent purpose. When told of a disaster, we easily feel lost in the steely emptiness of technical languages of engineering or medicine. Or, in our drive to pinpoint the source of suffering, we succumb to the hunt for a scapegoat, possibly inflicting even greater suffering on others around us. How can we satisfactorily deal with suffering when the disaster that caused it is no more than the dispassionate sum of utterly mundane, imperfect human decisions and technical failures? Broad in its historical sweep and ambition, The End of Heaven is also Dekker's most personal book to date.

Museums and Photography combines a strong theoretical approach with international case studies to investigate the display of death in various types of museums-history, anthropology, art, ethnographic, and science museums - and to understand the changing role of photography in museums. Contributors explore the politics and poetics of displaying death, and more specifically, the role of photography in representing and interpreting this difficult topic. Working with nearly 20 researchers from different cultural backgrounds and disciplines, the editors critically engage the recent debate on the changing role of museums, exhibition meaning-making, and the nature of photography. They offer new ways for understanding representational practices in relation to contemporary visual culture. This book will appeal to researchers and museum professionals, inspiring new thinking about death and the role of photography in making sense of it.

Medical advances prolong life. They also sometimes prolong suffering. Should we protect life or alleviate suffering? This dilemma formed the foundation for a powerful right-to-die movement and a counterbalancing concern over an emerging culture of death. What are the qualities of a life worth living? Where are the boundaries of tolerable suffering? This book is based on a hugely popular undergraduate course taught at the University of Texas, and is ideal for those interested in the social construction of social worth, social problems, and social movements. This book is part of a larger text, Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Decides?, http://www.routledge.com/9780415892476/

Arguing that the female criminal subject was central to the rise of the British novel, Kirsten T. Saxton provides fresh and convincing insights into the deeply complex ways in which categories of criminality, gender, and fiction intersected in the long eighteenth century. She offers the figure of the murderess as evidence of the constitutive relationship between eighteenth-century legal and fictional texts, comparing non-fiction representations of homicidal women in biographies of Newgate Ordinaries and in trial reports with those in the early novels of Aphra Behn, Delariviere Manley, Daniel Defoe, and Henry Fielding. As Saxton demonstrates that legal narratives informed the budding genre of the novel and fictional texts shaped the development of legal narratives, her study of deadly plots becomes a feminist intervention in scholarship on the literature of crime that simultaneously insists on the centrality of crime literature in feminist histories of the novel. Her epilogue shows that more than two centuries later, we still contend with displays of female violence that defy and define our notions of textual and sexual license and continue to shape legal and literary mandates, even as the lines between the real and the fictive remain blurred.

Recent scandals involving the use of human body parts have highlighted the need for legal clarification surrounding property law and the use of human tissue. This book advances the notion that the legal basis for dealing with this is already available in the law but has thus far neither been used nor discussed. Proposing an alternative approach to constructing entitlements in human tissue and resolving resulting property conflicts, a new methodology is also advanced for abstracting different concepts within the debate which enables comparison and distinction between different cases of entitlement and retention.

Grieving women in early modern English drama, this study argues, recall not only those of Classical tragedy, but also, and more significantly, the lamenting women of medieval English drama, especially the Virgin Mary. Looking at the plays of Shakespeare, Kyd, and Webster, this book presents a new perspective on early modern drama grounded upon three original interrelated points. First, it explores how the motif of the mourning woman on the early modern stage embodies the cultural trauma of the Reformation in England. Second, the author here brings to light the extent to which the figures of early modern drama recall those of the recent medieval past. Finally, Goodland addresses how these representations embody actual mourning practices that were viewed as increasingly disturbing after the Reformation. Female Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama synthesizes and is relevant to several areas of recent scholarly interest, including the performance of gender, the history of emotion, studies of death and mourning, and the cultural trauma of the Reformation.

From Pliny to Petrarch to Pope-Hennessy and beyond, many have understood the obvious connection between portraiture and commemorative practice. This book expands and nuances our understanding of Renaissance portraiture; the author shows it to be complexly generated within a discourse of male anxiety and pre-mortuary mourning. She argues that portraiture could defer memory loss or, at the very least, pictorially console the subject against his own potentially unmourned death. This book recognizes a socio-cultural anxiety - the fear not merely of death but also of being forgotten - and identifies a set of pictorial, literary and theoretical strategies consequently formulated to ensure memory. To explore this phenomenon, this interdisciplinary but fundamentally art historical project merges early modern visual culture and critical theories of the body. The author examines an extensive selection of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century male and female portraits, primarily associated with the Medici family, circle and court, in and against both historical writings and contemporary discourses, including literary and cultural theory, psychoanalysis, feminism and gender studies, and critical theories of race and disability. Re-membering Masculinity generates new ideas about both male and female portraiture in early modern Florence, raises even more questions about the experiences and representations of widowhood and mourning, and re-configures our understanding of masculinity - from the early modern male body to 'Renaissance Man' to postmodern manhood.

Biotechnology and the Challenge of Property addresses the question of how the advancement of property law is capable of controlling the interests generated by the engineering of human tissues. Through a comparative consideration of non-Western societies and industrialized cultures, this book addresses the impact of modern biotechnology, and its legal accommodation on the customary conduct and traditional beliefs which shape the lives of different communities. Nwabueze provides an introduction to the legal regulation of the evolving uses of human tissues, and its implications for traditional knowledge, beliefs and cultures.

Bereavement is a painful and inevitable experience. This book shares the experience of many bereavements, how they are dealt with, understood, and eventually adapted to in the ongoing framework of human life.