lluminated by a profound yet humorous vision, Lifting the Taboo explores the specific relationship women of many colors, cultures, ages, and sexual orientations have to their own deaths, their attitudes towards loss, and their disposition to their role as primary care-givers to the dying.

Specifically, the book weighs the implications of breast cancer and examines in detail Alzheimer's Disease which, contrary to popular myth, can in several significant ways be perceived as a women's disease. Investigating mothers' responses to children's deaths, Sally Cline establishes that women's relationships to death are intricately connected to the experience of giving birth. They are, she argues, therefore psychologically and emotionally different from those of men. Cline goes on to examine women's roles and responses to AIDS and suicide, women's sexual relationships while dying, how society views widows as leftover lives, and women's radical work in hospices and death therapy, as well as their roles as female funeral directors.

All too frequently, clinical practice consists of repeating year after year the methods learned in graduate training, occasionally seasoned by a technique learned in a continuing-education workshop. Bereavement Groups and the Role of Social Support gives clinicians what they've been missing in other volumes: practical techniques that have a solid contemporary empirical basis. Deftly weaving together theory, research, and practice, this volume is a compendium of the latest practical thinking about bereavement support groups. Readers will learn when well-loved practices make sense and are supported by sound evidence, as well as which practices should possibly be discontinued. The book also contains the results of a qualitative study bringing together the best practices of experienced bereavement group leaders from around the world.

Several years ago in Rajasthan, an eighteen-year-old woman was burned on her husband's funeral pyre and thus became sati. Before ascending the pyre, she was expected to deliver both blessings and curses: blessings to guard her family and clan for many generations, and curses to prevent anyone from thwarting her desire to die. Sati also means blessing and curse in a broader sense. To those who revere it, sati symbolizes ultimate loyalty and self-sacrifice. It often figures near the core of a Hindu identity that feels embattled in a modern world. Yet to those who deplore it, sati is a curse, a violation of every woman's womanhood. It is murder mystified, and as such, the symbol of precisely what Hinduism should not be.
In this volume a group of leading scholars consider the many meanings of sati in India and the West; in literature, art, and opera; in religion, psychology, economics, and politics. With contributors who are both Indian and American, this is a genuinely binational, postcolonial discussion. Contributors include Karen Brown, Paul Courtright, Vidya Dehejia, Ainslie Embree, Dorothy Figueira, Lindsey Harlan, John Hawley, Robin Lewis, Ashis Nandy, and Veena Talwar Oldenburg.

This collection contains twenty-one thought-provoking essays on the controversies surrounding the moral and legal distinctions between euthanasia and "letting die." Since public awareness of this issue has increased this second edition includes nine entirely new essays which bring the treatment of the subject up-to-date. The urgency of this issue can be gauged in recent developments such as the legalization of physician-assisted suicide in the Netherlands, "how-to" manuals topping the bestseller charts in the United States, and the many headlines devoted to Dr. Jack Kevorkian, who has assisted dozens of patients to die. The essays address the range of questions involved in this issue pertaining especially to the fields of medical ethics, public policymaking, and social philosophy. The discussions consider the decisions facing medical and public policymakers, how those decisions will affect the elderly and terminally ill, and the medical and legal ramifications for patients in a permanently vegetative state, as well as issues of parent/infant rights. The book is divided into two sections. The first, "Euthanasia and the Termination of Life-Prolonging Treatment" includes an examination of the 1976 Karen Quinlan Supreme Court decision and selections from the 1990 Supreme Court decision in the case of Nancy Cruzan. Featured are articles by law professor George Fletcher and philosophers Michael Tooley, James Rachels, and Bonnie Steinbock, with new articles by Rachels, and Thomas Sullivan. The second section, "Philosophical Considerations," probes more deeply into the theoretical issues raised by the killing/letting die controversy, illustrating exceptionally well the dispute between two rival theories of ethics, consequentialism and deontology. It also includes a corpus of the standard thought on the debate by Jonathan Bennet, Daniel Dinello, Jeffrie Murphy, John Harris, Philipa Foot, Richard Trammell, and N. Ann Davis, and adds articles new to this edition by Bennett, Foot, Warren Quinn, Jeff McMahan, and Judith Lichtenberg.

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 FELIX DENNIS PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION* ** AS HEARD ON BBC RADIO 4** 'Warsan Shire is an extraordinarily gifted poet whose profoundly moving poems so powerfully give voice to the unspoken' Bernardine Evaristo 'Vital, moving and courageous, this is a debut not to be missed' Guardian __________ Poems of migration, womanhood, trauma and resilience from the award-winning Somali British poet Warsan Shire, celebrated collaborator on Beyonce's Lemonade and Black Is King. With her first full-length poetry collection, Warsan Shire introduces us to a girl who, in the absence of a nurturing guide, makes her own stumbling way toward womanhood. Drawing from her own life and the lives of loved ones, as well as pop culture and news headlines, Shire finds vivid, unique details in the experiences of refugees and immigrants, mothers and daughters, Black women and teenage girls. These are noisy lives, full of music and weeping and surahs. These are fragrant lives, full of blood and perfume and jasmine. These are polychrome lives, full of moonlight and turmeric and kohl. The long-awaited collection from one of our most exciting contemporary poets is a blessing, an incantatory celebration of survival. Each reader will come away changed. 'Warsan Shire electrifies... The beautifully crafted poems in this collection are fiercely tender gifts' Roxane Gay 'Absolutely beautiful... So relevant' Elizabeth Day, *Day's Delights*

Rarely heard about in our society are caregivers' thoughts and feelings about life, death, and dying and how they act on those feelings. "For the Living: Coping, Caring and Communicating with the Terminally Ill" provides an in-depth, qualitative look at the experiences of oncology healthcare professionals as they work with terminally ill patients. Through a series of recorded and edited interviews, the author explores the social and cultural dynamics that affect physicians, nurses, and social workers routinely encountering mortality and loss. What death and the prospect of dying mean to these individuals should not be taken lightly.

Zygmunt Bauman's book is a brilliant exploration, from a sociological point of view, of the "taboo" subject in modern societies: death and dying. The book develops a new theory of the ways in which human mortality is reacted to, and dealt with, in social institutions and culture. The hypothesis explored in the book is that the necessity of human beings to live with the constant awareness of death accounts for crucial aspects of the social organization of all known societies. Two different "life strategies" are distinguished in respect of reactions to mortality. One, "the modern strategy," deconstructs mortality by translating the insoluble issue of death into many specific problems of health disease which are "soluble in principle." The "post-modern strategy," is one of deconstructing immortality: life is transformed into a constant rehearsal of "reversible death," a substitution of "temporary disappearance" for the irrevocable termination of life. This profound and provocative book will appeal to a wide audience. It will also be of particular interest to students and professionals in the areas of sociology, anthropology, theology, and philosophy.

Aimed at health care professionals and their colleagues, ministers of religion and funeral directors, this comprehensive work of reference describes the complex procedures required when someone dies. The information should be of value to all those who are concerned with the correct handling of situations as diverse as fatal mass disasters and the rites that are associated with those who hold unfamiliar religious beliefs. The guide is in three parts: legal and technical aspects; considerations for the living, care of the dying, and death with dignity; and religious, ethnic and cultural aspects of dying and death. The author combines medico-legal facts and practical, sensitive advice.

In the early 1960s, this classic work of investigative journalism was a number one bestseller. The savage and hilarious analysis of America's funeral practices rocked the industry and shocked the public. This up-dated edition (revised just before the author's death) shows that if anything the industry has become more pernicious than ever in its assault on our practices and wallets. And it's an industry that - alas - sooner or later affects us all.

Where are the dead? What are they doing? What kind of a process is dying? What relationships exist among the dead themselves, and between the dead and those in the world they have left behind? Modern philosophers argue that the idea of disembodied survival - to which many believers pay lip service - is incoherent, and that there can be evidence neither for nor against something incoherent. By contrast, this book argues, the idea of an embodied survival (albeit a form of embodiment differing from our present embodiment) makes perfect sense in itself and fits much better with the alleged evidence for post-mortem survival. Exploring post-mortem survival, Where are the Dead? uses a variety of empirical data, alongside mythological, legendary and purely fictional material, to illustrate how the less familiar idea of embodied post-mortem survival might actually 'work' in some real afterlife environment. By asking questions about the nature and whereabouts of the afterlife, and about what it might be like to be dead, the book explores themes nowadays relatively neglected even in disciplines explicitly concerned with ideas about death, dying and life after death.

A study of the way in which death is socially organized in the city of Belfast. It analyzes the responses to 415 deaths registered here in 1981, tracing the social, medical, legal, religious and political responses made to those deaths from the time death was pronounced to the time of disposal.

Revisioning War Trauma in Cinema: Uncoming Communities uses philosophy and critical theory to examine films that participate in debates concerning trauma and representation. Our book reflects upon films that invent, rather than represent the moment history breaks down. It proposes a 21st century way forward across problems of trauma, inheritance, and representation into exceptional communities of artistic invention. Revisioning War Trauma involves a confrontation with death and the hole that trauma exposes. We build our subtitle from a play on words, namely the "un-coming" as a resistance to jouissance and as a limit to cultural demands. Uncoming also refers to the traumatic departure of figures in the films from their homes and their symbolic places. As always already in the process of departure, characters in the films our book discusses embody the hemorrhaging of imaginary belonging that nationhood compels. The book uses psychoanalytic theory as a framework and a robust language that allows us to speak about what evades sense. Our book also engages with other post-modern theories of disaster and politics to examine how trauma might serve as an opportunity to foreground an aesthetics and politics of difference. Each chapter is a close reading of a film that critically examines a cinematic screen that allows for the emergence of what history fails to transmit.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This volume provides a series of illuminating perspectives on the timings of death, through in-depth studies of Shakespearean tragedy, criminal execution, embalming practices, fears of premature burial, rumours of Adolf Hitler's survival, and the legal concept of brain death. In doing so, it explores a number of questions, including: how do we know if someone is dead or not? What do people experience at the moment when they die? Is death simply a biological event that comes about in temporal stages of decomposition, or is it a social event defined through cultures, practices, and commemorations? In other words, when exactly is death? Taken together, these contributions explore how death emerges in a series of stages that are uncertain, paradoxical, and socially contested.

One of NPR's Great Reads of 2016 "A lively assemblage and smart analysis of dozens of haunting stories...absorbing...[and] intellectually intriguing." -The New York Times Book Review From the author of The Unidentified, an intellectual feast for fans of offbeat history that takes readers on a road trip through some of the country's most infamously haunted places-and deep into the dark side of our history. Colin Dickey is on the trail of America's ghosts. Crammed into old houses and hotels, abandoned prisons and empty hospitals, the spirits that linger continue to capture our collective imagination, but why? His own fascination piqued by a house hunt in Los Angeles that revealed derelict foreclosures and "zombie homes," Dickey embarks on a journey across the continental United States to decode and unpack the American history repressed in our most famous haunted places. Some have established reputations as "the most haunted mansion in America," or "the most haunted prison"; others, like the haunted Indian burial grounds in West Virginia, evoke memories from the past our collective nation tries to forget. With boundless curiosity, Dickey conjures the dead by focusing on questions of the living-how do we, the living, deal with stories about ghosts, and how do we inhabit and move through spaces that have been deemed, for whatever reason, haunted? Paying attention not only to the true facts behind a ghost story, but also to the ways in which changes to those facts are made-and why those changes are made-Dickey paints a version of American history left out of the textbooks, one of things left undone, crimes left unsolved. Spellbinding, scary, and wickedly insightful, Ghostland discovers the past we're most afraid to speak of aloud in the bright light of day is the same past that tends to linger in the ghost stories we whisper in the dark.

Guided by the Spirits is a case study of youth suicide in the Sault Sainte Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. Written by a member of the tribal community, this study focuses on qualitative methods, indigenous experience, and collaborative approaches to explore the social and historical significance of youth suicide in an Ojibwa community. Guided by the Spirits combines traditional methods of analysis, extracts of interviews and field notes, and creative ethnographic writing to present the relationships between culture, history, identity, agency, and youth suicide. This book is a must read for lay readers, policy makers, and researchers who seek a window into contemporary Native American life as well as a critical interpretation of youth suicide in indigenous societies.

This book takes a critical glance at the ways in which we attend to the corpse, tracing a trajectory from encounter toward considering options for disposal: veneered mortuary internment, green burial and its attendant rot, cremation and alkaline hydrolysis, donation and display, and ecological burial. Through tracing the possible futures of the dead that haunt the living, through both the stories that we tell and physical manifestations following the end of life, we expose the workings of aesthetics that shape corpses, as well as the ways in which corpses spill over, resisting aestheticization. This book creates a space for ritualized practices surrounding death: corpse disposal; corpse aesthetics that shape both practices attendant upon and representations of the corpse; and literary, figural, and cultural representations that deploy these practices to tell a story about dead bodies-about their separation from the living, about their disposability, and ultimately about the living who survive the dead, if only for a while. There is an aesthetics of erasure persistently at work on the dead body. It must be quickly hidden from sight to shield us from the certain trauma of our own demise, or so the unspoken argument goes. Experts-scientists, forensic specialists, death-care professionals, and law enforcement-are the only ones qualified to view the dead for any extended period of time. The rest of us, with only brief doses, inoculate ourselves from the materiality of death in complex and highly ritualized ceremonies. Beyond participating in the project of restoring our sense of finitude, we try to make sense of the untouchable, unviewable, haunting, and taboo presence of the corpse itself.

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.

Structured around a personal account of the illness and death of the author's partner, Jane, this book explores how something hard to bear became a threshold to a world of insight and discovery. Drawing on German Idealism and Jane's own research in the area, The Aesthetic Experience of Dying looks at the notion of life as a binary synthesis, or a return enhanced, as a way of coming to understand death. Binary synthesis describes the interplay between dynamically opposing pairs of concepts - such as life and death - resulting in an enhanced version of one of them to move forward in a new cycle of the process. Yet what relevance does this elegant word game have to the shocking diagnosis of serious illness? Struggling to balance reason with sense, thought with feeling, this book examines the experience of caring for someone from diagnosis to death and is illustrated with examples of the return enhanced. The concluding chapter outlines how the tension of Jane's dying has been resolved as the rhythmic patterns of the lifeworld have been understood through the process of reflecting on the experience. This creative and insightful book will appeal to those interested in the medical humanities. It will also be an important reference for practising and student health professionals.

The definitive reference on the anthropology of death and dying, expanded with new contributions covering everything from animal mourning to mortuary cannibalism Few subjects stir the imagination more than the study of how people across cultures deal with death and dying. This expanded second edition of the internationally bestselling Death, Mourning, and Burial offers cross-cultural readings that span the period from dying to afterlife, considering approaches to this transition as a social process and exploring the great variations of cultural responses to death. Exploring new content including organ transplantation, institutionalized care for the dying, HIV-AIDs, animal mourning, and biotechnology, this text retains classic readings from the first edition, and is enhanced by twenty-three new articles and two new sections which provide increased breadth and depth for readers. Death, Mourning, and Burial, Second Edition is divided into eight parts reflecting the social trajectory of death: conceptualizations of death; death, dying, and care; grief and mourning; mortuary rituals; and remembrance and regeneration. Sections are introduced through foundational texts which provide the ideal introduction to this diverse field. It is essential reading for anyone concerned with issues of death and dying, as well as violence, terrorism, war, state terror, organ theft, and mortuary rituals. * A thoroughly revised edition of this classic anthology featuring twenty-three new articles, two new sections, and three reformulated sections * Updated to include current topics, including organ transplantation, institutionalized care for the dying, HIV-AIDs, animal mourning, and biotechnology * Must reading for anyone concerned with issues of death and dying, as well as violence, terrorism, war, state terror, organ theft, and mortuary rituals * Serves as a text for anthropology classes and provides a genuinely cross-cultural perspective to all those studying death and dying

Grief is frequently thought of as an ordeal we must simply survive. This book offers a fresh approach to the negotiation of death and grief. It is founded in principles of constructive conversation that focus on "remembering" lives, in contrast to processes of forgetting or dismembering those who have died. Re-membering is about a comforting, life enhancing, and sustaining approach to death that does not dwell on the pain of loss and is much more than wistful reminiscing. It is about the deliberate construction of stories that continue to include the dead in the membership of our lives.

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.

As a result of its almost total displacement from the everyday life environment death threatens to become a target for the projection of various fears. This volume takes an interdisciplinary look at this complex phenomenon, and attempts to examine its various dimensions. The presentation of the possibilities of current palliative medicine and ethical reflection upon it are shown to be of particular importance.

While grief is suffered in all cultures, it is expressed differently all over the world in accordance with local customs and beliefs. Music has been associated with the healing of grief for many centuries, with Homer prescribing music as an antidote to sorrow as early as the 7th Century BC. The changing role of music in expressions of grief and mourning throughout history and in different cultures reflects the changing attitudes of society towards life and death itself. This volume investigates the role of music in mourning rituals across time and culture, discussing the subject from the multiple perspectives of music history, music psychology, ethnomusicology and music therapy.

This book provides insight and instruction for bereaved readers and those who work with them.