This fascinating work explores the meaning of death in the digital age, showing readers the new ways digital technology allows humans to approach, prepare for, and handle their ultimate destiny. With DeadSocial (TM) one can create messages to be published to social networks after death. Facebook's "If I Die" enables users to create a video or text message for posthumous publication. Twitter _LIVESON accounts will keep tweeting even after the user is gone. There is no doubt that the digital age has radically changed options related to death, dying, grieving, and remembering, allowing people to say goodbye in their own time and their own unique way. Drawing from a range of academic perspectives, this book is the only serious study to focus on the ways in which death, dying, and memorialization appear in and are influenced by digital technology. The work investigates phenomena, devices, and audiences as they affect mortality, remembrances, grieving, posthumous existence, and afterlife experience. It examines the markets to which the providers of such services are responding, and it analyzes the degree to which digital media is changing views and expectations related to death. Ultimately, the contributors seek to answer an even more important question: how digital existences affect both real-world perceptions of life's end and the way in which lives are actually lived. Explains how new technologies and online accessibility are changing human attitudes to death and dying-and impacting the ways in which people live Explores the afterlife experience as it can play out in a variety of digital media, including Facebook and other social media, World of Warcraft and video games, YouTube and other video services, and Internet memorials Analyzes the myriad ways encounters with death and dying and the capacity for mourning are mediated by new technologies Places death and dying in the digital age in historical perspective, showing how beliefs about and approaches to death and dying have changed constantly over time

Using a historical framework, this book offers not only the penal history of the death penalty in the states that have given women the death penalty, but it also retells the stories of the women who have been executed and those currently awaiting their fate on death row. This work takes a historical look at women and the death penalty in the United States from 1900 to 1998. It gives the reader a look at the penal codes in the various states regarding the death penalty and the personal stories of women who have been executed or who are currently on death row. As Americans continue to debate the enforcement of the death penalty, the issues of race and gender as they relate to the death penalty are also debated. This book offers a unique perspective to a recurring sociopolitical issue.

The social and cultural changes of the last century have transformed death from an everyday fact to something hidden from view. Shifting between the practical and the theoretical, the professional and the intimate, the real and the fictitious, this collection of essays explores the continued power of death over our lives. It examines the idea and experience of death from an interdisciplinary perspective, including studies of changing burial customs throughout Europe; an account of a"dying party" in the Netherlands; examinations of the fascination with violent death in crime fiction and the phenomenon of serial killer art; analyses of death and bereavement in poetry, fiction, and autobiography; and a look at audience reactions to depictions of death on screen. By studying and considering how death is thought about in the contemporary era, we might restore the natural place it has in our lives.

This book is a collection of mortality abstracts based on recent follow-up studies on the results of health disorders from the abstracts and articles appearing recently in the Journal of Insurance Medicine. The widely different types of investigators who may have repeated need of outcome data (death or morbid event) in a particular disease or risk factor will find this collection invaluable. Such a collection is valuable not only to users in the insurance industry, but to all physicians and health scientists who are interested in prognosis of chronic diseases, in clinical trials, in cost/benefit questions, in clinical decision-making, and similar fields of inquiry.

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.

In this compelling book Nigel Saul opens up the world of medieval gentry families, using the magnificent brasses and monuments of the Cobham family as a window on to the social and religious culture of the middle ages.

Bringing together the views of numerous distinguished scholars, Children and Death investigates the child's concept of death from both academic and clinical points of view. The contributors have aimed at developing practical guidelines for a multidisciplinary approach to the care and support of the dying child, the child's family unit, and staff who work with dying children. The findings presented here are also applicable to care of children with life-threatening illness. Topics discussed include: children's concepts of death; emotional impact of disease; perspectives on children's death and dying; and coping with a child's death.

Mortuary Dialogues presents fresh perspectives on death and mourning across the Pacific Islands. Through a set of rich ethnographies, the book examines how funerals and death rituals give rise to discourse and debate about sustaining moral personhood and community amid modernity and its enormous transformations. The book's key concept, "mortuary dialogue," describes the different genres of talk and expressive culture through which people struggle to restore individual and collective order in the aftermath of death in the contemporary Pacific.

The dead are potent and omnipresent in modern Indonesia. Presidents and peasants alike meditate before sacred graves to exploit the power they confer, and mediums do good business curing the sick by interpreting the wishes of deceased forebears. Among non-Muslims there are ritual burials of the bones of the dead in monuments both magnificent and modest. By promoting dead heroes to a nationalist pantheon, regions and ethnic groups establish their place within the national story.Although much has been written about the local forms of the scriptural religions to which modern Indonesians are required by law to adhere - Islam, Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism - this is the first book to assess the indigenous systems of belief in the spirits of ancestors. Sometimes these systems are condemned in the name of the formal religions, but more often the potent dead coexist as a private dimension of everyday religious practice.A unique team of anthropologists, historians and literary scholars from Europe, Australia and North America demonstrate the continuing importance of the potent dead for understanding contemporary Indonesia. At the same time, they help us understand historic processes of conversion to Islam and Christianity by examining the continuing interactions of the spirit world with formal religion.

"Fatal Freedom" is an eloquent defense of every individual's right to choose a voluntary death. The author, a renowned psychiatrist, believes that we can speak about suicide calmly and rationally, as he does in this book, and that we can ultimately accept suicide as part of the human condition. By maintaining statutes that determine that voluntary death is not legal, our society is forfeiting one of its basic freedoms and causing the psychiatric/medical establishment to treat individuals in a manner that is disturbingly inhumane according to Dr. Szasz. His important work asks and points to clear, intelligent answers to some of the most significant ethical questions of our time:

Is suicide a voluntary act?

Should physicians be permitted to prevent it?

Should they be authorized to abet it?

The author's thoughtful analysis of these questions consistently holds forth patient autonomy as paramount; therefore, he argues, patients should not be prevented from exercising their free will, nor should physicians be permitted to enter the process by prescribing or providing the means for voluntary death.

Dr. Szasz predicts that we will look back at our present prohibitory policies toward suicide with the same amazed disapproval with which we regard past policies toward homosexuality, masturbation, and birth control. This comparison with other practices that started as sins, became crimes, then were regarded as mental illnesses, and are now becoming more widely accepted, opens up the discussion and understanding of suicide in a historical context. The book explores attitudes toward suicide held by the ancient Greeks and Romans, through early Christianity and the Reformation, to the advent of modern psychiatry and contemporary society as a whole. Our tendency to define disapproved behaviors as diseases has created a psychiatric establishment that exerts far too much influence over how and when we choose to die. Just as we have come to accept the individual's right to birth control, so too must we accept his right to death control before we can call our society humane or free.

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.

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.

Suicide is now the third leading cause of death among adolescents in the United States, and some studies suggest that as many as 75 percent of all teenagers have considered killing themselves. Current research on young people who are suicidal (those who attempt and those who succeed) is discussed in a plain way. Among the wide ranging topics covered are the prevalence of adolescent suicide, racial and gender differences, methods used in the study of suicidal behavior, associated behavioral problems (e.g., drugs and alcohol), psychological profiles, precipitating events for suicide attempts, teenage suicide clusters, the effects of suicide on family and friends, the treatment of suicidal adolescents, and, most importantly, strategies for intervention and prevention.

This book is the first comprehensive assessment of the mortality crisis which has affected most economies in transition but which has remained so far largely unexplained. It reconciles long-term and short-term explanations of the crisis and makes use of special micro data-sets never used before. By providing a rigorous multidisciplinary analysis of this upsurge in mortality rates, the book hopes to contribute to the launch of vigorous policies to tackle this societal problem.

Working with Grief and Traumatic Loss: Theory, Practice, Personal Reflection, and Self-Care provides clinicians with a wide range of personal loss and grief examples from seasoned therapists while also considering grief through the lens of diverse cultural, religious, and theoretical perspectives. This unique text shares practicing clinicians' personal journeys of loss in myriad forms, including spousal, child and parental death, suicide, genocide, mass disasters, loss of physical health, miscarriage and beyond, in order to strengthen the frameworks through which grief is viewed, help readers more deeply understand its global context, and emphasize the relevance of personal experience when engaging in practice. Opening chapters review historical and modern theories of grief and loss, bereavement, and mourning rituals, as well as current evidence-based interventions and promising new practice methods. Later chapters transition from theoretical constructs and current research to intimate, personal stories of loss from licensed therapists, such as psychologists, marriage and family therapists, and social workers who experienced loss while in practice. Readers are introduced to a wide range of perspectives on grief, loss, and death with emphasized viewpoints from worldwide religions such as Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism, and countries such as Taiwan, Kenya, and Guatemala. Readers learn about the importance of integrating self-care into practice and discover strategies for continued self-reflection practices to maintain personal and professional health while simultaneously supporting clients through their grief journey. The book features classroom exercises and an annotated bibliography to facilitate additional learning opportunities. Working with Grief and Traumatic Loss is an ideal resource for social work, psychology, counseling, marriage and family, and grief and loss courses, as well as clinicians interested in deepening their practice.

Encountering evidence of postmortem examinations - dissection or autopsy in historic skeletal collections is relatively rare, but recently there has been an increase in the number of reported instances. And much of what has been evaluated has been largely descriptive and historical. The Bioarchaeology of Dissection and Autopsy brings together in a single volume the skeletal evidence of postmortem examination in the United States. Ranging from the early colonial period to the early 1900's, from a coffeehouse at Colonial Williamsburg to a Quaker burial vault in lower Manhattan, the contributions to this volume demonstrate the interpretive significance of a historically and theoretically contextualized bioarchaeology. The authors employ a wide range of perspectives, demonstrating how bioarchaeological evidence can be used to address a wide range of themes including social identity and marginalization, racialization, the nature of the body and fragmentation, and the emergence of medical practice and authority in the United States.

The main purpose of this booklet is twofold: to help Humanists who are thinking of becoming officiants on a regular basis; and to help families and friends who are faced with the need to organize a ceremony themselves at short notice. A third group who may find parts of it useful are funeral directors coping with funerals where there is no officiant and the family has no wish to play an active role.
The booklet aims to set out clearly the basic format of a Humanist ceremony, to suggest possible readings and turns of phrase, and to state simply the various practical measures that need to be taken. In short, it is a straightforward working manual.
" It was] the first funeral I had attended where I felt comfortable, and comforted
by the words spoken."
" . . . it gave me a sense of great peace."
"To hear others publicly proclaim their love, respect and admiration for my
husband made the funeral an uplifting experience. Afterwards so many who had
attended told me that it was the most interesting, most moving, most relevant
and best funeral that they had ever been to. Their remarks gave me a great
deal of comfort and I knew that I had treated my husband's atheism with the
respect and dignity that it deserved."
"A large number of those present, from a wide range of beliefs and backgrounds,
later expressed what we can only call enthusiasm for an experience that was
new to them, and in many cases compared very favourable with the often awkward
and impersonal alternatives with which they were familiar."
"Bearing in mind that this is a form of ceremony which has not yet gained wide
acceptance, we consider ourselves fortunate . . . to have received such expert and
personal attention."