The New Death brings together scholars who are intrigued by today's rapidly changing death practices and attitudes. New and different ways of treating the body and memorializing the dead are proliferating across global cities. Using ethnographic, historical, and media-based approaches, the contributors to this volume focus on new attitudes and practices around mortality and mourning--from the possibilities of digitally enhanced afterlives to industrialized "necro-waste," the ethics of care, the meaning of secular rituals, and the political economy of death. Together, the chapters coalesce around the argument that there are two major currents running through the new death--reconfigurations of temporality and of intimacy. Pushing back against the folklorization endemic to anthropological studies of death practices and the whiteness of death studies as a field, the chapters strive to override divisions between the Global South and the Anglophone world, focusing instead on syncretization, globalization, and magic within the mundane.

This illuminating book examines how the public funerals of major figures from the Civil War era shaped public memories of the war and allowed a diverse set of people to contribute to changing American national identities. These funerals featured lengthy processions that sometimes crossed multiple state lines, burial ceremonies open to the public, and other cultural productions of commemoration such as oration and song. As Sarah J. Purcell reveals, Americans' participation in these funeral rites led to contemplation and contestation over the political and social meanings of the war and the roles played by the honored dead. Public mourning for military heroes, reformers, and politicians distilled political and social anxieties as the country coped with the aftermath of mass death and casualties. Purcell shows how large-scale funerals for figures such as Henry Clay and Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson set patterns for mourning culture and Civil War commemoration; after 1865, public funerals for figures such as Robert E. Lee, Charles Sumner, Frederick Douglass, and Winnie Davis elaborated on these patterns and fostered public debate about the meanings of the war, Reconstruction, race, and gender.

What is suicide? When does suicide start and when does it end? Who is involved? Examining narratives of suicide through a discourse analytic framework, Discursive Constructions of the Suicidal Process demonstrates how linguistic theories and methodologies can help answer these questions and cast light upon what suicide involves and means, both for those who commit an act and their loved ones. Engaging in close analysis of suicide letters written before the act and post-hoc narratives from after the event, this book is the first qualitative study to view suicide not as a single event outside time, but as a time-extended process. Exploring how suicide is experienced and narrated from two temporal perspectives, Dariusz Galasinski and Justyna Ziolkowska introduce discourse analysis to the field of suicidology. Arguing that studying suicide narratives and the reality they represent can add significantly to our understanding of the process, and in particular its experiences and meanings, Discursive Constructions of the Suicidal Process demonstrates the value of discourse analytic insights in informing, enriching and contextualising our knowledge of suicide.

Dementia is a particularly cruel and teasing disease for which there is no known cure. No vaccine... and no escape, once it takes a hold. My book is a personal, yet hopefully objective, and sociological, reflection on all aspects of caring for my much-loved Mum throughout the steadily worsening stages of her final (5) years of life... until the Dementia finally reeled in its 'prey.' If it makes a positive difference to just one sufferer, it will not have been written in vain.

Hundreds of thousands of individuals perished in the epic conflict of the U.S. Civil War. As battles raged and the specter of death and dying hung over the divided nation, the living worked not only to bury their dead but also to commemorate them. President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address perhaps best voiced the public yearning to memorialize the war dead. His address marked the beginning of a new tradition of commemorating American soldiers and also signaled a transformation in the relationship between the government and the citizenry through an embedded promise and obligation for the living to remember the dead. In Death at the Edges of Empire Shannon Bontrager examines the culture of death, burial, and commemoration of American war dead. By focusing on the Civil War, the Spanish-Cuban-American War, the Philippine-American War, and World War I, Bontrager produces a history of collective memories of war expressed through American cultural traditions that emerged within broader transatlantic and transpacific networks. Examining the pragmatic collaborations between middle-class Americans and government officials to negotiate the contradictory terrain of empire and nation, Death at the Edges of Empire shows how Americans imposed modern order on the inevitability of death and used the war dead to reimagine political identities and opportunities into imperial ambitions.