Death, grief and funerary practices are central to any analysis of social, anthropological, artistic and religious worlds. However, cemeteries - the key conceptual and physical site for death - have rarely been the focus of archaeological research. 'Prioritizing Death and Society' examines the structure, organisation and significance of cemeteries in the Southern Levant, one of the key areas for both migration and settlement in both prehistory and antiquity. Spanning 6,000 years, from the Chalcolithic to the present day, 'Prioritizing Death and Society' presents new research to analyse the formation and regional variation in cemeteries. By examining both ancient and present-day - nationally Jewish - cemeteries, the study reveals the commonalities and differences in the ways in which death has been and continues to be ritualised, memorialised and understood.

An encounter with the death of another is often an occasion when the bereaved need to be sustained in their loss, relieved of the anxiety that the meeting with death engenders, and comforted in their grief. It is a time when those left behind often seek to redress wrongs in themselves or in the relationships that death has shaken and upset. In both collective and individual responses to the trauma of encountering death, we witness efforts to counter the misfortune and to explain the meaning of the loss, to turn memory into blessing, to reconcile life with death, to regenerate life, and redeem both the bereaved and the dead.

Sometimes loss may transform the bereaved in ways that lead to growth and maturity; other times a loss leads to unremitting anger or melancholia. There may be a variety of spiritual expressions that the bereaved experience in their time of loss, but there appears to be some common elements in all of them. Overtime, survivors' feelings are transformed into growing exploration of the spiritual, a profound sense of rebirth, newfound feelings of self-mastery or confidence, and a deeply held conviction that "life goes on."

The contributions to this volume are based on a conference held in New York on the first anniversary of September 11, 2001. Contributors include Peter Metcalf, Robert Jay Lifton, Ilana Harlow, Robert A. Neimeyer, Samuel Heilman, and Neil Gillman. This sensitive and heartfelt volume relates specifically to issues of death, bereavement, and mourning in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center, but the applications to other individual and catastrophic events is obvious. The contributions do not simply explore how people deal with bereavement or are psychologically affected by extreme grief: they address how people can try to find meaning in tragedy and loss, and strive to help restore order in the wake of chaos. The multidisciplinary perspectives include those of anthropology, psychology, theology, social work, and art.

Should patients be told they are dying? How do families react when one of their members is facing death? Who should reveal that death is imminent? How does hospital staff--doctors, nurses, and attendants--act toward the dying patient and his family?

Death, as a social ritual, is one of the great turning points in human existence, but prior to this classic work, it had been subjected to little scientific study. American perspectives on death seem strangely paradoxical--the brutal fact of death is confronted daily in our newspapers yet Americans are unwilling to talk openly about the process of dying itself. "Awareness of Dying, "using a highly original theory of awareness, examines the dying patient and those about him in social interaction, it gives us a language and tools of analysis for understanding who knows what about dying, under what circumstances, and what difference it makes.

The authors use their finely detailed observations to develop theoretical constructs that will be of use in many other interactions and situations. "Awareness of Dying "was the first study of dying in hospitals, and has proven a useful handbook for chaplains, social workers, nurses, and doctors in confronting the many ethical and personal problems that arise in the dying situation. Now available in paperback, it is destined to reach new audiences interested in this key part of all life.

In this thought-provoking memoir, Nancy Gerber maps the wrenching terrain of caring for an elderly parent. In the fall of 1995, at the age of 73, the author's father suffered a massive stroke on the right side of the brain, rendering him permanently disabled. This catastrophic event plunged the author and her family into a crisis for which they were completely unprepared, one that included financial worries; the need to hire full-time, live-in help; and the specter of putting her father into a nursing home. Even more wrenching was the demise of the parent she had always known. From an active, gregarious man with hobbies and friends - a man who had been working at the time of the stroke - her father became withdrawn, hostile, and silent. This profound loss was aggravated by the stress and anxiety that characterize family caregiving. In honest, evocative prose, the author describes her struggle to negotiate the competing demands of love, filial responsibility, familial conflict, and personal autonomy that arise when a parent becomes ill.

Although the distinctive - and sometimes bizarre - means by which Roman aristocrats often chose to end their lives has attracted some scholarly attention in the past, most writers on the subject have been content to view this a s an irrational and inexplicable aspect of Roman culture. In this book, T.D. Hill traces the cultural logic which animated these suicides, describing the meaning and significance of such deaths in their original cultural context. Covering the writing of most major Latin authors between Lucretius and Lucan, this book argues that the significance of the 'noble death' in Roman culture cannot be understood if the phenomenon is viewed in the context of modern ideas of the nature of the self.

Grief is a universal human experience, painful and inevitable. In this wise and compassionate book, a psychiatrist who has done extensive work and research with the bereaved shares her broad experience, revealing how people cope with, understand, and eventually adapt to many different bereavements in the course of human life. Those first few hours and days after a loved one has died may seem to pass like a dream, and only afterward does the real work of grieving and healing begin. In this comprehensive book, Beverley Raphael describes all the stages of mourning and healing, and analyzes how the effects of loss differ at each stage of life. Starting with the infant's loss of a parent, taking up the effects on adolescents of death in the family, and moving on to the losses people face in adult life and in old age, Raphael, with sensitivity and grace, shows how the dynamics of grief and recovery vary over the course of time. In describing the experience of loss, the author provides the reader with a rich understanding of how different people at different ages cope with grief, loss, and pain. The most thorough book on the subject ever written, The Anatomy of Bereavement is the standard work.

Death Talk is about the healing power of conversation. It gives numerous examples of children and their families being released from the grip of sadness, isolation, and fear by talking about their own experiences of death.

The pursuit and love of death has characterized Western culture since Homeric times. Foundations of Violence enters the ancient world of Homer, Plato and Aristotle to explore the genealogy of violence in Western thought. It uncovers the origins of ideas of death from the 'beautiful death' of Homeric heroes through to the gendered misery of war. Jantzen examines the tensions between those who tried to eliminate fear of death by denying its significance, and those like Plotinus who looked to another world for life and beauty.

Through a cultural analysis of the symbols of death - flesh, blood, bones, souls, time numbers, food and money - Chinese Death Rituals in Singapore throws light upon the Chinese perception of death and how they cope with its eventuality. In the seeming mass of religious rituals and beliefs, it suggests that there is an underlying logic to the rituals. This in turn leads Kiong to examine the interrelationship between death and the socioeconomic value system of China as a whole.

Social media is full of dead people. Nobody knows precisely how many Facebook profiles belong to dead users but in 2012 the figure was estimated at 30 million. What do we do with all these digital souls? Can we simply delete them, or do they have a right to persist? Philosophers have been almost entirely silent on the topic, despite their perennial focus on death as a unique dimension of human existence. Until now. Drawing on ongoing philosophical debates, Digital Souls claims that the digital dead are objects that should be treated with loving regard and that we have a moral duty towards. Modern technology helps them to persist in various ways, while also making them vulnerable to new forms of exploitation and abuse. This provocative book explores a range of questions about the nature of death, identity, grief, the moral status of digital remains and the threat posed by AI-driven avatars of dead people. In the digital era, it seems we must all re-learn how to live with the dead.

At heart, suicide is a subversive act: the assertion of individual will against public authority. How is it, then, that the act of suicide one with defiant political implications has come to be viewed as the last refuge of the self-destructive victim? In "Leaving You," Lisa Lieberman explores the puzzle of this reigning perception of suicide. Drawing on diverse sources, from biblical stories to Romantic novels, philosophical theories, and psychiatric diagnoses, along with contemporary memoirs of suicidal depression, she shows how the idea of suicide as an act of protest has pervaded Western attitudes toward self-destruction, yet how our contemporary view attempts to deny suicide's disruptive potential by depriving the act of its defiance. Efforts to read meaning out of suicide are not hard to find today, Ms. Lieberman finds. Therapeutic strategies that treat suicide as an illness medicating the depression while ignoring the underlying motivations that drive people to end their lives effectively diminish individual responsibility for the decision to die. Sociological explanations that emphasize social causes over individual intentions serve to make suicides passive. Our reluctance to recognize the right to die, to concede this right even to the terminally ill, betrays our uneasiness with the power implied in the act of self-destruction. Ms. Lieberman aims to restore autonomy to the so-called victims by showing how suicide came to function as a vehicle for constructing identity.

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.

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.

The social and religious constraints of their time may have prevented John Milton, Thomas Gray, and Alfred Tennyson from conscious expression or even unconscious recognition of the true extent of their love and devotion to their young male friends, but it lies at the heart of their emotional lives and poetry. Connected by the extraordinary coincidence that each of their loved ones died young, Milton, Gray, and Tennyson are also connected by the male-love elegies that sprang from their grief. This work examines the relationships between John Milton and Charles Diodati, Thomas Gray and Richard West, and Alfred Tennyson and Arthur Hallam through a critical study of Miltons "Epitaphium Damonis, " Grays "Elegy, " and Tennysons "In Memoriam." It shows how their concepts of otherness and difference from the people around them provided comfort after the loss of their loved ones. It discusses Miltons use of Latin to mourn his friend and screen the most resounding expressions of his love while keeping at bay those not ready to understand his concept of otherness, how Gray used both Latin and the vernacular to express his grief while conforming to social and religious constraints by also addressing larger concerns; and Tennysons ability to use the vernacular with complete security to speak out and yet hold back private thoughts about the person he loved more than almost any other in his life.

This book is a representation of the current state of our understanding of suicide and the practice of suicide prevention. Part I outlines suicidology's history and development. It consists of four chapters: an outline of the evolution of contemporary suicidology as a professional career, a look at suicidology of one hundred years ago, a close examination of the definitions of suicide, and an examination of the political culture and public policy choices in suicidology. Currently in the Western world, suicide is a conscious act of self-induced annihilation, best understood as a multidimensional malaise in a needful individual who defines an issue for which suicide is perceived as the best solution. To understand this self-induced annihilation, one should also understand violence. Part II presents four chapters: an explication of violence and its legacy, the role of trauma and violence in subsequent suicidal behavior, homicide with specific reference to elderly Anglo females, and terrorism and hostage taking. The very person who takes his/her life may be least aware of the psychological reasons for doing so. Part III consists of a study of unconscious processes in suicide, and an explication of the confusions of the body, self, and others in suicidal states. Mental health clinicians must deal with suicide in the lives of many people across various ages. Part IV presents an essay on suicidal children, identifying these youngsters as having serious developmental problems, and a review of adolescent suicidal behavior. Various approaches to knowledge are encouraged in suicidology. Part V consists of a review of the literature, exemplified by two cases: an outline of the psychological autopsyin forensic suicidology and the explication of a suicide's videotape, addressing the question, "When someone commits suicide, who is responsible?" The intense personal study of suicidal lives is also necessary. Part VI consists of the careful study of the medical records of Adolf Hitler, and an examination through newly found documents of the sub-intended death of Herman Melville. Cultural elements in the suicidal event must also be understood. Part VII presents a view of Japanese suicide and recent trends of suicide and its prevention in Japan. The saga of suicide does not end with death. Survivors of suicide often need professional attention. Part VIII presents what happens to the significant others who remain behind after the suicidal death, and a study of the lives of the survivors of suicide of ninety-three New York City policemen who killed themselves between 1934 and 1940. Is suicide of the terminally ill the same as other suicides? Death with dignity, euthanasia, assisted suicide, planned death are all forms that describe such a death. Part IX examines the right to die and its consideration from the different cultural perspectives of the Netherlands, Germany, and the United States.

This volume explores the fascinating phenomenon of noble death through pagan, Jewish and Christian sources. Today's society is uncomfortable with death, and willingly submitting to a violent and ostentatious death in public is seen as particularly shocking and unusual. Yet classical sources give a different view, with public self-sacrifice often being applauded. The Romans admired a heroic end in the battlefield or the arena, suicide in the tradition of Socrates was something laudable, and Christians and Jews alike faithfully commemorated their heroes who died during religious persecutions. The cross-cultural approach and wide chronological range of this study make it valuable for students and scholars of ancient history, religion and literature.

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.

Every year in the UK over 10,000 babies die before birth or shortly afterwards. For the parents, the grief is hard to bear. In this book, parents who have lost a baby tell their stories. They speak about what happened, how they felt, how they have been helped by others and how they helped themselves.
Using letters from and interviews with many bereaved parents, Nancy Kohner and Alix Henley have written a book which offers understanding of what it means to lose a baby and the grief that follows. When a Baby Dies also contains valuable information about why a baby dies, hospital practices, the process of grieving, sources of support, and the care parents need in future pregnancies.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203164881

Drawing on literary and visual texts spanning from the twelfth century to the present, this volume of essays explores what happens when narratives try to push the boundaries of what can be said about death.

Opening with a useful overview of the literature on user involvement, the book goes on to look at the policy and professional context within which user involvement is undertaken, in particular user involvement in palliative care. In this section, the authors discuss two key concepts - palliative care and empowerment - and analyse the role of self-help groups and new information and communication technologies in this context. The last section of the book focuses on the detailed narratives of people coping with three life-threatening illnesses - cystic fibrosis, multiple sclerosis and motor neurone disease - and in this way the views and experiences of the 'user' are brought into play to critique current policy and practice
Too Ill to Talk? addresses a current health services issue in a refreshingly critical manner. It challenges the assumption that user involvement is either easy to achieve or that it is necessarily welcomed by all parties. It will be valuable reading for students on health studies courses, health professionals and policy makers in health and social care.

This book is a brief but comprehensive survey of research, writings, and professional practices concerned with death and dying. It is interdisciplinary and eclectic--medical, psychological, religious, philosophical, artistic, demographics, bereavement, and widowhood are all considered--but with an emphasis on psychological aspects. A variety of viewpoints and research findings on topics subsumed under "thanatology" receive thorough consideration. Questions, activities, and projects at the end of each chapter enhance reflection and personalize the material.
This fourth edition features material on:
* moral issues and court cases concerned with abortion and euthanasia;
* the widespread problem of AIDS and other deadly diseases;
* the tragedies occasioned by epidemics, starvation, and war; and
* the resumption of capital punishment in many states.
The book's enhanced multicultural tone reflects the increased economic, social, and physical interdependency among the nations of the world.
Topics receiving increased attention in the fourth edition are: terror management; attitudes and practices concerning death; cross-cultural concepts of afterlife; gallows humor, out-of-body experiences; spiritualism; mass suicide; pet and romantic death; euthanasia; right to die; postbereavement depression; firearm deaths in children; children's understanding of death; child, adolescent, adult, and physician-assisted suicide; religious customs and death; confronting death; legal issues in death, dying and bereavement; death education; death music; creativity and death; longevity; broken heart phenomenon; beliefs in life after death; new definitions of death; children's acceptance of a parent's death; terminal illness; and the politics of death and dying.

Durkeim's book on suicide, first published in 1897 is widely regarded as a classic text, and is essential reading for any student of Durkheim's thought and sociological method. This book examines the continuing importance of Durkheim's methodology. The wide-ranging chapters cover such issues as the use of statistics, explanation of suicide, anomie and religion and the morality of suicide. This book will be of vital interest to any serious scholar of Durkheim's thought and to the sociologist looking for a fresh methodological perspective.

eBook available with sample pages: 020345927X

Taking as its focus a highly emotive area of study, The Dying Process draws on the experiences of daycare and hospice patients to provide a forceful new analysis of the period of decline prior to death.
Placing the bodily realities of dying very firmly centre stage and questioning the ideology central to the modern hospice movement of enabling patients to 'live until they die', Julia Lawton shows how our concept of a 'good death' is open to interpretation. Her study examines the non-negotiable effects of a patient's bodily deterioration on their sense of self and, in so doing, offers a powerful new perspective in embodiment and emotion in death and dying.
A detailed and subtle ethnographic study, The Dying Process engages with a range of deeply complex and ethically contentious issues surrounding the care of dying patients in hospices and elsewhere.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203130278

Taking as its focus a highly emotive area of study, The Dying Process draws on the experiences of daycare and hospice patients to provide a forceful new analysis of the period of decline prior to death.
Placing the bodily realities of dying very firmly centre stage and questioning the ideology central to the modern hospice movement of enabling patients to 'live until they die', Julia Lawton shows how our concept of a 'good death' is open to interpretation. Her study examines the non-negotiable effects of a patient's bodily deterioration on their sense of self and, in so doing, offers a powerful new perspective in embodiment and emotion in death and dying.
A detailed and subtle ethnographic study, The Dying Process engages with a range of deeply complex and ethically contentious issues surrounding the care of dying patients in hospices and elsewhere.