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In My Time of Dying - A History of Death and the Dead in West Africa (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R807
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In My Time of Dying - A History of Death and the Dead in West Africa (Hardcover)
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An in-depth look at how mortuary cultures and issues of death and
the dead in Africa have developed over four centuries In My Time of
Dying is the first detailed history of death and the dead in Africa
south of the Sahara. Focusing on a region that is now present-day
Ghana, John Parker explores mortuary cultures and the relationship
between the living and the dead over a four-hundred-year period
spanning the seventeenth to twentieth centuries. Parker considers
many questions from the African historical perspective, including
why people die and where they go after death, how the dead are
buried and mourned to ensure they continue to work for the benefit
of the living, and how perceptions and experiences of death and the
ends of life have changed over time. From exuberant funeral
celebrations encountered by seventeenth-century observers to the
brilliantly conceived designer coffins of the late twentieth
century, Parker shows that the peoples of Ghana have developed one
of the world's most vibrant cultures of death. He explores the
unfolding background of that culture through a diverse range of
issues, such as the symbolic power of mortal remains and the
dominion of hallowed ancestors, as well as the problem of bad
deaths, vile bodies, and vengeful ghosts. Parker reconstructs a
vast timeline of death and the dead, from the era of the slave
trade to the coming of Christianity and colonial rule to the rise
of the modern postcolonial nation. With an array of written and
oral sources, In My Time of Dying richly adds to an understanding
of how the dead continue to weigh on the shoulders of the living.
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