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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social institutions > Death & dying
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The Work of the Dead - A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Paperback)
Loot Price: R790
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The Work of the Dead - A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Paperback)
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The meaning of our concern for mortal remains-from antiquity
through the twentieth century The Greek philosopher Diogenes said
that when he died his body should be tossed over the city walls for
beasts to scavenge. Why should he or anyone else care what became
of his corpse? In The Work of the Dead, acclaimed cultural
historian Thomas Laqueur examines why humanity has universally
rejected Diogenes's argument. No culture has been indifferent to
mortal remains. Even in our supposedly disenchanted scientific age,
the dead body still matters-for individuals, communities, and
nations. A remarkably ambitious history, The Work of the Dead
offers a compelling and richly detailed account of how and why the
living have cared for the dead, from antiquity to the twentieth
century. The book draws on a vast range of sources-from mortuary
archaeology, medical tracts, letters, songs, poems, and novels to
painting and landscapes in order to recover the work that the dead
do for the living: making human communities that connect the past
and the future. Laqueur shows how the churchyard became the
dominant resting place of the dead during the Middle Ages and why
the cemetery largely supplanted it during the modern period. He
traces how and why since the nineteenth century we have come to
gather the names of the dead on great lists and memorials and why
being buried without a name has become so disturbing. And finally,
he tells how modern cremation, begun as a fantasy of stripping
death of its history, ultimately failed-and how even the ashes of
the victims of the Holocaust have been preserved in culture. A
fascinating chronicle of how we shape the dead and are in turn
shaped by them, this is a landmark work of cultural history.
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