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The Work of the Dead - A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Hardcover)
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The Work of the Dead - A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Hardcover)
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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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