Death’s Social and Material Meaning beyond the Human

Death’s Social and Material Meaning beyond the Human
Author: Jesse D. Peterson
Publisher: Policy Press
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2024-01-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1529230160

Death studies typically focus on the death of humans, overlooking the wider factors involved in social and natural processes around death. This edited volume provides an alternative focus for death studies by looking beyond human death, to reveal the complex interconnections among human and more than human creatures, entities and environments. Bringing together a diverse range of international scholars, the book sheds light on topics which have previously remained at the margins of contemporary death studies and death care cultures. Organised around three themes – Knowledge and Mediation, Care and Remembrance, and Agency and Power – this book pushes the boundaries of death studies to explore death and dying from beyond the perspective of a nature/culture binary.

Death's Social and Material Meaning Beyond the Human

Death's Social and Material Meaning Beyond the Human
Author: Jesse D. Peterson
Publisher: Policy Press
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2024-01-09
Genre:
ISBN: 1529230144

Death studies typically focus on the death of humans, overlooking the wider factors involved in social and natural processes around death. This edited volume provides an alternative focus for death studies by looking beyond human death, to reveal the complex interconnections among human and more than human creatures, entities and environments. Bringing together a diverse range of international scholars, the book sheds light on topics which have previously remained at the margins of contemporary death studies and death care cultures. Organised around three themes - Knowledge and Mediation, Care and Remembrance, and Agency and Power - this book pushes the boundaries of death studies to explore death and dying from beyond the perspective of a nature/culture binary.

Remembering and Disremembering the Dead

Remembering and Disremembering the Dead
Author: Floris Tomasini
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 106
Release: 2017-08-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1137538287

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence. This book is a multidisciplinary work that investigates the notion of posthumous harm over time. The question what is and when is death, affects how we understand the possibility of posthumous harm and redemption. Whilst it is impossible to hurt the dead, it is possible to harm the wishes, beliefs and memories of persons that once lived. In this way, this book highlights the vulnerability of the dead, and makes connections to a historical oeuvre, to add critical value to similar concepts in history that are overlooked by most philosophers. There is a long historical view of case studies that illustrate the conceptual character of posthumous punishment; that is, dissection and gibbetting of the criminal corpse after the Murder Act (1752), and those shot at dawn during the First World War. A long historical view is also taken of posthumous harm; that is, body-snatching in the late Georgian period, and organ-snatching at Alder Hey in the 1990s.

Being Algae

Being Algae
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2024-03-11
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9004683313

Water plants of all sizes, from the 60-meter long Pacific Ocean giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera) to the micro ur-plant blue-green algae, deserve attention from critical plant studies. This is the first book in environmental humanities to approach algae, swimming across the sciences, humanities, and arts, to embody the mixed nature and collaborative identity of algae. Ranging from Medieval Islamic texts describing algae and their use, Japanese and Nordic cultural practices based in seaweed and algae, and confronting the instrumentalization of seaweed to mitigate cow methane release and the hype of algal photobioreactors, amongst many other standpoints, this volume comprehensively addresses the ancestors of terrestrial plants through appreciating their unique aquatic medium.

Dissection Photography

Dissection Photography
Author: Brandon Zimmerman
Publisher: Policy Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2024-02-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1529222184

Featuring previously unseen images, stories and anecdotes, this book explores the visual culture of death and the gross anatomy lab through the tradition of dissection photography, examining its historical aspects from both photographic and medical perspectives.

Beyond the Body

Beyond the Body
Author: Elizabeth Hallam
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2005-08-16
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 1134739524

The authors challenge theories that put the body at the centre of identity, going 'beyond the body' to highlight the persistence of self-identity even when the body itself has been disposed of or is missing.

Death Matters

Death Matters
Author: Tora Holmberg
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2019-04-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030114856

This book investigates death as part of contemporary everyday experience and practices. Through a cultural sociological lens, it studies death as it remains constantly at the edge of our consciousness, shaping the ways in which we move through social reality. As such, Death Matters is a significant contribution to death studies, going beyond traditional parameters of the field by addressing the cultural omnipresence of death. The contributions analyse several death-related meaning-making processes, arguing that meanings emerging from culturally shared narratives, social institutions, and material conditions, are just as important as ’death practices’ in understanding the role of death in society. Drawing on the related themes of places of absence and presence, disease and bodies, and persons and non-persons, the authors explore a variety of areas of social life, from haunting to celebrity deaths, to move the notion of death from the margins of social reality to ongoing everyday life. This far-reaching collection will be of use to scholars and students across death studies, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, culture, media and communication studies.

The Materiality and Spatiality of Death, Burial and Commemoration

The Materiality and Spatiality of Death, Burial and Commemoration
Author: Christoph Klaus Streb
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 155
Release: 2021-09-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000460800

Death, dying and burial produce artefacts and occur in spatial contexts. The interplay between such materiality and the bereaved who commemorate the dead yields interpretations and creates meanings that can change over time. Materiality is more than simple matter, void of meaning or relevance. The apparent inanimate has meaning. It is charged with significance, has symbolic and interpretative value—perhaps a form of selfhood, which originates from the interaction with the animate. In our case, gravestones, bodily remains and the spatial order of the cemetery are explored for their material agency and relational constellations with human perceptions and actions. Consciously and unconsciously, by interacting with such materiality, one is creating meaning, while materiality retroactively provides a form of agency. Spatiality provides more than a mere context: it permits and shapes such interaction. Thus, artefacts, mementos and memorials are exteriorised, materialised, and spatialized forms of human activity: they can be understood as cultural forms, the function of which is to sustain social life. However, they are also the medium through which values, ideas and criteria of social distinction are reproduced, legitimised, or transformed. This book will explore this interplay by going beyond the consideration of simple grave artefacts on the one hand and graveyards as a space on the other hand, to examine the specific interrelationships between materiality, spatiality, the living, and the dead. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Mortality.

Slavery and Social Death

Slavery and Social Death
Author: Orlando Patterson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 528
Release: 2018-10-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0674916131

In a work of prodigious scholarship and enormous breadth, which draws on the tribal, ancient, premodern, and modern worlds, Orlando Patterson discusses the internal dynamics of slavery in sixty-six societies over time. These include Greece and Rome, medieval Europe, China, Korea, the Islamic kingdoms, Africa, the Caribbean islands, and the American South.

U.S. Health in International Perspective

U.S. Health in International Perspective
Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 421
Release: 2013-04-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0309264146

The United States is among the wealthiest nations in the world, but it is far from the healthiest. Although life expectancy and survival rates in the United States have improved dramatically over the past century, Americans live shorter lives and experience more injuries and illnesses than people in other high-income countries. The U.S. health disadvantage cannot be attributed solely to the adverse health status of racial or ethnic minorities or poor people: even highly advantaged Americans are in worse health than their counterparts in other, "peer" countries. In light of the new and growing evidence about the U.S. health disadvantage, the National Institutes of Health asked the National Research Council (NRC) and the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to convene a panel of experts to study the issue. The Panel on Understanding Cross-National Health Differences Among High-Income Countries examined whether the U.S. health disadvantage exists across the life span, considered potential explanations, and assessed the larger implications of the findings. U.S. Health in International Perspective presents detailed evidence on the issue, explores the possible explanations for the shorter and less healthy lives of Americans than those of people in comparable countries, and recommends actions by both government and nongovernment agencies and organizations to address the U.S. health disadvantage.