Deconstructing Death deals with some of the most recent changes and transformations within the realms of death, dying, bereavement, and care in contemporary Nordic countries. The book deals with some of the major - as well as some of the less conspicuous - changes in the cultural and social engagement with the phenomenon of death. Among the themes touched upon are: organ transplantation, death education, communication with the dead, changes in commemorative rituals, mourning practices on the internet, parental responses to children's suicide, death control, the practice and ethics of end-of-life care, and the lonely death. Deconstructing Death contains contributions written by researchers and practitioners from Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland, with professional and academic backgrounds within areas such as sociology, anthropology, religious studies, and palliative care.

Death Across Cultures: Death and Dying in Non-Western Cultures, explores death practices and beliefs, before and after death, around the non-Western world. It includes chapters on countries in Africa, Asia, South America, as well as indigenous people in Australia and North America. These chapters address changes in death rituals and beliefs, medicalization and the industry of death, and the different ways cultures mediate the impacts of modernity. Comparative studies with the west and among countries are included. This book brings together global research conducted by anthropologists, social scientists and scholars who work closely with individuals from the cultures they are writing about.

A provocative study that explores medical, social, cultural, and aesthetic customs and practices of treating the dead body in Sweden in an era of modernization.

This book features the second selection of the most representative papers presented at the international conference “Dying and Death in 18th–21st Century Europe” (ABDD), a traditional scientific event organized every year in Alba Iulia, Romania. The book invites the reader on a fascinating journey across the last three centuries of Europe, using the concept of death as a guide. The past and present realities of the complex phenomena of death and dying in Romania, the United Kingdom, Lithuania, Serbia, Macedonia, Poland, USA, Germany, Sweden, Finland, and Italy are dealt with by authors from varying backgrounds, including historians, sociologists, psychologists, priests, humanists, anthropologists, and doctors. This is proof that death as a topic cannot be confined to one science; the deciphering of its meanings and of the shifts it effects requires a joint, interdisciplinary effort.

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.

Death is a constant in every society, but each of the world's cultures views the end of life differently. This book examines beliefs about dying, burial, and life after death held by peoples of wide ranging societies.