Death, Materiality and Mediation
Title | Death, Materiality and Mediation PDF eBook |
Author | Barbara Graham |
Publisher | Berghahn Books |
Pages | 174 |
Release | 2016-11-15 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 9781785332821 |
In Death, Materiality and Mediation, Barbara Graham analyzes a diverse range of objects associated with remembrance in both the public and private arenas through ethnography of communities on both sides of the Irish border. In doing so, she explores the materially mediated interactions between the living and the dead, revealing the physical, cognitive, emotional, and spiritual roles of the dead in contemporary communities. Through this study, Graham expands the concept of materiality to include narrative, song, senses, emotions, ephemera and embodied experience. She also examines how modern practices are informed by older beliefs and folk religion.
Death, Materiality and Mediation
Title | Death, Materiality and Mediation PDF eBook |
Author | Barbara Graham |
Publisher | Berghahn Books |
Pages | 174 |
Release | 2016-11-01 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 178533283X |
In Death, Materiality and Mediation, Barbara Graham analyzes a diverse range of objects associated with remembrance in both the public and private arenas through ethnography of communities on both sides of the Irish border. In doing so, she explores the materially mediated interactions between the living and the dead, revealing the physical, cognitive, emotional, and spiritual roles of the dead in contemporary communities. Through this study, Graham expands the concept of materiality to include narrative, song, senses, emotions, ephemera and embodied experience. She also examines how modern practices are informed by older beliefs and folk religion.
Mediating and Remediating Death
Title | Mediating and Remediating Death PDF eBook |
Author | Dorthe Refslund Christensen |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 319 |
Release | 2016-04-29 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 1317098617 |
From the ritual object which functions as a substitute for the dead - thus acting as a medium for communicating with the ’other world’ - to the representation of death, violence and suffering in media, or the use of online social networks as spaces of commemoration, media of various kinds are central to the communication and performance of death-related socio-cultural practices of individuals, groups and societies. This second volume of the Studies in Death, Materiality and Time series explores the ways in which such practices are subject to ’re-mediation’; that is to say, processes by which well-known practices are re-presented in new ways through various media formats. Presenting rich, interdisciplinary new empirical case studies and fieldwork from the US and Europe, Asia, The Middle East, Australasia and Africa, Mediating and Remediating Death shows how different media forms contribute to the shaping and transformation of various forms of death and commemoration, whether in terms of their range and distribution, their relation to users or their roles in creating and maintaining communities. With its broad and multi-faceted focus on how uses of media can redraw the traditional boundaries of death-related practices and create new cultural realities, this book will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities with interests in ritual and commemoration practices, the sociology and anthropology of death and dying, and cultural and media studies.
Mediating and Re-Mediating Death
Title | Mediating and Re-Mediating Death PDF eBook |
Author | Dorthe Refslund Christensen |
Publisher | Lund Humphries Publishers |
Pages | 288 |
Release | 2014-08-01 |
Genre | POLITICAL SCIENCE |
ISBN | 9781472413048 |
Presenting rich, new interdisciplinary empirical case studies and fieldwork from the US and Europe, Asia, The Middle East, Australasia and Africa, Mediating and Remediating Death shows how different media forms contribute to the shaping and transformation of various forms of death and commemoration, whether in terms of their range and distribution, their relation to users or their roles in creating and maintaining communities.
Rest in Plastic
Title | Rest in Plastic PDF eBook |
Author | Isabel Bredenbröker |
Publisher | Berghahn Books |
Pages | 276 |
Release | 2024-06 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 1805395033 |
In Peki, an Ewe town in the Ghanaian Volta Region, death is a matter of public concern. By means of funeral banners printed with synthetic ink on PVC, public lyings in state, cemented graves and wreaths made from plastic, death occupies a prominent place in the world of the living. Rest in Plastic gives an insight into local entanglements of death, synthetic materials and power in Ewe community. It shows how different materials and things that come to shape power relations, exist in a delicate balance between state and local governance, kin and outsiders, death and life, the invisible and the visible, movement and containment.
Reconstructing Homes
Title | Reconstructing Homes PDF eBook |
Author | Eerika Koskinen-Koivisto |
Publisher | Berghahn Books |
Pages | 232 |
Release | 2024-07-01 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 1805395750 |
In the practice of constructing the idea of home and the emotions surrounding it, sensory experiences and materiality intertwine to form layers of memory and affective atmospheres. People in different life stages and situations create continuity and a sense of home by engaging with materiality and objects in their own unique way. Reconstructing Homes takes on a multidisciplinary approach of sensory ethnography, visual methods and autoethnography methodologies to explore affective engagements with materiality in the context of home and the idea of belonging.
When Death Falls Apart
Title | When Death Falls Apart PDF eBook |
Author | Hannah Gould |
Publisher | University of Chicago Press |
Pages | 214 |
Release | 2023-12-11 |
Genre | |
ISBN | 0226829014 |
Through an ethnographic study inside Japan's Buddhist goods industry, this book establishes a method for understanding change in death ritual through attention to the dynamic lifecourse of necromaterials. Deep in the Fukuyama mountainside, "the grave of the graves" (o-haka no haka) houses the material remains of Japan's discarded death rites. In the past, the Japanese dead would be transformed into ancestors through years of ritual offerings at graves and in the home at Buddhist altars called butsudan. But in 21st-century Japan, this intergenerational system of care is rapidly collapsing due to falling birth rates, secularization, and economic downturn. Through the lens of this domestic altar, Gould asks: What happens when religious technology becomes obsolete? In noisy carpentry studios, flashy funeral showrooms, the neglected houses of widowers, and the cramped kitchens where women prepare memorial feasts, Gould traces the butsudan alongside the Buddhist lifecycle, exploring how they are made, circulate within religious and funerary economies, come to mediate intimate exchanges between the living and the dead, fall into disuse, and, maybe, are remade. Gould suggests how this form might be reborn for the modern world, from miniature urns inspired by sleek Scandinavian design to new ritual practices that embrace impermanence, such as scattering or the making of "bone buddhas". Read against a long tradition of theorizing memorialization, Japan's contemporary deathscape offers a case study of a different kind of necrosociality, based on material exchanges that seek to both nurture the dead and disentangle them from the world of the living.