A Companion to the Anthropology of Death

Antonius C. G. M. Robben is Professor of Anthropology at Utrecht University, The Netherlands, and past President of The Netherlands Society of Anthropology. His most recent edited books include Necropolitics: Mass Graves and Exhumations in the Age of Human Rights (2017) and the second edition of Death, Mourning, and Burial: A Cross-Cultural Reader (Wiley Blackwell, 2017). He is also the author of the monograph Argentina Betrayed: Memory, Mourning, and Accountability (2018).

Notes on Contributors ix

An Anthropology of Death for the Twenty‐First Century xv
Antonius C. G. M. Robben

Part I Mortuary Rituals 1

1 Governing the Dead in Guatemala: Public Authority and Dead Bodies 3
Finn Stepputat

2 Evolving Mortuary Rituals in Contemporary Japan 17
Yohko Tsuji

3 Revealing Brands, Concealing Labor 31
George Sanders

4 Playing with Corpses: Assembling Bodies for the Dead in Southwest China 45
Erik Mueggler

5 Death and Separation in Postconflict Timor‐Leste 59
Judith Bovensiepen

6 Migration, Death, and Conspicuous Redistribution in Southeastern Nigeria 71
Daniel Jordan Smith

Part II Emotions 85

7 After Death: Event, Narrative, Feeling 87
Michael Lambek

8 Reflections on the Work of Recovery, I and II 103
Beth A. Conklin

9 The Pursuit of Sorrow and the Ethics of Crying 117
Olivier Allard

10 Mourning as Mutuality 131
Jason Danely

11 A Comparative Study of Jewish Israeli and Buddhist Khmer Trauma Descendant Discontinued Bonds with the Genocide Dead 145
Carol A. Kidron

12 Facing Death: On Mourning, Empathy, and Finitude 161
Devin Flaherty and C. Jason Throop

Part III Massive Death 175

13 What Is a Mass Grave? Toward an Anthropology of Human Remains Treatment in Contemporary Contexts of Mass Violence 177
Élisabeth Anstett

14 Death on the Move: Pantheons and Reburials in Spanish Civil War Exhumations 189
Francisco Ferrándiz

15 Accountability for Mass Death, Acts of Rescue, and Silence in Rwanda 205
Jennie E. Burnet

16 Impassable Visions: The Cambodia to Come, the Detritus in its Wake 223
Hudson McFann and Alexander Laban Hinton

17 Experience, Empathy, and Flexibility: On Participant Observation in Deadly Fields 237
Ivana Maceǩ

Part IV Regeneration 249

18 Learning How to Die 251
Robert Desjarlais

19 Whirlpools, Glitter, and Ferocious Intruders: The Palpability of Death in Chachi Animism 265
Istvan Praet

20 Shamanic Rebirth and the Paradox of Disremembering the Dead among Mapuche in Chile 279
Ana Mariella Bacigalupo

21 After‐Death Communications: Signs from the Other World in Contemporary North America 293
Ellen Badone

22 Cryonic Suspension as Eschatological Technology in the Secular Age 307
Abou Farman

Part V Corporeal Materiality 321

23 From Here and to Death: The Archaeology of the Human Body 323
Liv Nilsson Stutz

24 Death, Corporeality, and Uncertainty in Zimbabwe 337
Joost Fontein

25 Death, Power, and Silence: Native Nations’ Ancestral Remains at the Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania 357
Jacqueline Fear‐Segal

26 In the Absence of a Corpse: Rituals for Body Donors in the Netherlands 371
Sophie Bolt

27 Death as Spectacle: Plastinated Bodies in Germany 383
Uli Linke

Part VI Biomedical Issues 399

28 The Body as Medicine: Blood and Organ Donation in China 401
Charlotte Ikels

29 Ethical Dilemmas in the Field: Witchcraft and Biomedical Etiology in South Africa 415
Isak Niehaus

30 The Disappearance of Dying, and Why It Matters 429
Helen Stanton Chapple

31 Death, Detachment, and Moral Dilemmas of Care in a Kenyan Hospital 445
Ruth J. Prince

32 The New Normal: Mediated Death and Assisted Dying in the United States 461
Frances Norwood

Index 477