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Grave Matters

Encounters with Death around the World

 

Nigel Barley

 

Within the multitude of attitudes toward grieving, Grave Matters reveals that after death the body may be preserved or obliterated, transformed into furniture, or eaten. In this cross-cultural study of how people lend meaning to death, Nigel Barley uses autobiographical vignettes and a careful blend of ethnography and comparative theories to reflect on today’s mortuary practices and issues. For some, the road to death is enlightening, for others it is ghastly. Not one to slight death’s sting (or its caress by the overly solicitous mortuary industry), Barley agrees with Aristotle that humor is also a key distinguishing feature of humanity. At his own father’s cremation, the worship space, which was designed for measured grief, could be converted into a basketball court.


This evocative and edifying text shows that death is a mirror in which human diversity can be seen, exposing a society’s culture and the possibilities for mourning or robust eruptions. While a polished coffin with brass handles may be appropriate in Western society, in Ghana a poultry farmer is buried in a giant carved chicken. Life and death go hand in hand, as illustrated during the French Revolution when fashionable ladies wore elegant little guillotines in their ears as jewelry. Underlying these peculiarities is the premise that, when it comes to death, it is not what we feel that counts, it is what we do.

The Innocent Anthropologist

 

$17.95 list, 240 pages

10-digit ISBN: 1-57766-431-0

13-digit ISBN: 978-1-57766-431-4

© 1995

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“This is an enjoyable and engaging exploration of the diverse reactions to death around the world. Highly readable and irreverent, Barley avoids ponderous prose in favor of a lighter touch and challenges Western scholarly approaches to examining death.”  — Yorke Rowan, University of Notre Dame

Table of Contents

 

Introduction

1. The Universality of Death

2. Before and after the Fact

3. The Mythical Place of Death

4. The Quick and the Dead: Relations across the Grave

5. Only Flesh and Blood

6. Political Deaths

7. Fixed Abode: Time, Place and Death

8. Metaphors We Die By

9. From the Cradle to the Grave

10. Getting Ahead: War, Murder and Capital Punishment

11. In Memoriam