Mortuary Dialogues: Death Ritual and the Reproduction of Moral Community in Pacific Modernities (ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology, 7) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 178533171X ISBN 13: 9781785331718

Publisher: Berghahn Books, 2016

Synopsis

Mortuary Dialogues presents fresh perspectives on death and mourning across the Pacific Islands. Through a set of rich ethnographies, the book examines how funerals and death rituals give rise to discourse and debate about sustaining moral personhood and community amid modernity and its enormous transformations. The book’s key concept, “mortuary dialogue,” describes the different genres of talk and expressive culture through which people struggle to restore individual and collective order in the aftermath of death in the contemporary Pacific.

About this title

About the Author

Eric K. Silverman is Professor of Anthropology in the American Studies and Psychology/Human Development Departments at Wheelock College.

Review

"This book is notable for its wealth of ethnographic data on mortuary practices in very different parts of a changing Pacific, as well as for the critique running through it that reminds us that Hertz’s model is an idealization―both emic and etic―from which the actual practice departs into varying degrees of ambivalence." · Roger Lohmann, Trent University

"The chapters here offer some very important additions to the discipline and are stimulating and good reads whether or not one agrees with the authors’ points." · Frederick Damon, University of Virginia

About this edition

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 178533171X
• ISBN 13: 9781785331718
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 262
• Editor: Lipset David, Silverman Eric K.