Death?s Social and Material Meaning Beyond the Human

Death studies typically focus on the death of humans, overlooking the wider factors involved in social and natural processes around death. This edited volume provides an alternative focus for death studies by looking beyond human death, to reveal the complex interconnections among human and more than human creatures, entities and environments.

Bringing together a diverse range of international scholars, the book sheds light on topics which have previously remained at the margins of contemporary death studies and death care cultures. Organised around three themes – Knowledge and Mediation, Care and Remembrance, and Agency and Power – this book pushes the boundaries of death studies to explore death and dying from beyond the perspective of a nature/culture binary.

Jesse D. Peterson is Lecturer and Assistant Professor with the Radical Humanities Laboratory at University College Cork.

Natashe Lemos Dekker is a postdoctoral researcher at the Leiden Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology.

Philip R. Olson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech.