Residues of Death

This book provides a critical overview of the changing ways people mourn, commemorate and interact with the remains of the dead, including bodies, materials and digital artefacts. It focuses on how residues of death persist and circulate through different spaces, materials, data and mediated memories, refiguring how the disposal of the dead is understood, enacted and contested across the globe. The volume contains contributions by scholars from a number of disciplines and includes a diverse range of case studies drawn from Asia, Europe and North America. Together they reveal how rapidly changing practices, industries and experiences around death’s remains involve the entwining of digital technologies with other material and ritualised forms of commemoration, as well as with shifting boundaries between the sacred and the profane, the institutional and the vernacular, the public and the private.

Tamara Kohn is Professor of Anthropology in the School of Social and Political Sciences, at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Martin Gibbs is an Associate Professor in the School of Computing and Information Systems and a member of the Interaction Design Lab (IDL) at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Bjorn Nansen is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Luke van Ryn has a PhD from the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, Australia.