ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how contemporary disposal processes relating to the deceased are currently being refigured in practice, and how they are also reinterpreted in anthropological studies of death, dying and memorialisation. To provide a framework for the volume Residues of Death: Disposal Refigured, and its interdisciplinary contributions, we introduce the book’s key concepts, highlighting transformations and decompositions of the body that facilitate human post-mortem life in a variety of ways. A growing diversity in modes of body disposal, particularly in Western contexts, provides the dead with material afterlives within wider ecologies and environments of memory making. Within this shifting terrain of disposal, death’s residues—whether bodily, material or digital—can become animated, such that the deceased remain or become affective and active as registered through their social relationships with the living.
