ABSTRACT
Tangible remains play an important role in our relationships with the dead; they are pivotal to how we remember, mourn and grieve. The chapters in this volume analyse a diverse range of objects and their role in the processes of grief and mourning, with contributions by scholars in anthropology, history, fashion, thanatology, religious studies, archaeology, classics, sociology, and political science. The book brings together consideration of emotions, memory and material agency to inform a deeper understanding of the specific roles played by objects in funerary contexts across historical and contemporary societies.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part 1|54 pages
The afterlife of possessions
chapter 3|21 pages
Remembering Roland Leighton
Uniforms as the materials of memory and mourning in World War I
part 2|97 pages
Representational objects
chapter 6|18 pages
Talking with a cold grey stone
The life and death of gravestones in contemporary Denmark
chapter 8|24 pages
Enduring grief
Images of the mourning woman from the ancient classical world to eighteenth-century Britain
part 3|70 pages
The body as material for mourning
chapter 9|16 pages
The ‘worth’ of grief and the ‘value’ of bodies
Managing the civilian corpse in Second World War Britain
chapter 10|14 pages
Fragments of bone and chips of stone
Materiality and mourning in a Chinese society
chapter 11|17 pages
Sacred rituals of the security state
Reclaiming bodies and making relics from Ground Zero
part |17 pages
Afterword
