ABSTRACT

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.

part I|2 pages

Animating deathspaces

chapter 2|18 pages

The politics of a threatened space of the dead

Challenges for (re)disposal in a traditional Chinese cemetery in Singapore

chapter 3|15 pages

“Adapt or Die”

The funeral trade show as a site of institutional anxiety

part II|2 pages

Data afterlife

chapter 5|11 pages

Posthumous performance and digital resurrection

From science fiction to start-ups

chapter 6|11 pages

The decay of digital personhood

Towards new norms of disposal and preservation

chapter 7|16 pages

Digital data funerals

part III|2 pages

Material afterlife

chapter 8|15 pages

Managing the pious cadaver

Whole-body donation and anatomy in Sri Lanka

chapter 10|14 pages

Ashes to ashes, rust to rust?

The recovery and recycling of orthopaedic implants post-cremation

part IV|2 pages

Mediating mourning

chapter 11|16 pages

Death in Second Life

Lost and missing lives

chapter 12|15 pages

Memeifying the corpse

The photograph and the dead body between evidence and bereavement

chapter 13|11 pages

Selfie eulogies

The posthumous affect of the camera phone