ABSTRACT

This unique volume examines death from a socio-cultural events perspective. Drawing on the empirical and conceptual work produced by an international body of researchers, it is the first publication to look at death, dying, memorialization, and their mediation, from an events orientation.

By placing the contribution of these scholars together, this book provides a unique opportunity to instigate an international, critical discussion, around the connectivities associated with death and events. Chapters consider connections to death and events on many levels, including individual, local, communally based, construals of the event landscape; the relationship between death and events into larger socio-cultural frames of reference. Chapteres also consider how death and events are manifest through diverse platforms of mediation, with a discussion of the media presentation of end of life events, and the articulation of death online. Case studies from a wide-ranging selection of countries, from Moscow to Bangladesh to Cambodia, are examined throughout.

This will be of great interest to upper-level students and researchers in event studies as well as a variety of other disciplines such as sociology and cultural studies.

chapter 1|12 pages

Introduction

chapter 2|13 pages

Funerals as a social process

Rituals and symbols in rural and urban funerals

chapter 3|22 pages

Dying with dignity

Perception of good death among the Santals of Bangladesh

chapter 4|15 pages

Memorial space of the necropolis

The case of Novodevichy Cemetery

chapter 6|17 pages

Ritualized death in Eastern and Islamic culture

“Taste of Cherry”

chapter 7|16 pages

Burdened with the memories of death

An autoethnographic account of the real and the imagined deaths

chapter 8|17 pages

Living in ‘limbo’

Death in everyday Sundarbans

chapter 9|19 pages

Reframing grief in Colombian armed conflict

Performativities of the photographic image in processes of civil resistance in the Magdalena Medio zone (Cimitarra Valley)

chapter 11|13 pages

Remember your brothers

Memory and inspiration in the video-testaments of the Islamic State

chapter 12|17 pages

The assisted dying movement

How media platforms influence our response to events that challenge the boundaries of contemporary social control

chapter 13|19 pages

Conclusion