ABSTRACT
Resurrective practice restores a sense of basic security fractured by death, but is also a routine feature of daily life. This chapter includes examples from a variety of human activities, including shopping, eating, warfare, media representations, medical procedures, life insurance systems, as well as bereavement narratives, which together illustrate the broad scope of resurrective practice through narrative construction. It presents the study of bereavement narratives, which reveals a dissolution of the social bond which everyday narrative actions otherwise sustain by allowing individuals to claim membership in the human social group. Caring for dying people is imbued with this confrontation, so that the acts of carers are often understood to be filled with triumphs of the human spirit. Miller observes that shopping has ritualized elements in which, as in sacrificial ritual, there is 'a splitting of the objects of sacrifice between that which is given to the deity and that which is retained for human consumption'.
