American Afterlives documents rapidly changing death practices in the United States while asking what this change tells us about American…
Archaeology of a book/film
death
Encounters with death in contemporary America
Pieced-together scraps from the cutting room floor — that is how anthropologist and archaeologist Shannon Dawdy describes her book American…
A new American way of death
I can’t think of any scholarly projects, books or otherwise, that begin and end at the author’s grave. And certainly…
Earth
American Afterlives concludes with the ritualized disinterment of the author’s decomposed corpse. An archaeologist is excavating a twenty-first century cemetery,…
Death, definitions, and ontological design
What roles do naming and self-definition play in the liberation or oppression of a people? One might argue that words…
Political life after death: Racial violence in North Carolina
In recent years, the political and social activity of racialized Muslim American communities is transforming alongside the widening powers of…
No olvidados: Unclaimable bodies of the US-Mexico border
US migration policies are not only intentionally deadly but also are designed to produce ambiguous loss across migrant sending communities.…
Imperial death and belonging in Alexandria, Egypt
Over and again, the stories of Jessie Brown and other foreign nationals of Alexandria demonstrated that death defined the living.…
Facing death alone: Mortuary prospects for the socially solo in Japan
In the face of such unsettlement for the dead, there is much anxiety (fuan) around the issue of mortuary care.…
Covid-19, death, and repatriation in Southern Africa
I argue here that regulations that were set up to prevent the spread of the highly contagious coronavirus have entered…