Full Description
Contemporary forms of living and dying in Swaziland cannot be understood apart from the global HIV/AIDS pandemic, according to anthropologist Casey Golomski. In Africa's last absolute monarchy, the story of 15 years of global collaboration in treatment and intervention is also one of ordinary people facing the work of caring for the sick and dying and burying the dead. Golomski's ethnography shows how AIDS posed challenging questions about the value of life, culture, and materiality to drive new forms and practices for funerals. Many of these forms and practicesnewly catered funeral feasts, an expanded market for life insurance, and the kingdom's first crematoriumare now conspicuous across the landscape and culturally disruptive in a highly traditionalist setting. This powerful and original account details how these new matters of death, dying, and funerals have become entrenched in peoples' everyday lives and become part of a quest to create dignity in the wake of a devastating epidemic.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Note on Transliteration
Introduction Funeral Culture: Dignity, Work, and Cultural Change
Chapter 1 Reckoning Life: Dying from AIDS to Living with HIV
Chapter 2 Religious Healing and Resurrection: "Faith Without Work is Dead"
Chapter 3 The Secrets of Life Insurance: Savings, Care, and the Witch
Chapter 4 Grounded: Body Politics of Burial and Cremation
Chapter 5 Life in a Takeaway Box: Mobility and Purity in Funeral Feasts
Chapter 6 Commemoration and Cultural Change: Memento Radicalis
Conclusion The Afterlives of Work
Appendix
I. siSwati-American English Glossary
II. List of Abbreviations
References
Index
