Full Description
Mortuary Dialogues presents fresh perspectives on death and mourning across the Pacific Islands. Through a set of rich ethnographies, the book examines how funerals and death rituals give rise to discourse and debate about sustaining moral personhood and community amid modernity and its enormous transformations. The book's key concept, "mortuary dialogue," describes the different genres of talk and expressive culture through which people struggle to restore individual and collective order in the aftermath of death in the contemporary Pacific.
Contents
List of Figures and Tables
Foreword
Shirley Lindenbaum
Acknowledgements
Map
Introduction: Mortuary Ritual, Modern Social Theory and the Historical Moment in Pacific Modernity
Eric K. Silverman and David Lipset
PART I: TENACIOUS VOICES
Chapter 1. Fearing the Dead: The Mortuary Rites of Marshall Islanders' amid the Tragedy of Pacific Modernity
Laurence M. Carucci
Chapter 2. Into the World of Sorrow: Women and the Work of Death in Maori Mortuary Rites
Che Wilson and Karen Sinclair
Chapter 3. Death and Experience in Rawa Mortuary Rites, Papua New Guinea
Doug Dalton
Chapter 4. The Knotted Person: Death, the Bad Breast and Melanesian Modernity among the Murik, Papua New Guinea
David Lipset
Chapter 5. Mortuary Ritual and Mining Riches in Island Melanesia
Nicholas A. Bainton and Martha Macintyre
PART II: EQUIVOCAL VOICES
Chapter 6. Finishing Kapui's Name: Birth, Death and the Reproduction of Manam Society, Papua New Guinea
Nancy C. Lutkehaus
Chapter 7. Transformations of Male Initiation and Mortuary Rites among the Kayan of Papua New Guinea
Alexis T. von Poser
Chapter 8. Mortuary Failures: Traditional Uncertainties and Modern Families in the Sepik River, Papua New Guinea
Eric K. Silverman
Chapter 9. Everything Will Come Up Like TV, Everything Will Be Revealed: Death in an Age of Uncertainty in the Purari Delta, Papua New Guinea
Joshua Bell
Afterword: Mortuary Dialogues in Pacific Modernities and Anthropology
David Lipset, Eric K. Silverman and Eric Venbrux
Index
