Full Description
Without exception, all people are faced with the inevitability of death, a stark fact that has immeasurably shaped societies and individual consciousness for the whole of human history. Mirrors of Passing offers a powerful window into this oldest of human preoccupations by investigating the interrelationships of death, materiality, and temporality across far-flung times and places. Stretching as far back as Ancient Egypt and Greece and moving through present-day locales as diverse as Western Europe, Central Asia, and the Arctic, each of the richly illustrated essays collected here draw on a range of disciplinary insights to explore some of the most fundamental, universal questions that confront us.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Mirrors of Passing
Sophie Seebach and Rane Willerslev
PART I: DEATH'S TIME
Chapter 1. The Time of the Dead: Anthropology, Literature, and the Virtual Past
Stuart McLean
Chapter 2. Orpheus in Love, Death, and Time
Marina Prusac-Lindhagen
Chapter 3. Death before Time: Mythical Time in Ancient Egyptian Mortuary Religion
Rune Nyord
Chapter 4. When Bad Places Turn Worse: The Necropolitics of Death Sites in Northern KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
Per Detlef Frederiksen
Chapter 5. Narratives of Ebola: Temporal and Material Changes of Social Riverscapes
Theresa Amman
PART II: MATERIALITIES OF DEATH
Chapter 6. "Saving the Dead": Fighting for Life in the Siberian North
Rane Willerslev and Jeanette Lykkegård
Chapter 7. Death, Rebirth, Objects, and Time in North American Traditional Inuit Societies: an Overview
Matthew J. Walsh and Sean O'Neill
Chapter 8. Transforming and Creating Multiple Worlds: Strange Attractors in the Mongolian landscape
Malthe Lehrmann
Chapter 9. The Dead among the Living: Materiality and Time in Rethinking Death and Otherness in Lowland South America
Clarissa Martins Lima and Felipe Vander Velden
PART III: LIFE AFTER DEATH
Chapter 10. Making Presence: Time Work and Narratives in Bereaved Parents' Online Grief Work
Dorthe Refslund Christensen and Kjetil Sandvik
Chapter 11. The Multiple Identities of Aslak Hætta and Mons Somby: The Case of the Sámi Skulls
Susan Matland
Chapter 12. Media, Ritual, and Immortality: The Case of a Masculine Hero
Johanna Sumiala
Chapter 13. The Temporality and Materiality of Life and Death in a Sepik Village
Christiane Falck
PART IV: EXHIBITING DEATH, MATERIALITY, AND TIME
Chapter 14. The Wonderful Exhibition That Almost Was
Alexandra Schuessler
Index
