Full Description
Establishing a new set of international perspectives from around the world on experiences of death, disposition and remembrance in urban environments, this book brings deathscapes - material, embodied and emotional places associated with dying and death - to life. It pushes the boundaries of established empirical and conceptual understandings of death in urban spaces through anthropological, geographical and ethnographic insights.
Chapters reveal how urban deathscapes are experienced, used, managed and described in specific locales in varied settings; how their norms and values intersect and at times conflict with the norms of dominant and assumed practices; and how they are influenced by the dynamic practices, politics and demographics typical of urban spaces. Case studies from across Africa, Asia, Europe and North and South America highlight the differences between deathscapes, but also show their clear commonality in being as much a part of the world of the living as they are of the dead.
With a people- and space-centred approach, this book will be an interesting read for human geography, death studies and urban studies scholars, as well as social and cultural anthropologists and sociologists. Its international and interdisciplinary nature will also make this a beneficial book for planning and landscape architecture, religious studies and courses on death practices.
Contents
Contents:
1 Introduction: continuity, change, and contestation in urban
deathscapes 1
Mariske Westendorp and Danielle House
PART I SOCIO-POLITICAL DEATHSCAPES
2 Informal deathscapes in metropolitan Lima as cultural
knowledge systems 21
Christien Klaufus
3 Between life, death, and modernity at Bukit Brown
Cemetery, Singapore 42
See Mieng Tan and Benedict J.W. Yeo
4 There's no place like home: minority-majority dialogue,
contestation, and ritual negotiation in cemeteries and
crematoria spaces 61
Katie McClymont, Yasminah Beebeejaun, Avril Maddrell,
Brenda Mathijssen, Danny McNally, and Sufyan Dogra
PART II FAMILIAL DEATHSCAPES
5 Negotiating the aesthetics of mourning in Luxembourg:
on pre-modern forms in post-modern spaces 83
Elisabeth Boesen
6 "The crocodile is stronger in the water": Swakopmund
jetty as a place of death in Namibia 107
Jack Boulton
7 Adapting to 'one-size-fits-all': constructing appropriate
Islamic burial spaces in Northwestern Europe 124
Danielle House, Mariske Westendorp, Vevila Dornelles,
Helena Nordh, and Farjana Islam
PART III TECHNOLOGISED DEATHSCAPES
8 Mechanical grievability: urban graves for the solo dead in Japan 145
Anne Allison
9 Being existed by another through the sensory: the
ungrievable deaths of industrial pigs in slaughterhouse tours 162
Eimear Mc Loughlin
10 Mexico City's exceptional deathscapes: the disappeared,
(digital) bodies, molecular speculations 180
Arely Cruz-Santiago
11 Afterword: urban deathscapes - bodies, ritual spaces,
urban inequalities, pressures, and opportunities 198
Avril Maddrell
Index 204
