Preserve The Dead

Author : Thomas W. Laqueur
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 745 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2015-10-13
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781400874514

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The Work of the Dead by Thomas W. Laqueur Pdf

The meaning of our concern for mortal remains—from antiquity through the twentieth century The Greek philosopher Diogenes said that when he died his body should be tossed over the city walls for beasts to scavenge. Why should he or anyone else care what became of his corpse? In The Work of the Dead, acclaimed cultural historian Thomas Laqueur examines why humanity has universally rejected Diogenes's argument. No culture has been indifferent to mortal remains. Even in our supposedly disenchanted scientific age, the dead body still matters—for individuals, communities, and nations. A remarkably ambitious history, The Work of the Dead offers a compelling and richly detailed account of how and why the living have cared for the dead, from antiquity to the twentieth century. The book draws on a vast range of sources—from mortuary archaeology, medical tracts, letters, songs, poems, and novels to painting and landscapes in order to recover the work that the dead do for the living: making human communities that connect the past and the future. Laqueur shows how the churchyard became the dominant resting place of the dead during the Middle Ages and why the cemetery largely supplanted it during the modern period. He traces how and why since the nineteenth century we have come to gather the names of the dead on great lists and memorials and why being buried without a name has become so disturbing. And finally, he tells how modern cremation, begun as a fantasy of stripping death of its history, ultimately failed—and how even the ashes of the victims of the Holocaust have been preserved in culture. A fascinating chronicle of how we shape the dead and are in turn shaped by them, this is a landmark work of cultural history.

Author : Ryan Nagelhout
Publisher : Gareth Stevens Publishing LLLP
Page : 34 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2014-08-01
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN : 9781482414882

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Preserving the Dead by Ryan Nagelhout Pdf

With the help of some chemicals and a bit of hard work, bodies can have a long life well after a person’s death. Early embalming efforts in ancient Egypt were meant to preserve bodies for the afterlife. Today, we preserve bodies in a variety of ways to honor our loved ones after they’re gone. With great facts and figures, readers will get an inside look at the funeral homes and other places where we preserve our dead. From organs in jars to modern embalming, this series offers full-color photographs and lots of information about the various processes that have helped preserve the dead for centuries.

Author : Brian Michael Murphy
Publisher : UNC Press Books
Page : 329 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2022-05-16
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781469668307

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We the Dead by Brian Michael Murphy Pdf

Locked away in refrigerated vaults, sanitized by gas chambers, and secured within bombproof caverns deep under mountains are America's most prized materials: the ever-expanding collection of records that now accompany each of us from birth to death. This data complex backs up and protects our most vital information against decay and destruction, and yet it binds us to corporate and government institutions whose power is also preserved in its bunkers, infrastructures, and sterilized spaces. We the Dead traces the emergence of the data complex in the early twentieth century and guides readers through its expansion in a series of moments when Americans thought they were living just before the end of the world. Depression-era eugenicists feared racial contamination and the downfall of the white American family, while contemporary technologists seek ever denser and more durable materials for storing data, from microetched metal discs to cryptocurrency keys encoded in synthetic DNA. Artfully written and packed with provocative ideas, this haunting book illuminates the dark places of the data complex and the ways it increasingly blurs the lines between human and machine, biological body and data body, life and digital afterlife.

Author : E. Myers,Abigail Johnson Dodge
Publisher : Lindsay Publications, Incorporated
Page : 234 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 1997-09-01
Category : Embalming
ISBN : 0917914244

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Preserving the Dead by E. Myers,Abigail Johnson Dodge Pdf

Author : Romedio Schmitz-Esser
Publisher : Harvey Miller Publishers
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2020
Category : Burial
ISBN : 1909400874

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The Corpse in the Middle Ages by Romedio Schmitz-Esser Pdf

To what extent are the dead truly dead? In medieval society, corpses were assigned special functions and meanings in several different ways. They were still present in the daily life of the family of the deceased, and could even play active roles in the life of the community. Taking the materiality of death as a point of departure, this book comprehensively examines the conservation, burial and destruction of the corpse in its specific historical context. A complex and ambivalent treatment of the dead body emerges, one which necessarily confronts established modern perspectives on death. New scientific methods have enabled archaeologists to understand the remains of the dead as valuable source material. This book contextualizes the resulting insights for the first time in an interdisciplinary framework, considering their place in the broader picture drawn by the written sources of this period, ranging from canon law and hagiography to medieval literature and historiography. It soon becomes obvious that the dead body is more than a physical object, since its existence only becomes relevant in the cultural setting it is perceived in. In analogy to the findings for the living body in gender studies, the corpse too, can best be understood as constructed. Ultimately, the dead body is shaped by society, i.e. the living. This book examines the mechanisms by which this cultural construction of the body took place in medieval Europe. The result is a fascinating story that leads deep into medieval theories and social practices, into the discourses of the time and the daily life experiences during this epoch.

Author : Robert Pogue Harrison
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2010-04-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780226317922

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The Dominion of the Dead by Robert Pogue Harrison Pdf

How do the living maintain relations to the dead? Why do we bury people when they die? And what is at stake when we do? In The Dominion of the Dead, Robert Pogue Harrison considers the supreme importance of these questions to Western civilization, exploring the many places where the dead cohabit the world of the living—the graves, images, literature, architecture, and monuments that house the dead in their afterlife among us. This elegantly conceived work devotes particular attention to the practice of burial. Harrison contends that we bury our dead to humanize the lands where we build our present and imagine our future. As long as the dead are interred in graves and tombs, they never truly depart from this world, but remain, if only symbolically, among the living. Spanning a broad range of examples, from the graves of our first human ancestors to the empty tomb of the Gospels to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Harrison also considers the authority of predecessors in both modern and premodern societies. Through inspired readings of major writers and thinkers such as Vico, Virgil, Dante, Pater, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Rilke, he argues that the buried dead form an essential foundation where future generations can retrieve their past, while burial grounds provide an important bedrock where past generations can preserve their legacy for the unborn. The Dominion of the Dead is a profound meditation on how the thought of death shapes the communion of the living. A work of enormous scope, intellect, and imagination, this book will speak to all who have suffered grief and loss.

Author : Chapman, Simon
Publisher : Sydney University Press
Page : 278 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2013-02-06
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781743320310

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Over Our Dead Bodies by Chapman, Simon Pdf

The Port Arthur massacre on 28 April 1996, when 35 people were shot dead by Martin Bryant, transformed Australia’s gun control debate. Public outrage drove politicians from all sides of politics to embrace gun control. Non-violent ‘people power’ galvanised government resolve to outlaw semi-automatic weapons, register all guns, and tighten gun ownership laws. Simon Chapman’s book gives an insider’s view of the struggle for gun control, highlighting the public discourse between shooters determined to preserve the right for civilians to bear military-style weapons, and activists dedicated to getting Australia ‘off the American path’ of gun violence. Law reform is not inevitable. It requires the planned, strategic use of media and advocacy to convert anger into action. The story of the campaign for gun control is a practical guide to achieving humane social change for activists everywhere.

Author : James R. Martel
Publisher : Amherst College Press
Page : 160 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2018-11-16
Category : Family & Relationships
ISBN : 9781943208104

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Unburied Bodies by James R. Martel Pdf

Title on title page verso and throughout the book is "Unburied Bodies."

Author : Becky Cooper
Publisher : Hachette UK
Page : 512 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2020-11-10
Category : True Crime
ISBN : 9781538746844

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We Keep the Dead Close by Becky Cooper Pdf

FINALIST FOR THE J. ANTHONY LUKAS BOOK PRIZE NATIONAL BESTSELLER Named One of The Best Books of 2020 by NPR's Fresh Air * Publishers Weekly * Marie Claire * Redbook * Vogue * Kirkus Reviews * Book Riot * Bustle A Recommended Book by The New York Times * The Washington Post * Publisher's Weekly * Kirkus Reviews* Booklist * The Boston Globe * Goodreads * Buzzfeed * Town & Country * Refinery29 * BookRiot * CrimeReads * Glamour * Popsugar * PureWow * Shondaland Dive into a "tour de force of investigative reporting" (Ron Chernow): a "searching, atmospheric and ultimately entrancing" (Patrick Radden Keefe) true crime narrative of an unsolved 1969 murder at Harvard and an "exhilarating and seductive" (Ariel Levy) narrative of obsession and love for a girl who dreamt of rising among men. You have to remember, he reminded me, that Harvard is older than the U.S. government. You have to remember because Harvard doesn't let you forget. 1969: the height of counterculture and the year universities would seek to curb the unruly spectacle of student protest; the winter that Harvard University would begin the tumultuous process of merging with Radcliffe, its all-female sister school; and the year that Jane Britton, an ambitious twenty-three-year-old graduate student in Harvard's Anthropology Department and daughter of Radcliffe Vice President J. Boyd Britton, would be found bludgeoned to death in her Cambridge, Massachusetts apartment. Forty years later, Becky Cooper a curious undergrad, will hear the first whispers of the story. In the first telling the body was nameless. The story was this: a Harvard student had had an affair with her professor, and the professor had murdered her in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology because she'd threatened to talk about the affair. Though the rumor proves false, the story that unfolds, one that Cooper will follow for ten years, is even more complex: a tale of gender inequality in academia, a 'cowboy culture' among empowered male elites, the silencing effect of institutions, and our compulsion to rewrite the stories of female victims. We Keep the Dead Close is a memoir of mirrors, misogyny, and murder. It is at once a rumination on the violence and oppression that rules our revered institutions, a ghost story reflecting one young woman's past onto another's present, and a love story for a girl who was lost to history.

Author : Joelle Rollo-Koster
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2016-10-04
Category : History
ISBN : 9781315466842

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Death in Medieval Europe by Joelle Rollo-Koster Pdf

Death in Medieval Europe: Death Scripted and Death Choreographed explores new cultural research into death and funeral practices in medieval Europe and demonstrates the important relationship between death and the world of the living in the Middle Ages. Across ten chapters, the articles in this volume survey the cultural effects of death. This volume explores overarching topics such as burials, commemorations, revenants, mourning practices and funerals, capital punishment, suspiscious death, and death registrations using case studies from across Europe including England, Iceland, and Spain. Together these chapters discuss how death was ritualised and choreographed, but also how it was expressed in writing throughout various documentary sources including wills and death registries. In each instance, records are analysed through a cultural framework to better understand the importance of the authors of death and their audience. Drawing together and building upon the latest scholarship, this book is essential reading for all students and academics of death in the medieval period.

Author : Caitlin Doughty
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 215 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2017-10-03
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780393249903

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From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death by Caitlin Doughty Pdf

A New York Times and Los Angeles Times Bestseller “Doughty chronicles [death] practices with tenderheartedness, a technician’s fascination, and an unsentimental respect for grief.” —Jill Lepore, The New Yorker Fascinated by our pervasive fear of dead bodies, mortician Caitlin Doughty embarks on a global expedition to discover how other cultures care for the dead. From Zoroastrian sky burials to wish-granting Bolivian skulls, she investigates the world’s funerary customs and expands our sense of what it means to treat the dead with dignity. Her account questions the rituals of the American funeral industry—especially chemical embalming—and suggests that the most effective traditions are those that allow mourners to personally attend to the body of the deceased. Exquisitely illustrated by artist Landis Blair, From Here to Eternity is an adventure into the morbid unknown, a fascinating tour through the unique ways people everywhere confront mortality.

Author : Alexandra Fletcher (Museum curator),Daniel Antoine,J. D. Hill
Publisher : British Museum Research Public
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2014
Category : Nature
ISBN : 0861591976

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Regarding the Dead by Alexandra Fletcher (Museum curator),Daniel Antoine,J. D. Hill Pdf

A key publication on the British Museum's approach to the ethical issues surrounding the inclusion of human remains in museum collections and possible solutions to the dilemmas relating to their curation, storage, access management and display.

Author : Maureen Carroll,Jane Rempel
Publisher : Studies in Funerary Archaeolog
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2011
Category : History
ISBN : 1842173766

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Living Through the Dead by Maureen Carroll,Jane Rempel Pdf

This volume investigates the archaeology of death and commemoration through thematically linked case studies drawn from the Classical world. These investigations stress the processes of burial and commemoration as inherently social and designed for an audience, and they explore the meaning and importance attached to preserving memory. While previous investigations of Greek and Roman death and burial have tended to concentrate on period- or regionally-specific sets of data, this volume instead focuses on a series of topical connections that highlight important facets of death and commemoration significant to the larger Classical world. Living through the dead investigates the subject of death and commemoration from a diverse set of archaeologically informed approaches, including visual reception, detailed analysis of excavated remains, landscape, and post-classical reflections and draws on artefactual, documentary and pictorial evidence. The nine papers present recent research by some of the leading voices on the subject, as well as some fresh perspectives. Case studies come from Thermopylae, the Bosporan kingdom, Athens, Republican Rome, Pompeii and Egypt. As a collected volume, they provide thematically linked investigations of key issues in ritual, memory and (self)presentation associated with death and burial in the Classical period. As such, this volume will be of particular interest to postgraduate students and academics with specialist interests in the archaeology of the Classical world and also more broadly, as a source of comparative material, to people working on issues related to the archaeology of death and commemoration.

Author : Kenneth V. Iserson
Publisher : Gale Group Incorporated
Page : 868 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2001
Category : Family & Relationships
ISBN : UOM:39015050758104

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Death to Dust by Kenneth V. Iserson Pdf

In our culture, we rarely speak about death -- partly because it is seen as a sort of pornography, shrouded in indecency and immersed in taboos; and partly because we know so little about it. Yet nearly everyone at some point has questions about what happens after death. At long last, here is a book to answer many of those questions: What physical changes occur to a dead body?

Author : Jeffrey P. Bishop
Publisher : University of Notre Dame Pess
Page : 432 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2011-09-19
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780268075859

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The Anticipatory Corpse by Jeffrey P. Bishop Pdf

In this original and compelling book, Jeffrey P. Bishop, a philosopher, ethicist, and physician, argues that something has gone sadly amiss in the care of the dying by contemporary medicine and in our social and political views of death, as shaped by our scientific successes and ongoing debates about euthanasia and the “right to die”—or to live. The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying, informed by Foucault’s genealogy of medicine and power as well as by a thorough grasp of current medical practices and medical ethics, argues that a view of people as machines in motion—people as, in effect, temporarily animated corpses with interchangeable parts—has become epistemologically normative for medicine. The dead body is subtly anticipated in our practices of exercising control over the suffering person, whether through technological mastery in the intensive care unit or through the impersonal, quasi-scientific assessments of psychological and spiritual “medicine.” The result is a kind of nihilistic attitude toward the dying, and troubling contradictions and absurdities in our practices. Wide-ranging in its examples, from organ donation rules in the United States, to ICU medicine, to “spiritual surveys,” to presidential bioethics commissions attempting to define death, and to high-profile cases such as Terri Schiavo’s, The Anticipatory Corpse explores the historical, political, and philosophical underpinnings of our care of the dying and, finally, the possibilities of change. This book is a ground-breaking work in bioethics. It will provoke thought and argument for all those engaged in medicine, philosophy, theology, and health policy.