Taming Time, Timing Death

Social Technologies and Ritual

Rane Willerslev, Dorthe Refslund Christensen, Rane Willerslev, Dorthe Refslund Christensen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138253520
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317046806
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Departing from a persisting current in Western thought, which conceives of time in the abstract, and often reflects upon death as occupying a space at life's margins, this book begins from position that it is in fact through the material and perishable world that we experience time. As such, it is with death and our encounters with it, that form the basis of human conceptions of time. Presenting rich, interdisciplinary empirical studies of death rituals and practices across the globe, from the US and Europe, Asia, The Middle East, Australasia and Africa, Taming Time, Timing Death explores the manner in which social technologies and rituals have been and are implemented to avoid, delay or embrace death, or communicate with the dead, thus informing and manifesting humans' understanding of time. It will therefore be of interest to scholars and students of anthropology, philosophy, sociology and social theory, human geography and religion.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 “Seaweeds and Limpets will Grow on Our Grave Stones”: On Islands, Time, Death and Inhuman Materialities
• 2 Death, Witchcraft and the Temporal Aspects of Divination
• 3 Time, Late Modernity and the Demise of Forever: From Eternal Salvation to Completed Bucket Lists
• 4 Rebirth and the Death Drive: Rethinking Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” through a Siberian Time Perspective
• 5 Sharing Death: Conceptions of Time at a Danish Online Memorial Site
• 6 Stones, Shamans and Pastors: Pagan and Baptist Temporalities of Death in Tribal India
• 7 Dealing with Dead Saints
• 8 Pilgrimage Landscape as Material Anchor of Time
• 9 Creating the New Times: Reburials after War in Northern Uganda
• 10 Memory and Succession in the City of the Dead: Temporality in the Ancient Egyptian Mortuary Cult
• 11 Death and Meateriality
• 12 Defacing: Becoming by Killing
• 13 Dying on Time: Cultures of Death and Time in Muslim Northern Nigeria
• Index