Necropolitics of the Ordinary

Name: Necropolitics of the Ordinary
ISBN: 9780295753348

Death and Grieving in Contemporary Singapore

Ruth E. Toulson,

English
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Necropolitics of the Ordinary

Death and Grieving in Contemporary Singapore

Ruth E. Toulson,

About this book

Can a state make its people forget the dead? Cemeteries have become sites of acute political contestation in the city-state of Singapore. Confronted with high population density and rapid economic growth, the government has ordered the destruction of all but one burial ground, forcing people to exhume their family members. In this ethnography of Chinese funeral parlors and cemeteries, anthropologist and trained mortician Ruth E. Toulson demonstrates this as part of a larger shift to transform a Daoist-infused obsession with ancestors into a sterile, more easily controlled "Protestant" Buddhism. Further, in a context where the dead remain central to family life, forced exhumation tears the social fabric, turning ancestors into ghosts. Using death ritual and grieving as interrogative lenses, Toulson explores the scope of and resistance to state power over the dead, laying bare the legacies of colonialism and consequences of whirlwind capitalist development. In doing so, she offers a new anthropology of death, one both more personal and politicized. Written in accessible prose rich with ethnographic detail, the book is suitable for undergraduate teaching in anthropology, Asian studies, religious studies, sociology, and history.

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Yes, you can access Necropolitics of the Ordinary by Ruth E. Toulson in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Asian Politics. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.