Ultimate Ambiguities: Investigating Death and Liminality

Periods of transition are often symbolically associated with death, making the latter the paradigm of liminality. Yet, many volumes on death in the social sciences and humanities do not specifically address liminality. This book investigates these “ultimate ambiguities,” assuming they can pose a threat to social relationships because of the disintegrating forces of death, but they are also crucial periods of creativity, change, and emergent aspects of social and religious life. Contributors explore death and liminality from an interdisciplinary perspective and present a global range of historical and contemporary case studies outlining emotional, cognitive, artistic, social, and political implications.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Preface Introduction Peter Berger PART I: RITUALS Chapter 1. The Ambiguity of Mortal Remains, Substitute Bodies, and other Materializations of the Dead among the Garo of Northeast India Erik de Maaker Chapter 2. Structures and Processes of Liminality: The Shape of Mourning among the Sora of Tribal India Piers Vitebsky Chapter 3. Liminal Bodies, Liminal Food: Hindu and Tribal Death Rituals Compared Peter Berger Chapter 4. The Liminality of “Living Martyrdom”: Suicide Bombers’ Preparations for Paradise Pieter G. T. Nanninga PART II: CONCEPTS Chapter 5. Disappearance and Liminality: Argentina’s Mourning of State Terror Antonius C.G.M. Robben Chapter 6. Three Dimensions of Liminality in the Context of Kyrgyz Death Rituals Roland Hardenberg Chapter 7. Death, Ritual, and Effervescence Peter Berger PART III: IMAGERIES Chapter 8. Hungry Ghost or Divine Soul? Post-Mortem Initiation in Medieval Shaiva Tantric Death Rites Nina Mirnig Chapter 9. Between Death and Judgement: Sleep as the Image of Death in Early Modern Protestantism Justin Kroesen and Jan R. Luth Chapter 10. Body and Soul Between Death and Funeral in Archaic Greece Jan N. Bremmer Chapter 11. Death, Memory and Liminality. Rethinking Lampedusa’s Later Life as Author and Aristocrat   Yme B. Kuiper Notes on Contributors

About the Author :
Peter Berger is Associate Professor of Indian Religions and the Anthropology of Religion at the University of Groningen. His books include Feeding, Sharing and Devouring: Ritual and Society in Highland Odisha (de Gruyter, 2015), The Modern Anthropology of India (co-ed with Frank Heidemann, Routledge, 2013) and Godroads: Modalities of Conversion in India (co-ed with Sarbeswar Sahoo, Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Review :
“At the theoretical level, the volume certainly makes a strong argument for the enduring relevance of the sociological tradition from Durkheim to Turner. Robben’s article alone presents a most poignant illustration of the analytic power of liminality in a contemporary setting. Berger’s valiant argument for Durkheim’s much maligned concept of effervescence should be taken seriously, for it seems to open a rapprochement between structural and cognitive science approaches to ritual.” • Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute “Ultimate Ambiguities: Investing Death and Liminality is a valuable contribution to the often diffuse literature on religion and death/dying given that the widely varying case studies share a common focus on ‘liminality explicitly in the context of death’. Editors Peter Berger and Justin Kroesen draw together a wide-ranging set of eleven primarily anthropological chapters. These offer rich and contextualized examples of beliefs, especially ritualization, from various traditions. Yet the key measure of this book’s success is theoretical, given its explicit focus on liminality… The book is a valuable resource… the editors deserve praise for putting together one of the most focused and valuable volumes in the death and dying sub-genre.” • Reading Religion “With studies ranging from the Sora of India to death rituals in Ancient Greece, this selection offers a comparative approach that reinforces previous theories while also challenging liminality as some unidentifiable location… Berger and Kroesen’s compilation is a most valuable addition to studies on liminality and death as it introduces key theoretical concepts through varied and intriguing case studies.” • Religious Studies Review “This is a hugely interesting book that will be a very valuable contribution to the study of death in social science and the humanities.” • Arnar Árnason, University of Aberdeen “This is an important volume dealing… with the always-complex ritualization of death in comparative perspective, critically reassessing the work of some of the classic authors in the social sciences and more particularly in anthropological debates, and offering new theoretical and empirical angles to better understand the ambiguities inherent to death, burial, and afterlife beliefs.” • Francisco Ferrándiz, Spanish National Research Council