Articulate Necrographies: Comparative Perspectives on the Voices and Silences of the Dead

Going beyond the frameworks of the anthropology of death, Articulate Necrographies offers a dramatic new way of studying the dead and their interactions with the living. Traditional anthropology has tended to dichotomize societies where death “speaks” from those where death is “silent” – the latter is deemed “scientific” and the former “religious” or “magical”. The collection introduces the concept of “necrography” to describe the way death and the dead create their own kinds of biographies in and among the living, and asks what kinds of articulations and silences this in turn produces in the lives of those affected.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Anastasios Panagiotopoulos and Diana Espírito Santo PART I: NECROGRAPHIC FRAMEWORKS Chapter 1. Voices and Silences of the Dead in Western Modernity Tony Walter Chapter 2. Coping with Massive Urban Death: The Mutual Constitution of Mourning and Recovery in World War Two's Bombing War Antonius C.G.M. Robben Chapter 3. Biographies and Necrographies in Exchange: From the Self to the Other Anastasios Panagiotopoulos PART II: NECROGRAPHIC OBSERVATIONS Chapter 4. The Making of Spirit Bodies and Death Perspectives in Afro-Cuban Religion Diana Espírito Santo Chapter 5. Sensory Necrography: The Flow of Signs and Sensations in the Corpse Beth Conklin Chapter 6. Unanchored Deaths: Grieving the Unplaceable in Samburu Bilinda Straight Chapter 7. The Sociality of Death: Life Potentialities and the Vietnamese Dead Marina Marouda Chapter 8. Enlightened Spirits: A Historical-anthropological Perspective on Spiritism, Science, Modernity and the Vitality of Spirits under Neoliberalism Raquel Romberg Chapter 9. Channeling the Flow: Dealing with Death in an African-based Religion Gabriel Banaggia Chapter 10. Of Shadows and Fears: Nepalese Ghost Stories from Classical Texts and Folklore to the Social Media Davide Torri Chapter 11. Death isn't What it Used to Be: Animist and Baptist Ontologies in Tribal India Piers Vitebsky Afterword: The Necrographic Imagination Magnus Course Index

About the Author :
Anastasios Panagiotopoulos is a senior post-doctoral researcher at Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia – Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal. His research includes the role of divination in Afro-Cuban religiosity, as this is related to issues of personhood, the historical imagination, race and secularism, among others.

Review :
“The chapters in this book are scholarly and sophisticated, their data and conceptual approaches clearly stated. What makes this an original and fascinating contribution to end of life studies is the common focus on “sustaining necrographies,” culturally specific narratives of the active overlap between the concerns of the living and the interests and experiences of their dead. This book is an impressive piece of scholarship, is clearly written, and offers an unexpected approach to the subject of death that is timely and fascinating.” • James W. Green, University of Washington