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This current volume is a response to those who envision the four fields of anthropology as mutually exclusive entities, and all the papers demonstrate the efficacy of a cross-field or cross-disciplinary approach to analyzing rituals associated with death. The authors engage both ethnographic and archaeological perspectives on mortuary practices, and to describe the interdependence of crafting social memories and identities in mortuary practices, a subject that has received considerable attention from both archaeologists and ethnographers. The powerful combination of ethnographic and archaeological research into mortuary practices in the same volume highlights the interconnections between the archaeology and ethnography and illustrates an exciting dialogue between archaeologists and ethnographers. This rich collection of archaeological and ethnographic case studies of death, identity, and social memory illustrates how much archaeologists can learn from ethnographers, and ethnographers from archaeologists.
List of contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Social Memory, Identity, and Death: An Introduction
Meredith S. Chesson
Section One. Death and Collective Social Memories
Burying the Dead at Tlatilco: Social Memory and Social Identities
Rosemary A. Joyce
The Egyptian Ways of Death
Lynn Meskell
Death, Gender, and the Chumash Peoples: Mourning Ceremonialism as an Integrative Mechanism
Sandra E. Hollimon
Matters of Life and Death: Mortuary Rituals as Part of a Larger Whole among the Betsileo of Madagascar
Victor Raharijaona and Susan Kus
Section Two. Mortuary Rituals and Social Identities
Mortuary Monuments and Social Change among the Ngaju
Anne Schiller
Place, Death, and the Transmission of Social Memory in Early Agricultural Communities of the Near Eastern Pre-Pottery Neolithic
Ian Kuijt
Embodied Memories of Place and People: Death and Society in an Early Urban Community
Meredith S. Chesson
"To Dare to Wear the Cloak of Another Before Their Very Eyes": State Co-optation and Local Re-appropriation in Mortuary Rituals of Central Madagascar
Susan Kus and Victor Raharijaona
List of Contributors
Index
