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Tangible remains play an important role in our relationships with the dead; they are pivotal to how we remember, mourn and grieve. The chapters in this volume analyse a diverse range of objects and their role in the processes of grief and mourning, with contributions by scholars in anthropology, history, fashion, thanatology, religious studies, archaeology, classics, sociology, and political science. The book brings together consideration of emotions, memory and material agency to inform a deeper understanding of the specific roles played by objects in funerary contexts across historical and contemporary societies.
List of contents
1. Introduction: Emotions and Materiality in Theory and Method 2. Dead People's Clothes: Materialising Mourning and Memory in Ancient Rome 3. Remembering Roland Leighton: Uniforms as the Materials of Memory in World War I 4. Destroying Objects, Keeping Memories 5. The Grottarossa Doll and her Mistress: Hope and Consolation in a Roman Tomb 6. Talking with a Cold Grey Stone: The Life and Death of Gravestones in Contemporary Denmark 7. The Face of the Deceased: Portrait Busts in Roman Tombs 8. Enduring Grief: Images of Mourning from the Ancient Classical World to Eighteenth-Century Britain 9. The 'Worth' of Grief and the 'Value' of Bodies: Managing the Civilian Corpse in Second World War Britain 10. Fragments of Bone and Chips of Stone: Materiality and Mourning in a Chinese Society 11. Sacred Rituals of the Security State: Reclaiming Bodies and Making Relics from Ground Zero 12. Why Materiality in Mourning Matters 13. The Death Turn: Interdisciplinarity, Mourning and Material Culture
About the author
Zahra Newby is Reader in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Warwick. Her research interests lie in the field of Roman art, and she has published numerous papers on Roman funerary art, as well as on ancient athletics, art and tet, and the uses of myth in Roman art.
Ruth E. Toulson is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, with research interests, thematically, in death, the emotions, and material culture, and, geographically, in Southeast Asia and Mainland China.
Summary
Tangible remains play an important role in our relationships with the dead; they are pivotal to how we remember, mourn and grieve. The chapters in this volume analyse a diverse range of objects and their role in the processes of grief and mourning, with contributions by scholars in anthropology, history, fashion, thanatology, religious studies,
