Death Matters: Cultural Sociology of Mortal Life

Description

This book investigates death as part of contemporary everyday experience and practices. Through a cultural sociological lens, it studies death as it remains constantly at the edge of our consciousness, shaping the ways in which we move through social reality. As such, Death Matters is a significant contribution to death studies, going beyond traditional parameters of the field by addressing the cultural omnipresence of death. The contributions analyse several death-related meaning-making processes, arguing that meanings emerging from culturally shared narratives, social institutions, and material conditions, are just as important as ’death practices’ in understanding the role of death in society. Drawing on the related themes of places of absence and presence, disease and bodies, and persons and non-persons, the authors explore a variety of areas of social life, from haunting to celebrity deaths, to move the notion of death from the margins of social reality to ongoing everyday life. This far-reaching collection will be of use to scholars and students across death studies, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, culture, media and communication studies. Front Matter ....Pages i-xvii Introduction: Why Death Matters (Tora Holmberg, Annika Jonsson, Fredrik Palm)....Pages 1-21 Front Matter ....Pages 23-23 Materializing Loss and Facing the Absence-Presence of the Dead (Annika Jonsson)....Pages 25-44 Mortmain: Manor Culture and Material Immortality (Tora Holmberg)....Pages 45-64 The Death of Place: Exploring Discourse and Materiality in Debates on Rural Development (Tobias Olofsson)....Pages 65-85 Front Matter ....Pages 87-87 Living and Dying with Bacteria: Paradoxical Figures of Death (Hedvig Gröndal)....Pages 89-106 On Anorexia Nervosa and the Embodied Being-Toward-Death (Nicklas Neuman)....Pages 107-127 Viral Desires: Enjoyment and Death in the Contemporary Discourse on Barebacking (Fredrik Palm)....Pages 129-150 Me and My Dead Body: Death, Secularism, and Simultaneity (Hedvig Ekerwald)....Pages 151-174 Front Matter ....Pages 175-175 Digital Mourning Labor: Corporate Use of Dead Celebrities on Social Media (Magdalena Kania-Lundholm)....Pages 177-197 Aligned with the Dead: Representations of Victimhood and the Dead in Anti-Police Violence Activism Online (María Langa, Philip K. Creswell)....Pages 199-220 Frames of Death: Media Audience Framing of a Lethal Drone Strike (Henrik Fürst, Karin Idevall Hagren)....Pages 221-239 To Make Pets Live, and To Let Them Die: The Biopolitics of Pet Keeping (David Redmalm)....Pages 241-263 Mortality and Culture: Do Death Matters Matter? (Ruth Penfold-Mounce)....Pages 265-279 Back Matter ....Pages 281-289