Mirrors of Passing: Unlocking the Mysteries of Death, Materiality, and Time

by Sophie Seebach (Editor), Rane Willerslev (Editor)

Overview

Without exception, all people are faced with the inevitability of death, a stark fact that has immeasurably shaped societies and individual consciousness for the whole of human history. Mirrors of Passing offers a powerful window into this oldest of human preoccupations by investigating the interrelationships of death, materiality, and temporality across far-flung times and places. Stretching as far back as Ancient Egypt and Greece and moving through present-day locales as diverse as Western Europe, Central Asia, and the Arctic, each of the richly illustrated essays collected here draw on a range of disciplinary insights to explore some of the most fundamental, universal questions that confront us.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781785338946
Publisher:	Berghahn Books, Incorporated
Publication date:	08/01/2018
Pages:	326
Product dimensions:	8.40(w) x 10.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Rane Willerslev holds a doctorate from the University of Cambridge. His numerous books and publications include On the Run in Siberia (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), Taming Time, Timing Death: Social Technologies and Ritual (edited with Dorthe R. Christensen, Ashgate, 2013), and Transcultural Montage (edited with Christian Suhr, Berghahn, 2013).

Sophie Seebach holds a doctorate from Aarhus University. Her recent publications include pieces in the edited collection Mortuary Rites, Memory, and Authority/Agency: The Anthropology of Death in the Early Twenty-First Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and, with Lotte Meinert and Rane Willerslev, in the journal Africa.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Mirrors of Passing

Sophie Seebach and Rane Willerslev

PART I: DEATH'S TIME

Chapter 1. The Time of the Dead: Anthropology, Literature, and the Virtual Past

Stuart McLean

Chapter 2. Orpheus in Love, Death, and Time

Marina Prusac-Lindhagen

Chapter 3. Death before Time: Mythical Time in Ancient Egyptian Mortuary Religion

Rune Nyord

Chapter 4. When Bad Places Turn Worse: The Necropolitics of Death Sites in Northern KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

Per Detlef Frederiksen

Chapter 5. Narratives of Ebola: Temporal and Material Changes of Social Riverscapes

Theresa Amman

PART II: MATERIALITIES OF DEATH

Chapter 6. "Saving the Dead": Fighting for Life in the Siberian North

Rane Willerslev and Jeanette Lykkegård

Chapter 7. Death, Rebirth, Objects, and Time in North American Traditional Inuit Societies: an Overview

Matthew J. Walsh and Sean O’Neill

Chapter 8. Transforming and Creating Multiple Worlds: Strange Attractors in the Mongolian landscape

Malthe Lehrmann

Chapter 9. The Dead among the Living: Materiality and Time in Rethinking Death and Otherness in Lowland South America

Clarissa Martins Lima and Felipe Vander Velden

PART III: LIFE AFTER DEATH

Chapter 10. Making Presence: Time Work and Narratives in Bereaved Parents' Online Grief Work

Dorthe Refslund Christensen and Kjetil Sandvik

Chapter 11. The Multiple Identities of Aslak Hætta and Mons Somby: The Case of the Sámi Skulls

Susan Matland

Chapter 12. Media, Ritual, and Immortality: The Case of a Masculine Hero

Johanna Sumiala

Chapter 13. The Temporality and Materiality of Life and Death in a Sepik Village

Christiane Falck

PART IV: EXHIBITING DEATH, MATERIALITY, AND TIME

Chapter 14. The Wonderful Exhibition That Almost Was

Alexandra Schuessler

Index

Editorial Reviews

“Ambitious and engaging, the essays in this volume demonstrate how diverse conceptions of time, in relation to death, are present across history, geography, and media. Beginning with the first chapter’s enchanting examination of a James Joyce story, and continuing through the various ethnographies, the contributors have provided us with new ways of engaging with some familiar themes.” · Barbara Graham, author of Death, Materiality, and Mediation: An Ethnography of Remembrance in Ireland

From the Publisher