Taming Time, Timing Death: Social Technologies and Ritual

Departing from a persisting current in Western thought, which conceives of time in the abstract, and often reflects upon death as occupying a space at life's margins, this book begins from position that it is in fact through the material and perishable world that we experience time. As such, it is with death and our encounters with it, that form the basis of human conceptions of time.

Presenting rich, interdisciplinary empirical studies of death rituals and practices across the globe, from t...