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.
Table of Content
Chapter 1: Introduction: Why Death Matters; Tora Holmberg, Annika Jonsson & Fredrik Palm.- Part 1: Places of Absence-Presence. – Chapter 2: Materializing Loss and Facing the Absence-Presence of the Dead; Annika Jonsson.- Chapter 3: Mortmain: Manor Culture and Material Immortality; Tora Holmberg.- Chapter 4: The Death of Place: Exploring Discourse and Materiality in Debates on Rural Development; Tobias Olofsson.- Part 2: Disease/Bodies. – Chapter 5: Living and Dying with Bacteria: Paradoxical Figures of Death; Hedvig Gröndal.- Chapter 6: On Anorexia Nervosa and the Embodied Being-Toward-Death; Nicklas Neuman.- Chapter 7: Viral Desires: Enjoyment and Death in the Contemporary Discourse on Barebacking; Fredrik Palm.- Chapter 8: Me and My Dead Body: Death, Secularism and Simultaneity; Hedvig Ekerwald.- Part 3: Persons and Non-Persons. – Chapter 9: Digital Mourning Labor: Corporate Use of Dead Celebrities on Social Media; Magdalena Kania-Lundholm.- Chapter 10: Aligned with the Dead: Representations of Victimhood and the Dead in Anti-Police Violence Activism Online; María Langa & Philip K. Creswell.- Chapter 11: Frames of Death: Media Audience Framing of a Lethal Drone Strike; Henrik Fürst & Karin Idevall Hagren.- Chapter 12: To Make Pets Live, and to Let them Die: The Biopolitics of Pet Keeping; David Redmalm.- Chapter 13: Mortality and Culture: Do Death Matters Matter?; Ruth Penfold-Mounce.
About the author
Tora Holmberg is Professor in Sociology at the Department of Sociology, Uppsala University, Sweden.Annika Jonsson is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Social and Psychological Studies, University of Karlstad, Sweden.
Fredrik Palm is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the Department of Sociology, Uppsala University, Sweden.
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