The Anthropology of Death Revisited

Author(s): Matthew Engelke

Source: Annual Review of Anthropology, 2019, Vol. 48 (2019), pp. 29-44
Published by: Annual Reviews
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 Annual Review of Anthropology
The Anthropology of Death
Revisited
Matthew Engelke
Department of Religion, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA;
email: [email protected]

Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2019. 48:29–44 Keywords

First published as a Review in Advance on
death, the corpse, funerals, materiality, Hertz
May 21, 2019

The Annual Review of Anthropology is online at Abstract

anthro.annualreviews.org
This article brings together classic work in the anthropology of death, much
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102218-
of which focused on funerary rites, with more recent studies, some of which
011420
continue with the classic focus and some of which introduce distinct views
Copyright © 2019 by Annual Reviews.
and problematics. The anthropology of death has become a capacious field,
All rights reserved
linking to broader debates on violence, suffering, medicine, subjectivity, race,
gender, faith, modernity, and secularity (among others). In much of this work,
though, we find common concerns with, and recurrent considerations of,
certain themes. This review focuses on two of the most important: the sym-
bolic imaginaries of how life conquers death; and, even more centrally, the
materiality of death. A range of topics are addressed, including putrescence,
burial, bones, commemorations, debts, care, sovereignty, and personal loss.

29

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 INTRODUCTION
It has been 35 years since the Annual Review of Anthropology published an article on the anthro-
pology of death in the sociocultural section of the volume (Palgi & Abramovitch 1984). Other
subfields have more recent assessments (Arnold & Jeske 2014, Crossland 2013), and several so-
ciocultural reviews do incorporate parts of the literature within different frames (see especially
Kaufman & Morgan 2005; see also Caduff 2014, Das 2008). But the time is ripe for another con-
sideration for two reasons. First, work in a number of areas, including, but not limited to, medical
anthropology, science and technology studies, critical secular studies, and the anthropology of vio-
lence, has broadened the anthropology of death beyond the traditional focus on funerary rites and
mourning, while continuing to address aspects of its main interests. This is reflected in important
edited volumes (Das & Han 2016, Robben 2018b), but it is also evident in articles (Fisch 2013,
Cagüeñas 2018) and collections (Sluka 1999, Franklin & Lock 2005) in which there is little to
no explicit engagement with “the anthropology of death” per se. Second, the analysis of funerals
and other mortuary rites has remained fruitful, pushing beyond, yet still drawing from, Hertz’s
(1960) foundational analysis of 1907 and its 1980s renaissance (Bloch & Parry 1982a, Metcalf &
Huntington 1991). We are still finding new ways to think critically with Hertz (Christensen &
Willerslev 2016, Kwon 2008, Lomnitz 2005, Mueggler 2018).
The anthropology of death, per se and perforce, is often framed by two main interests, each
crystallized in particularly influential ways by Hertz (1960). The first is an interest in how life
persists. The literature on funerals and mortuary rituals explores the variety of ways in which
death can be conquered, asserting the continuity of life in general in the face of loss in particular.
Related literature on grief and mourning considers the emotional work needed to make a death
good, whether for an individual or for a community. It is from Hertz (1960) that most subsequent
analysts have developed arguments about the social significance of funerary rites and, in particular,
the observation that such rites symbolically conquer death through the assertion of social conti-
nuities. “The last word must remain with life: the deceased will rise from the grip of death and
will return, in one form or another, to the peace of human association” (Hertz 1960, p. 78). Let us
consider the phrase “in one form or another”: We have a large catalog of how this is understood,
from reincarnation (Mills & Slobodin 1994, Obeyesekere 2002), rebirth (Parry 1994), and eternal
life (Klaits 2010, Simpson & Douglas-Jones 2017), to the cultivation of memory (Cannell 2011,
Kwon 2007)—and forgetting (Astuti 2007, Mueggler 2018, Taylor 1993)—to technoscientific ad-
vances (Bernstein 2019, Farman 2013), new digital horizons (Ghannam 2015, Huberman 2018)
and even mortuary tourism and zombification (Adams 2018, Volkman 1987). While Hertz focused
on double burials and secondary funerals, the theme of “death and the regeneration of life” (Bloch
& Parry 1982a) is evident in a range of other approaches to mortality. When Scheper-Hughes
(1993), for instance, writes of how women in Brazil understood some infants as wishing to perish
so that others may live, she is tracing out a logic of sacrifice-through-death in which a central
theme is life’s regeneration.
The second main interest is in the brute stuff of death itself—above all, as I explore, the corpse
and its iconical and indexical forms (from statues, to organs, to shrunken heads). Once again Hertz
(1960) is a major point of departure. Death is simultaneously an “organic event” and “a complex
mass of beliefs, emotions and activities” (p. 27). Hertz tells us much about various practices and
traditions. He also catalogs a full spectrum of feelings and emphasizes their centrality to his theses.
All the same, it is the fate of the body, its organic eventfulness, that undergirds his essay and secures
its purchase. It is the body that matters. Here, though, we should also consider precarious lives—
the “dead alive, dead outside” (Biehl 2005, p. 8)—in which the body is devalued to the point of
social death. What we encounter across the literature, widely framed, is not only Hertz’s “grip

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of death,” but more the grip of the dead, “this thing that is always more than a thing” (Laqueur
2015, p. xiv; cf. Schwarz 2015, Verdery 1999). These works are animated by such concerns as the
corpse’s putrescence; victims of war, illegal border crossing, and the disappeared; the proper form
of commemoration; the dryness of bones; pregnancy loss; and the decrepit state of barely living
bodies (Bjerregaard et al. 2016, Crossland 2009, De León 2015, Hallam et al. 1999, Layne 2003,
Newby & Toulson 2018, Stepputat 2014a). What we can take from Hertz is that the anthropology
of death always begins and ends with the stuff of death, above all the materiality of the corpse, but
more generally speaking the things that matter to making death good.
In what follows I chart these two key interests in the ever-broadening anthropology of death.
I address the literature by grouping it under four headings, paying particular attention to the
centrality of a concern with materiality. While these four groupings cannot account for all the
topics or problematics in play, they do provide a sense of perennial and emerging interests.

THE CORPSE
The issue is putrescence, rotting away. What other anthropological literature is dependent on
such a term? Even blood, which has its own special materiality, long ago ceased to be a necessary
consideration in kinship studies. Blood matters, yes (Carsten 2013), but can often be put in its place
or even dismissed in certain cultures of relatedness (Carsten 2000). This is not so with the body
in the anthropology of death. To read about death is to read of smells, alongside the awkwardness
and instabilities of flesh and bone forming a recalcitrant presence. Douglas’s (1966) work on purity
and danger is almost nowhere more relevant than to the panoply of death pollution taboos; it all
has to do with matter out of place.
And matter it is. Verdery (1999) puts this well. Dead bodies are “indisputably there” (Verdery
1999, p. 27, original emphasis); they are “heavy symbols” (p. 32). By this, she means to suggest
that a dead human is “unlike a tomato can or a dead bird” (p. 32; cf. Hertz 1960, p. 27). It is
the thing that is always more than a thing. Verdery provides us with one of the most significant
accounts of the there-ness of the dead by tracing their political significance in postsocialist Eastern
Europe. She does this with respect not only to bodies, but also to the iconic power of socialist-era
statues—or, “dead people cast in bronze or stone” (Verdery 1999, p. 5)—through which the living
reconfigure the social world, enlivening it with “‘cosmic’ concerns, such as the meaning of life and
death” (p. 31).
A connection between the corpse and problem of meaning is a consistent theme in the lit-
erature. Corpses are certainly heavy symbols when it comes to practices of secondary burial.
Danforth’s (1982) classic example concerns the extent to which Greek villagers use the body as a
cosmic index. “The condition of the corpse…is a model for the condition of the soul” (Danforth
1982, p. 37). The Orthodox rite of exhumation, which takes place up to five years after a death,
provides mourners with the legible traces of a soul’s state. The ideal is dry, white bones, with
the hair and clothes long dissolved, and the soul thus safely passed to the other world. Versions
of this sensibility abound from Portugal to China (de Pina Cabral 1986, Watson 1982). Proper
decomposition and decay are often what mark a good death: more purity, less danger.
Care of the corpse is a key aspect of this, too. Often, the significance of such ethical practice
becomes clearest in its frustration. This happened in Sierra Leone during the Ebola outbreak of
2014–2015 (Lipton 2017). There, families had to contend with international edicts forbidding
the handling of corpses, due to the possibilities of contagion, which otherwise would have been
a central aspect in local funerary rites of washing, perfuming, and wrapping. This limitation cre-
ated a number of problems, playing out with respect to religious affiliations, land claims, and
relationships with ancestors. The clash between universalized, biomedical protocols and those

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 of Krio deathways in Freetown also maps onto larger and long-standing discourses of race and
power—just as they do with respect to gender (Abu-Lughod 1993, Martin 1988). In Freetown,
deaths became “white” and “black”—both, actually, depending on the moment and issue—with
the former indexing not only the anticultural prescriptions of biomedicine, but also distinct no-
tions of personhood, temporality, and social relations. “As death in the time of Ebola made plain,
the clockwork of ‘white time’—while exemplifying Weberian bureaucratic order—presented a
form of cruel, impersonal disorder; a metronomic punctuality opposed to the comforting rhythm
of activity typically associated with ‘good’ death” (Lipton 2017, p. 814).
Weber’s (1946) work on disenchantment, through which calculation crowds out wonder and
science replaces magic, is also relevant here. His interests in secularization and modernization
are strongly reflected in the literature on death, especially in a master narrative that emphasizes
a number of shifts in the West and, by extension, the colonial and postcolonial worlds. These
include shifts from the authority of the family to that of the state, the home to the hospital, and
the priest to the doctor. These are set out most influentially in the work of historian Ariès (1981)
but underpin some approaches in sociology (Walter 1994) and anthropology (Davies 1997). This
can also be used to help explain why some of the most interesting analyses of death in recent
years are not framed primarily as “the anthropology of death”; the main focus is the state, or
biopolitics, or another rubric. And the master narrative is not unfounded. Death is now often
a matter of paperwork, made even worse, as Gorer (1965) puts it, by the extent to which the
dead, alongside expressions of grief and mourning, became pornographic under the conditions of
modernity, unmoored from a public culture and ritual efficacies.
In line with this point, it is worth noting how Weber’s reflections on disenchantment concern
his admiration for Tolstoy’s questioning of how “civilized man” deals with death. This is not very
well, for “he catches only the most minute part of what the life of the spirit brings forth ever anew,
and what he seizes is always something provisional and not definitive, and therefore death for
him is a meaningless occurrence” (Weber 1946, p. 140). Weber’s invocations of death and death
imagery are purposeful; consider how he writes as well of his students’ “bony hands seek[ing] to
grasp the blood-and-the-sap of true life without ever catching up with it” (p. 141).
Weber could figure more prominently in the anthropology of death. His concerns with disen-
chantment, secularization, and rationalization are certainly useful when it comes to understanding
contemporary pushback on the medicalization of death. If this is true in Sierra Leone—where fam-
ilies did what they could to negotiate biomedical regimes—it is equally so in the United States
and Britain. In these and other settings, trends are emerging in which natural burials (Clayden
et al. 2010), home funerals (Hagerty 2014), death doulas (Olson 2018), and other efforts to es-
tablish values of intimacy mark commitments to “the blood-and-the-sap of true life” (however
defined). The trends capture a number of related concerns, including a rejection of the funeral
industry, distaste for ostentatious displays and markers of status, and pushback against the nor-
mative protocols of biomedicine. In short, such practices challenge the pornography of death. As
Hagerty (2014) puts it, in a study of home funerals in California, “[H]ere is the body in decay,
in ordinary living rooms and bedrooms all over America, unembalmed, unmistakenly dead, for
all to see and touch and smell—publicly available to the full sensorium” (p. 429). Putrescence
persists.

COMMEMORATIONS
If putrescence persists, it also ends, prompting questions of commemoration. A good death is about
not only the dryness of bones, or perfuming of the corpse, but also how remains of the dead are
placed, literally and figuratively. From stones to gravestones, statues to photographs, park benches

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to Facebook tributes, and to lockets of hair and urns of ash, it is crucial to attend to what Hallam
& Hockey (2001) call “figuring memory” (pp. 23–46) in relation to how the materiality of death
extends beyond the body (Hallam et al. 1999).
One fruitful line of inquiry has been the innovation around cremation and ash disposal
(Prendergast et al. 2006). In Britain, an increasing number of families are patriating the ashes of
loved ones and personalizing the ways in which the dead are commemorated. And from Britain,
to Japan (Kawano 2004), to Spain (Kawano 2004, Vaczi 2014), people are making the most of this
materiality (but see Jieun 2016): One can scatter ashes over the prow of a boat, or along a favorite
mountain path; one can keep them on the mantle, or in a ring; one can bury them in sports stadiums
and inject them under your skin (in a memorial tattoo). Such practices index the significance of
authenticity, individualism, and choice (i.e., consumerism) as cultural values (Schafer 2011, Walter
1994). And these values are expressed not only with respect to the pliability of ashes; we find sim-
ilar practices of personalized expression (and pushback against state-regulated expectations and
norms) in cemeteries. At the same time, work on these modes of commemoration has shown that
in many instances (a) collective identities and community ties still matter (Engelke 2015b, Vaczi
2014), and (b) traditions of personal expression and marking are not new, even as the profession-
alization of death trades and state regulations have promoted “aesthetic restraint” (Dawdy 2013,
p. 456). We see no such restraint in Ghana, where coffins are elaborately constructed. This prac-
tice, too, has to do with consumption, prestige, and individual biography, although it is primarily
about “the importance of being remembered,” with the coffin as “the instrument that allows the
memory of the deceased to be stored” (Bonetti 2012, p. 275).
Commemorations of death often define the landscape. Throughout Imerina, in Madagascar,
“in most villages there is literally no place one can stand without a tomb being in sight”; tombs
are “symbols of permanence,” constructed of granite, in contrast to mud brick houses (Graeber
1995, p. 262). Tombs are also the sites of the Merina’s famadihanas—ritual practices which involve
dancing with corpses and rewrapping bones. Famadihanas recall and honor the dead; they are a
means through which the living seek blessings and favor. At the same time, famadihanas signal not
only connection (as dancing might suggest) but also detachment—a kind of “depersonalization”
of the dead (Bloch 1971, pp. 161–71). Relatives get close to the dead in order to underscore their
distance and difference. Famadihanas are acts of remembering to forget—cultivation of “genealog-
ical amnesia” (Graeber 1995, p. 264)—prompted by conflicting images of the dead as “benevolent
ancestors” and “rapacious ghosts” (p. 275). What famadihanas point out so well is the social tension
often found between concern for the dead in general with anxiety over the dead in particular (cf.
Taylor 1993, Vitebsky 2017).
If the Merina’s dead should both fade from memory and disintegrate over time, it is nevertheless
crucial that they be buried properly in the first place. “For the Merina there is no worse nightmare
than that one’s body will be lost so that it cannot enter into the communal tomb” (Bloch & Parry
1982b, p. 15). They are not alone. And once again, as with the time of Ebola, the nexus here of
the body, its disposition, and memorialization is most arresting in instances of its frustration. Dead
bodies are often symbolically heaviest, in Verdery’s sense, when absent altogether. From Argentina
(Robben 2018a) to Zimbabwe (Fontein 2014), no dead are more dangerous than those unsettled:
the war dead and the disappeared, cheated proper rites of burial and commemoration. During
the Vietnam War, the amount of grievous death, in which “the agony of a violent death and the
memory of terror entrap the soul” (Kwon 2008, p. 13), reshaped life to an unprecedented extent,
in part by making “bad deaths” a norm, thus upsetting the received Hertzian calculus in which
bad deaths stand as the occasional instance and through which the ideological articulation of a
good death gets made. As Kwon (2008) argues, we need to take greater account of the extent to
which bad deaths can become normalized, prompting a “representational crisis in social memory”

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 (p. 21; cf. Kilma 2002, Mueggler 2001, Talebi 2011). This has also often led to pushback against the
state’s valuation of traditional practices as backward (Feeley-Harnik 1984, Grant 2011, Mueggler
2018).
If the politics and poetics of commemoration shine light on the arrangements of mass culture,
the significance of these arrangements is often expressed through particular events. The Black
Lives Matter movement in the United States has brought the issue of racialized mass death to
the fore in such terms. Since the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin, specific faces, names, and
bodies have been made heavy. As Black Lives Matter shows, though, to say that the dead body
is a heavy symbol requires further qualification because not all (dead) bodies are treated equally
(Vargas 2015; see also Williams 2015 and other posts in this series). Similar points can be made
with reference to the dead in Apartheid South Africa (Dennie 2009), war-torn Guatemala (O’Neill
2012), heat-wave Chicago (Klinenberg 2001), Rust-Belt Syracuse (Rubinstein et al. 2018), and
nuclear-meltdown Ukraine (Petryna 2003). This list could go on, each case capturing the extent
to which a (dead) body is also black, or female, or queer, or Muslim, or radioactive, or any number
of other marked designations. Within the semiotics of commemoration—or lack thereof—we find
the machinations of necropolitics (Mbembe 2003).
Carter’s (2018) research on the memorial work of African American women in New Orleans
gives us a good sense of these necropolitics. Within the church-based communities Carter studied,
“motherwork” was too often pressed into the service of giving name and shape to the victims of
gun violence, most of whom are young black men. This work involved a range of activities and
actions, from birthday parties for the dead—“raising dead sons”—to weekly marches on city hall,
bearing a bouquet of roses—one for each new victim of urban violence. An important aspect of
the latter project was bearing witness to and for the dead whose names did not make it into the
papers or otherwise circulate within local communities. In all such practices and efforts, “homicide
victims were no longer ‘unidentified black men’ found dead on the streets of New Orleans. They
were sons, grandsons, and the children and grandchildren of neighbours, known and unknown”
(Carter 2018, p. 699). The heaviness of these symbols is built up through the force of metonymy.

TECHNOLOGIES OF TRADE
Very few corners of the earth operate without a funeral industry or death trade. From a pioneering
exposé of the business in 1960s America (Mitford 1978), to contemporary studies of its growth
in Ghana (De Witte 2003), South Africa (Lee 2011), and Japan (Suzuki 2000), the uneasy rela-
tionship between money and death—“death as a living” (Parry 1994, pp. 75–150)—has received
good attention. We have already touched on reactions to this unease as expressed in the home
funerals movement and natural burials. I do not want to dwell further on them here because it
eclipses other ways of considering the “technologies of trade.” It might also leave the false im-
pression that these relationships are distinct to modern markets. Death is always exchange—most
famously captured in the figure of Charon, ferryman of the Styx; similar figures appear in cos-
mologies stretching from South America to Southeast Asia (Grinsell 1957). Yet when it comes to
technologies and trade, there are two more basic points to consider: (a) the importance of rec-
ognizing that exchange entails relationships; and (b) how the affordances of specific technologies
give those relationships shape.
The dead are demanding. There are very few places/times in which the dead actually “rest in
peace,” if that is understood to mean disconnect. There are, as with the Merina, cases in which
the living seek to realize disconnection (Conklin 2001, Mueggler 2018). But even here, the end
goal of remembering to forget can be achieved only within a certain temporal arc, characterized
by intensive—and often quite literal—interaction with the dead. What commemoration often

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involves is much more than remembering the dead. It requires a serious engagement with the
things that ghosts and ancestors want: a proper burial, a pot of beer, a feast, money, a fitting grave-
stone, the blood of a reindeer, the blood of kin. Debts abound (De Pina-Cabral 1986, Jasarevic
2012, Langford 2013, Russ 2005). And they are often framed in terms of sacrifice. Death is ob-
viously an aspect of the literature on sacrifice, though it is underexplored in such terms (Hoskins
1993). But as a number of anthropologists have emphasized, to grapple with sacrifice is also to
grapple with two of anthropological theory’s enduring interests: the gift and, more generally, ex-
change (Langford 2013, Mayblin 2014, Mueggler 2018, Parry 1986, Toulson 2013, Willerslev
2009). Even more, then, alongside Hertz’s death essay one should also read his collaborative essay
on sacrifice (Hubert & Mauss 1964) as well as Marcel Mauss’s The Gift (1990). Together these
texts crystalize the moral aspects of intentionality, reciprocity, and hierarchy in the crafting of
social bonds with the dead.
Willerslev (2009) pulls these texts together well. For the Chukchi, voluntary death—“the wish
to die at the hands of a close relative”—is a “heroic act,” ideally performed when one is aged and
infirm (p. 695). While rarely carried out, this “optimal sacrifice” in the Siberian North reflects the
esteem for, and superiority of, the ancestors, from whom all fortune is given. Ancestors are said to
experience such death of kin as a form of return. This logic of exchange is extended outward, such
that reindeer, upon which Chukchi rely for survival, become the next most valuable (and more
common) sacrificial victims, as their deaths replenish herds in the world of the dead. Related to
what we find in the classic literature on the generative function of funerals, this is about “the
maintenance and furthering of life through the act of taking life” (Willerslev 2009, p. 701). It is an
exchange, albeit an unequal one, because the living are always already dependent on the goodwill of
ancestors. In many cosmologies, life is a debt that can never be repaid, and sacrifice, or other forms
of exchange, while in some ways emphasizing relationships between the living and the dead, also
serves to underscore difference and hierarchy. In this respect relations with the dead also raise key
questions about the nature and sources of social authority (Kopytoff 1971)—to which we return
below.
If the dead are powerful, they are also vulnerable and rely on the care of the living. Hertzian
work on relations between the living and the dead has often had an instrumental tinge here: giv-
ing to get. Recent work complicates this picture, showing how care, love, and commitment exceed
the functional calculus (Desjarlais 2014, Feldman 2017, Klima 2002). In her work on Lao and
Cambodian emigrants to the United States, Langford’s (2013) attention to care adds a twist to
the literature on “ghosts of war.” Like their Vietnamese counterparts, these emigrants find them-
selves haunted by bad deaths linked to the Vietnam War (and Khmer Rouge). What Langford also
finds is a new form of violence, and bad death, brought on by the medical and funeral industries
in the United States. To the ghosts of war, add the ghosts of hospitals; such institutions try to
dematerialize death and grief, shifting focus from consumption, display, and physical care of the
corpse—all central to traditional sensibilities—and toward more Protestant and secular concerns
with the immaterial and symbolic. “U.S. institutions for managing death become critical sites for
the disruption of gift exchange and the discounting of sacrifice” (Langford 2013, p. 195). They
make proper care impossible because they frustrate “enactment of the sociality of living and dead”
(p. 203).
Langford’s work tracks the significance of major changes within social and cosmological orders.
Contest over deathways is often a bellwether of such changes, with funerals and burials in partic-
ular laying bare religious and political reconfigurations (Durham 2002, Gable 2006, Geschiere
2005, Janson 2011, O’Rourke 2007, Telle 2000, van der Geest 2006). The classic example is
Geertz’s (1957) analysis of the funeral of a Javanese boy, which should have followed a locally
developed syncretic form but precipitated a clash between secular nationalists and conservative

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 Muslims. The center of the clash, it is worth noting, was the boy’s corpse—the heavy symbol,
making a bang. Yet we also find other things serving as catalysts for these reconfigurations.
Take a recent trend in Ethiopia, reported by Boylston (2015), during which people began erect-
ing concrete graves. The materials had become affordable, and the value of individual remem-
brance had grown, partly as a result of the influx of new ideas (political, religious, and economic).
The concrete caused a practical problem: lack of space in the churchyard. More importantly, it
raised theological issues because it signaled a valuation of “body” over “spirit” (if we take these
terms loosely)—contrary to Orthodox norms of “not leaving any remnant after departing from
this world” (Boylston 2015, p. 287). And that valuation was generally borne out in practice, as
local people cared very little for the maintenance of graves or even preservation of bones; in one
instance, Boylston found himself surprised by the casual way in which fellow gravediggers tossed
away human remains they came upon in their pit. “Concrete graves insist on pointing to the bones;
they do not let the body blend back into the environment” (p. 300).
Technology often becomes intertwined with questions of embodiment and materiality vis-
à-vis cosmological frames. In other cases, we see this intertwining with the emergence of new
procedures for body disposal. In recent years, alkaline hydrolysis (AH)—the process of liquify-
ing remains—has gained a foothold in the American funeral industry. This process is presented
as a more ecological alternative to cremation, though it is meeting strong resistance from en-
trenched business interests. Economics aside, the controversy hinges on cultural encodings of
purity and danger, with critics expressing concern over “wet” remains (despite the fact that AH
also produces “dry” calcium phosphate deposits). “Analysis of the politics of dead bodies must
take account of the roles played by disposition technologies in the exercise of authority over the
corpse” (Olson 2014, p. 667). And these technologies are not confined to funeral industries; they
extend throughout broader social infrastructures (Fisch 2013, Ghannam 2015, Huberman 2013).
In research on commuter train suicides in Tokyo, for instance, Fisch (2013) tracks the shift in
reporting such events as suicides to, increasingly, “body accidents.” In doing so, train compa-
nies are simultaneously dehumanizing a life and enlivening a transportation network, or “techno-
social body” (p. 340). This case reinforces the links (and blurring) between human and machine;
a thanatology for the transhumanist age, in which the authority to decide what is what is thrown
open.

SOVEREIGNTY/AUTHORITY
Who owns the dead? How is death managed and declared? How is it conquered? Answers to
these questions have emerged in some of what is covered above; however, within the anthro-
pology of death, sovereignty and authority are central ethnographic issues and theoretical con-
cerns in their own right (Bernstein 2013, Bloch 1971, Cagüeñas 2018, Grant 2011, Kilma 2002,
Makley 2015, Singh 2012). Ethnographically, we find a full shelf of cases in which power is deter-
mined by who presides over the funeral, who certifies the death, who serves as custodian of the
chief/prophet/premier’s remains, and who can wield legitimate violence. Theoretically, these cases
stake interventions in debates ranging from necropolitics and bare life to kingship and seculariza-
tion. In this final section, we come back to some key aspects of dealing with the corpse, tracing
the ways in which authority of/over the dead is enacted.
The significance of authority is made clear in the example of Vladimir Lenin, whose body has
been on display since 1924 (Yurchak 2015). To call it “his body,” though, is to gloss a more com-
plicated situation, for the amount of preservation and reconstruction work required means that it
is not him; so much is new, and often inorganic matter. What the Soviet and Russian states have
perpetuated is the practice of linking the sovereign’s body to the body politic (Kantorowicz 1957),

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albeit with a distinctive form of “material doubling” (Yurchak 2015, p. 136) in which, through the
science of preservation, corpse and effigy are one. Materiality still matters, but the significance of
the corpse’s materiality is eclipsed by political visions.
The most recent work on Russia, by Bernstein (2019), points to the long-standing lure of
immortalism, as expressed through the problem of the body’s finitude. Today, this concept finds
expression among transhumanists, who turn to science and technology in their efforts to defeat
death. Cryogenics, neural uploading, and a refashioning of biological life are among the diverse
strategies employed in these efforts, which together underscore the extent to which temporality
is bound up with materiality. Bernstein’s ethnography is as much about the anthropology of time
as it is about the anthropology of death; in this respect, it continues a theme we find in other
works, both classic [Frazer 1994 (1903), Hertz 1960] and contemporary (Farman 2017, Kaufman
2005, Svendsen et al. 2018). For Bernstein’s interlocutors, the future is a cause, as much as a fact.
There should be no time to die: This is true sovereignty. A related assertion of sovereignty can be
found in the moves to legalize assisted dying and euthanasia, the rise of which is starting to gain
anthropological attention (Buchbinder 2018, Norwood 2009). Here, the sovereign decision is not
not to die, but when—and how.
Vitebsky’s (2017) work captures the struggle of sovereignty over life and death that can follow
from religious proselytization. Over the past generation, fundamentalist strains of Baptist Chris-
tianity and Hinduism have gained prominence among the Sora, in India, forcing a break with the
traditional practice of speaking with the ancestors via shamans (Vitebsky 1993). While the older
ways of dialogic connection were ultimately about “carefully paced forgetting” (Vitebsky 2017,
p. 293), Baptist and Hindu demands to disavow the dead, in obeisance to the true god(s), have
created community rifts; some people embrace the new understandings of authority, whereas oth-
ers are racked by anxieties over facing a bad death through absolute and immediate silencing and
disconnection. Such crises of authority often prompt moral torment and contests in relation to
funerals, what makes a good death, and ancestral relations (Robbins 2004; see also Chua 2011,
Tomlinson 2007).
If in some contexts we find clear assertions of a “religious” domain, in many more contexts
the lines between scientific and religious sources of authority blur. This is the case in Russian
transhumanism, where we find strains of both Christian and secular imaginaries. And the blurring
even takes place within the heart of the seemingly heartless modern medical complex. In her
research on African American experiences in a neonatal intensive care unit, Rouse (2004) offers
a nuanced reading of one case in which the parents’ Christian faith was harnessed to renegotiate
the secular-scientific understandings of suffering and the value of life. For the hospital, a good
death for the critically ill baby girl in question had to mean a cessation of life support. But a “do
not resuscitate” order was not an option for the parents, who understood the matter at hand in
relational, not individual, terms, the significance of which was marked by the value of care, not
secularized renderings of suffering and pain (Asad 2003, Fassin 2011). Related work focuses on
debates over fetal personhood and pregnancy loss (Gammeltoft 2014, Morgan 2009, van der Sijpt
2018).
There is no doubting the power of medical authority, as both culturally expressed and legally
codified. Death can indeed be a matter of legal decree, as we see in the literature on organ dona-
tion (Lock 2001, Sharp 2006; cf. Copeman & Reddy 2012). Here, though, any explanatory rubric
of modernity falls short because what we find in Canada and the United States (increasing accep-
tance) is different from that in, say, Japan (resistance). As Lock (2001) makes clear in this compari-
son, we need to think instead in terms of the self and the body: how dominant Western renderings
of the person have been built up on increasingly immaterial foundations, with “the self” located

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 in the mind and spirit. This view is a key part of why brain death—a legal precondition for the
harvesting of organs—is not an absurd term. It is the Cartesian end.
This end is running into some trouble, as the Russian transhumanists show. Farman (2013,
2017) has also explored the muddy waters between life and death, as it depends on certain render-
ings of time and matter. With respect to the latter, Farman’s work on American transhumanists
explores the philosophical problems thrown up by cryonics—the process of freezing the body (or
brain) in the hopes of a future reanimation. And what is that reanimation? If a self is a mind, housed
in a secular, “desouled body” (Farman 2017, p. 105), what role does matter have? Tellingly, cryo-
genists refuse to refer to that matter as a corpse; it is a patient. As Farman notes, “the cryopreserved
cannot be treated as mere corpses,” while the patient simultaneously has to be understood as “a
personless body” (Farman 2013, p. 743). Technoscientific imaginaries highlight the imprecision
of our conceptual categories.

THE END?
A Cartesian frame has never been, and will never be, the only option. A good reminder of this
notion, as well as the contingency of the technological factor, can be found in Mueggler’s (2018)
work in Júzò, Southwest China. Pushing back against the state’s degradation of tradition, while
at the same time engaging with modern sensibilities of individuality and sincerity, funerary rites
in Júzò, as well as more general forms of sociality, are wrapped up in concerns with the material
and immaterial, rendered by Mueggler in terms of soul/body. Yet the only real bodies, in this
cosmology, are dead bodies, the materiality of which is pliable enough to encompass not only
the corpse but also the carcasses of sacrificed animals, textual inscriptions, stones, tombstones,
and photographs. In the local rendering, the living might be better described as virtual, marked by
their potential to be dead. Similar to what we find in a classic example from central Africa (Kopytoff
1971), a boundary between life and death comes to feel artificial. “In Júzò, at least, and possibly
anywhere, an ontological distinction between the living and the dead is a distortion. Rather than
to speak of either living or dead as real or imaginary it is more accurate to speak of both as moving
continuously between material and immaterial forms” (Mueggler 2018, p. 10).
Has there even been a mere corpse? The closest we seem to get is the Hadza (Woodburn 1982),
who have little concern for the body, burying it quickly, and shallowly, with only some thought
for making sure hyenas cannot disinter it. But compared to how Hadza understand the deaths
of animals—those dead birds, perhaps?—human passing is “hedged around with remarkably few
procedures, prescriptions, taboos or rituals” (Woodburn 1982, p. 188). Secular humanists also
make some efforts to claim so, albeit as a future goal (Engelke 2015a).
But perhaps the grip of the dead is nowhere more evident than in the personal situations of
anthropologists themselves. Like other writers, anthropologists (of all specialties) dedicate their
books to loved ones; many such dedications are in memoriam and easily cast, from a reverse an-
thropological view, as an effort at loosening the grip of death. More notably, though, there is a
haunting and minor practice among anthropologists who study death of folding into academic
work accounts of their own terror, anger, sadness, rage, wonder, and enchantment with personal
losses (e.g., Behar 1991, Farman 2017, Graeber 2012, Laqueur 2015). Rosaldo’s (1984) reflection
on the deaths of his brother and, eleven years later, his wife (fellow anthropologist, Michelle), in
his efforts to understand Ilongot headhunting, is the canonical example. The argument he makes
from this personal grief is that anthropologists need to take the role of emotions seriously in their
academic treatments of death—something which, at the time of his writing, was too often still
treated in the way Radcliffe-Brown (1933, pp. 241–45) treated Andaman tears of mourning. Inas-
much as this review has not focused properly on grief and mourning, the importance of such an

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argument needs to be acknowledged (see Brison & Leavitt 1995, Wikan 1990; see also Part II
of Robben 2018b)—including as key themes in texts I have cited above (Conklin 2001, Danforth
1982, Kwon 2007, Scheper-Hughes 1993).
Most of Rosaldo’s (1984) essay is devoted to exploring the emotions surrounding death. But
what is also worth reflecting on is the presence, albeit fleetingly, of Michelle Rosaldo’s body
(p. 183), for it is upon seeing her—could anyone say “it”?—at the bottom of a treacherous ravine
that his own thinking and feeling unfold. Personal encounters with the dead—ranging from fam-
ily to strangers—are a bracing presence in the literature, whether in up close, visceral detail (De
León 2015, Gorer 1965, Hagerty 2014, Schwarz 2015, Stepputat 2014b) or in dreamlike haunt-
ings (Mueggler 2018). In the anthropology of death, a “cadaverous cold” (Rosaldo 1984, p. 184)
stitches together self and other in a way that seems to demand a pause in the reflex to exhaustive
explanation. It behooves us to recognize these findings and lacunae in our ongoing efforts at un-
derstanding this thing that seems always more than a thing. The anthropology of death shows no
signs of winding down.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
The author is not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings that might
be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank Jenny Huberman and Bambi Schieffelin for their insightful feedback on a draft of this ar-
ticle. Many other colleagues offered helpful suggestions for this review—too many to name—but
I extend special thanks to Anya Bernstein, Shannon Lee Dawdy, Abou Farman, Tim Hutchings,
Rebekah Lee, Tamara Kneese, Phil Olson, and Margaret Schwarz. I also thank Zachary Hendrick-
son for his help in preparing the references.

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