Ruth E. Toulson

Necropolitics of the Ordinary (eBook, ePUB)

Death and Grieving in Contemporary Singapore

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Can a state make its people forget the dead?

Cemeteries have become sites of acute political contestation in the city-state of Singapore. Confronted with high population density and rapid economic growth, the government has ordered the destruction of all but one burial ground, forcing people to exhume their family members. In this ethnography of Chinese funeral parlors and cemeteries, anthropologist and trained mortician Ruth E. Toulson demonstrates this as part of a larger shift to transform a Daoist-infused obsession with ancestors into a sterile, more easily controlled "Protestant" Buddhism. Further, in a context where the dead remain central to family life, forced exhumation tears the social fabric, turning ancestors into ghosts. Using death ritual and grieving as interrogative lenses, Toulson explores the scope of and resistance to state power over the dead, laying bare the legacies of colonialism and consequences of whirlwind capitalist development. In doing so, she offers a new anthropology of death, one both more personal and politicized. Written in accessible prose rich with ethnographic detail, the book is suitable for undergraduate teaching in anthropology, Asian studies, religious studies, sociology, and history.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: University of Washington Press
• Seitenzahl: 196
• Erscheinungstermin: 28. Januar 2025
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780295753348
• Artikelnr.: 73219892

Autorenporträt

Ruth E. Toulson is an anthropologist and faculty member of the Department of Humanistic Studies at Maryland Institute College of Art. She is the coeditor of The Materiality of Mourning: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach (Routledge, 2018) and of The Cambridge Handbook of the Anthropology of Death (Cambridge University Press, under contract, due to press June 2023).