The Matter of Death Space, Place and Materiality

by Hockey, Jenny; Woodthorpe, Kate; Komaromy, Carol

• ISBN13: 9780230224162
• ISBN10: 0230224164
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-08-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This collection opens up spaces where lives end, bodies are disposed of and memories generated: hospitals, hospices, care homes, coroners' courts, funeral premises, cemeteries, roadsides, the spirit world. Using material culture studies, it illuminates the ways human beings make meaningful the challenges of death, dying and bereavement.

Author Biography

JENNY HOCKEY is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Sheffield University, UK. She has published widely in the area of death, dying, disposal and memorialisation, drawing on related work in the fields of material culture, the life course, ageing and gender.
 
CAROL KOMAROMY is Senior Lecturer in Health Studies at the Open University, UK. Her background in health care underpins her research and scholarship in death and dying and commitment to making a difference to the experience of end-of-life care.
 
KATE WOODTHORPE is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Bath, UK where she teaches on the MSc Death and Society and oversees the Foundation Degree in Funeral Services. Her research interests include the materiality of death, deathcare work, and ethnographic research.

Table of Contents

List of Figures and Table	p. ix
Biographical Information	p. xi
Preface	p. xv
Materialising Absence	p. 1
Never Say Die: CPR in Hospital Space	p. 19
Making Hospice Space	p. 35
Dying Spaces in Dying Places	p. 52
The Materialities of Absence after Stillbirth: Historical Perspectives	p. 69
Distributed Personhood and the Transformation of Agency: An Anthropological Perspective on Inquests	p. 85
Behind Closed Doors? Corpses and Mourners in English and American Funeral Premises	p. 100
Private Grief in Public Spaces: Interpreting Memorialisation in the Contemporary Cemetery	p. 117
Wandering Lines and Cul-de-sacs: Trajectories of Ashes in the United Kingdom	p. 133
Natural Burial: The De-materialising of Death?	p. 148
What Will the Neighbours Say? Reactions to Field and Garden Burial	p. 165
Memorialising the Suicide Victim: 'Walking the Walk'	p. 178
Potent Reminders: An Examination of Responses to Roadside Memorials In Ireland	p. 195
Geographies of the Sprit World	p. 208
Recovering Presence	p. 223
Bibliography	p. 235
Index	p. 254
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