Panagiotopoulos Anastasios, Espírito Santo Diana (ed.) Articulate Necrographies: Comparative Perspectives on the Voices and Silences of the Dead

Oxford; New York: Berghahn Books, 2019. — 264 p. — ISBN 978-1-78920-304-2.Going beyond the frameworks of the anthropology of death, Articulate Necrographies offers a dramatic new way of studying the dead and their interactions with the living. Traditional anthropology has tended to dichotomize societies where death “speaks” from those where death is “silent” – the latter is deemed “scientific” and the former “religious” or “magical”. The collection introduces the concept of “necrography” to describe the way death and the dead create their own kinds of biographies in and among the living, and asks what kinds of articulations and silences this in turn produces in the lives of those affected.Introduction. Anastasios Panagiotopoulos and Diana Espírito Santo.
Necrographic Frameworks.
Voices and Silences of the Dead in Western Modernity. Tony Walter.
Coping with Massive Urban Death: The Mutual Constitution of Mourning and Recovery in World War II’s Bombing War. Antonius C.G.M. Robben.
Biographies and Necrographies in Exchange: From the Self to the Other. Anastasios Panagiotopoulos.
Necrographic Observations.
The Making of Spirit Bodies and Death Perspectives in Afro-Cuban Religion. Diana Espírito Santo.
Sensory Necrography: The Flow of Signs and Sensations in the Corpse. Beth Conklin.
Unanchored Deaths: Grieving the Unplaceable in Samburu. Bilinda Straight.
The Sociality of Death: Life Potentialities and the Vietnamese Dead. Marina Marouda.
“Enlightened” Spirits: Modern Exchanges between the Living and the Dead under Spiritism. Raquel Romberg.
Channeling the Flow: Dealing with Death in an African-Based Religion. Gabriel Banaggia.
Of Shadows and Fears: Nepalese Ghost Stories from Classical Texts and Folklore to Social Media. Davide Torri.
Death Isn’t What It Used to Be: Animist and Baptist Ontologies in Tribal India. Piers Vitebsky.
Afterword. The Necrographic Imagination. Magnus Course.
Index.