We the Dead

We the Dead PDF Author: Brian Michael Murphy
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469668300
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 329

Book Description
Locked away in refrigerated vaults, sanitized by gas chambers, and secured within bombproof caverns deep under mountains are America's most prized materials: the ever-expanding collection of records that now accompany each of us from birth to death. This data complex backs up and protects our most vital information against decay and destruction, and yet it binds us to corporate and government institutions whose power is also preserved in its bunkers, infrastructures, and sterilized spaces. We the Dead traces the emergence of the data complex in the early twentieth century and guides readers through its expansion in a series of moments when Americans thought they were living just before the end of the world. Depression-era eugenicists feared racial contamination and the downfall of the white American family, while contemporary technologists seek ever denser and more durable materials for storing data, from microetched metal discs to cryptocurrency keys encoded in synthetic DNA. Artfully written and packed with provocative ideas, this haunting book illuminates the dark places of the data complex and the ways it increasingly blurs the lines between human and machine, biological body and data body, life and digital afterlife.

Preserving the Dead

Preserving the Dead PDF Author: Ryan Nagelhout
Publisher: Gareth Stevens Publishing LLLP
ISBN: 1482414880
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 34

Book Description
With the help of some chemicals and a bit of hard work, bodies can have a long life well after a person’s death. Early embalming efforts in ancient Egypt were meant to preserve bodies for the afterlife. Today, we preserve bodies in a variety of ways to honor our loved ones after they’re gone. With great facts and figures, readers will get an inside look at the funeral homes and other places where we preserve our dead. From organs in jars to modern embalming, this series offers full-color photographs and lots of information about the various processes that have helped preserve the dead for centuries.

The Work of the Dead

The Work of the Dead PDF Author: Thomas W. Laqueur
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691180938
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 736

Book Description
The meaning of our concern for mortal remains—from antiquity through the twentieth century The Greek philosopher Diogenes said that when he died his body should be tossed over the city walls for beasts to scavenge. Why should he or anyone else care what became of his corpse? In The Work of the Dead, acclaimed cultural historian Thomas Laqueur examines why humanity has universally rejected Diogenes's argument. No culture has been indifferent to mortal remains. Even in our supposedly disenchanted scientific age, the dead body still matters—for individuals, communities, and nations. A remarkably ambitious history, The Work of the Dead offers a compelling and richly detailed account of how and why the living have cared for the dead, from antiquity to the twentieth century. The book draws on a vast range of sources—from mortuary archaeology, medical tracts, letters, songs, poems, and novels to painting and landscapes in order to recover the work that the dead do for the living: making human communities that connect the past and the future. Laqueur shows how the churchyard became the dominant resting place of the dead during the Middle Ages and why the cemetery largely supplanted it during the modern period. He traces how and why since the nineteenth century we have come to gather the names of the dead on great lists and memorials and why being buried without a name has become so disturbing. And finally, he tells how modern cremation, begun as a fantasy of stripping death of its history, ultimately failed—and how even the ashes of the victims of the Holocaust have been preserved in culture. A fascinating chronicle of how we shape the dead and are in turn shaped by them, this is a landmark work of cultural history.

Preserving the Dead

Preserving the Dead PDF Author: E. Myers
Publisher: Lindsay Publications, Incorporated
ISBN: 9780917914249
Category : Embalming
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Book Description

The Corpse in the Middle Ages

The Corpse in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Romedio Schmitz-Esser
Publisher: Harvey Miller Publishers
ISBN: 9781909400870
Category : Burial
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
To what extent are the dead truly dead? In medieval society, corpses were assigned special functions and meanings in several different ways. They were still present in the daily life of the family of the deceased, and could even play active roles in the life of the community. Taking the materiality of death as a point of departure, this book comprehensively examines the conservation, burial and destruction of the corpse in its specific historical context. A complex and ambivalent treatment of the dead body emerges, one which necessarily confronts established modern perspectives on death. New scientific methods have enabled archaeologists to understand the remains of the dead as valuable source material. This book contextualizes the resulting insights for the first time in an interdisciplinary framework, considering their place in the broader picture drawn by the written sources of this period, ranging from canon law and hagiography to medieval literature and historiography. It soon becomes obvious that the dead body is more than a physical object, since its existence only becomes relevant in the cultural setting it is perceived in. In analogy to the findings for the living body in gender studies, the corpse too, can best be understood as constructed. Ultimately, the dead body is shaped by society, i.e. the living. This book examines the mechanisms by which this cultural construction of the body took place in medieval Europe. The result is a fascinating story that leads deep into medieval theories and social practices, into the discourses of the time and the daily life experiences during this epoch.

The Dominion of the Dead

The Dominion of the Dead PDF Author: Robert Pogue Harrison
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226317927
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
How do the living maintain relations to the dead? Why do we bury people when they die? And what is at stake when we do? In The Dominion of the Dead, Robert Pogue Harrison considers the supreme importance of these questions to Western civilization, exploring the many places where the dead cohabit the world of the living—the graves, images, literature, architecture, and monuments that house the dead in their afterlife among us. This elegantly conceived work devotes particular attention to the practice of burial. Harrison contends that we bury our dead to humanize the lands where we build our present and imagine our future. As long as the dead are interred in graves and tombs, they never truly depart from this world, but remain, if only symbolically, among the living. Spanning a broad range of examples, from the graves of our first human ancestors to the empty tomb of the Gospels to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Harrison also considers the authority of predecessors in both modern and premodern societies. Through inspired readings of major writers and thinkers such as Vico, Virgil, Dante, Pater, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Rilke, he argues that the buried dead form an essential foundation where future generations can retrieve their past, while burial grounds provide an important bedrock where past generations can preserve their legacy for the unborn. The Dominion of the Dead is a profound meditation on how the thought of death shapes the communion of the living. A work of enormous scope, intellect, and imagination, this book will speak to all who have suffered grief and loss.

Death in Medieval Europe

Death in Medieval Europe PDF Author: Joelle Rollo-Koster
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1315466848
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
Death in Medieval Europe: Death Scripted and Death Choreographed explores new cultural research into death and funeral practices in medieval Europe and demonstrates the important relationship between death and the world of the living in the middle ages. This volume explores overarching topics such as burials, commemorations, revenants, mourning practices and funerals, capital punishment, suspiscious death and death registrations using case studies from across Europe including England, Iceland and Spain. Drawing together and building upon the latest scholarship, this book is essential reading for all students and academics of death in the medieval period.

Living Through the Dead

Living Through the Dead PDF Author: Maureen Carroll
Publisher: Studies in Funerary Archaeolog
ISBN: 9781842173763
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
This volume investigates the archaeology of death and commemoration through thematically linked case studies drawn from the Classical world. These investigations stress the processes of burial and commemoration as inherently social and designed for an audience, and they explore the meaning and importance attached to preserving memory. While previous investigations of Greek and Roman death and burial have tended to concentrate on period- or regionally-specific sets of data, this volume instead focuses on a series of topical connections that highlight important facets of death and commemoration significant to the larger Classical world. Living through the dead investigates the subject of death and commemoration from a diverse set of archaeologically informed approaches, including visual reception, detailed analysis of excavated remains, landscape, and post-classical reflections and draws on artefactual, documentary and pictorial evidence. The nine papers present recent research by some of the leading voices on the subject, as well as some fresh perspectives. Case studies come from Thermopylae, the Bosporan kingdom, Athens, Republican Rome, Pompeii and Egypt. As a collected volume, they provide thematically linked investigations of key issues in ritual, memory and (self)presentation associated with death and burial in the Classical period. As such, this volume will be of particular interest to postgraduate students and academics with specialist interests in the archaeology of the Classical world and also more broadly, as a source of comparative material, to people working on issues related to the archaeology of death and commemoration.
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