Title:
The work of the dead : a cultural history of mortal remains / Thomas W. Laqueur.
Author:
Laqueur, Thomas Walter.
Publication Information:
Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, 2015.
Call Number:
GT3150 .L37 2015
Abstract:
"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."-- Provided by publisher.
ISBN:
9780691157788
Physical Description:
xix, 711 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
Contents:
Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Work of the dead -- Part 1: Deep Time Of The Dead: -- Do the dead matter? -- Dead body and the persistence of being -- Cultural work of the dead -- Part 2: Places Of The Dead: -- Churchyard And The Old Regime: -- Development of the church-yard -- Language -- Place -- Church and churchyard in the landscape -- Necrogeography -- Necrobotany -- Necrotopology and memory -- Life and afterlife of the churchyard in literature -- Passage of the dead to the churchyard -- Law : Exclusion from the churchyard -- Claims of the dead body on the parish churchyard -- Claims of the parish on the dead body -- Economics of churchyard burial -- Right to burial and the crisis of the old regime -- Enlightenment Scandals: -- Voltaire -- David Hume -- Cemetery And The New Regime: -- Danger of the dead and the rise of the cemetery -- Genealogies Of The New Regime: -- Imagination : Elysium, arcadia, and the dead of the Eighteenth Century -- Cimetiere du Pere-Lachaise -- Distant lands and the imperial imagination -- Age Of The Cemetery: -- Novelty -- Necrogeography and Necrobotany -- Cemeteries and capitalism -- Religious pluralism in the age of the cemetery -- Reform, revolution, and the cemetery -- Class, family, and the cemetery -- Putting the dead in their place: pauper funerals and proper funerals, burials and reburials -- Disrupted bodies -- Part 3: Names Of The Dead: -- Names Of The Dead In Deep Time: -- Names of the dead in times of war -- Names of the dead in times of peace -- Rise of the names of the dead in modern history -- Age Of Necronominalism: -- Names over bodies -- Names and the absent but present body -- Monumental names -- Names of the vanished dead -- Names of the great war: -- Part 4: Burning The Dead: -- Disenchantment and cremation -- Ashes and history -- Different enchantments -- Ashes in their place -- Afterword: From a history of the dead to a history of dying -- Notes -- Image credits -- Index -- Plates follow page.
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