Mortal Dilemmas: The Troubled Landscape of Death in America

ISBN-13: 9781629583921 / Angielski / Twarda / 2016 / 156 str.

Donald Joralemon

Opis

Anthropologist Donald Joralemon asks whether America is really, as many scholars claim, a death-denying culture that prefers to quarantine the sick in hospitals and the elderly in nursing homes. His answer is a reasoned no. In his view, Americans are merely struggling to find cultural scripts for the exceptional conditions of dying that our social world and medical technologies have thrust upon us. The book
-is written in the first-person for a broad audience by a senior anthropologist, making it an authoritative yet accessible textbook for courses on death and dying and American culture;
-includes contemporary debates about highly visible cases, the definition of death, the status of human remains, aging, and the medicalization of grief;
-demonstrates persuasively that arguments over death and dying are in fact arguments about what it means to be human in modern America."

O autorze

Donald Joralemon earned his doctorate in cultural anthropology from UCLA and has taught at Smith College since 1983. His first book, on Peruvian shamanism, led to an appearance on the National Geographic television channel's program "Taboo" (on "Altered States"). For the last ten years he has done research on the developed world’s healing technologies, especially organ transplantation, and published articles in various anthropology and medical ethics journals. He has been interviewed by the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Canadian Medical Journal and was invited to submit an editorial to Proto, the journal for the Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also the author of the widely used textbook Exploring Medical Anthropology, now in its third edition.