Kategoria BISAC: Social Science >> Death & Dying

Death has popularly had the reputation of being the last of life's great mysteries, a subject of speculation, and as a foreboding event both inevitable, and feared. In Life Sentences, Zohreh Bayatrizi examines the many concerted attempts from the last 350 years to strip death of its mystery, and to order, manage, and transform it from an individualized and fatalistic event to a social phenomenon that allows intervention. She examines the process that has caused death to be understood in five quasi-biblical commandments: "thou shalt not die violently; thou shalt not die...

This book examines Maya sacrifice and related posthumous body manipulation. The editors bring together an international group of contributors from the area studied: archaeologists as well as anthropologists, forensic anthropologists, art historians and bioarchaeologists. This interdisciplinary approach provides a comprehensive perspective on these sites as well as the material culture and biological evidence found there

Have you been attacked by a great white shark? Gone over Niagara Falls in a barrel? Been exposed to anthrax? No, you haven't, or you'd be dead. This Will Kill You reveals the intriguing facts behind the many ways humans bite the dust in encounters with deadly bugs, hungry predators, natural disasters, and freak occurrences. Thoroughly researched and illustrated, not to mention thoroughly hilarious, this book describes in deathly detail what happens to the body when it's struck by lightning, slimed by a dart frog, or flung from a mountaintop.

No other book has ever peaked under...

As a society, we are faced with a series of dilemmas--abortion, euthanasia, genetic engineering, organ transplant allocation, support or non-support of the elderly and fragile--that seem to offer no resolution. How do we choose between the needy and the ailing? Choices must be made in both the world of law and the realm of medical ethics. What we need is what we do not have--a perspective in the larger sense of the word--a view that makes apparent the sweep of the issues at hand. The failure of perspective in bioethics and medical decision making is absolute. It results from the limits of...

Shame is a common and pervasive feature of the human response to death and other losses, yet this often goes unrecognized due to a reluctance to acknowledge and confront it. This book intends to expose shame for what it is, allowing clinicians to see that it is the central psychological force in the understanding of death and mourning. Kauffman and his fellow authors explore the psychology of shame via observation, reflection, theory, and practice in order to demonstrate the significant role it can play in our processing of grief, death, and trauma. The authors avoid defining a unified...

From antebellum slavery to the twenty-first century, African American funeral directors have orchestrated funerals or "homegoing" ceremonies with dignity and pageantry. As entrepreneurs in a largely segregated trade, they were among the few black individuals in any community who were economically independent and not beholden to the local white power structure. Most important, their financial freedom gave them the ability to support the struggle for civil rights and, indeed, to serve the living as well as bury the dead.

During the Jim Crow era, black funeral directors relied on...

This monograph focuses on the Aceramic Neolithic of Cyprus, and addresses three key theoretical topics; memory, death and landscape. Sites dating from the initial colonisation of the island (the Akrotiri phase) through to Khirokitia and its contemporaries, are contextualised within their spatial and temporal settings, and are presented here taking into consideration recent theoretical developments in archaeology and anthropology. This monograph covers what have traditionally been seen as three distinctive periods: the Akrotiri phase, the Early Aceramic Neolithic and the Late Aceramic...

Proceedings of the XV World Congress UISPP (Lisbon, 4-9 September 2006). Volume 24. Session WS26

This book includes papers from the session 'Babies Reborn: Infant/Child Burials in Pre- and Protohistory' held at the XV UISPP World Congress, Lisbon, September 2006.