Search results

Law attempts to govern life & death through the appropriation of images that give a fantasy of control over death. The functioning of the thanatopolitical state is underpinned by a perceived control over death & its representation. This means of controlling death is challenged when someone wishes to die in an untimely fashion. Death may be timely when the state engages in the officially sanctioned killing of the death penalty but not when the individual assumes such a power to decide. When an individual goes before the law to obtain a right to die, instead of confronting death, legal institutions evade the issue & instead talk about life, & its sacred & inviolable nature. Yet, in the same move, many exceptions to this sacred quality of life are carved out. One can see an example of this phenomenon in the area of Supreme Court decision making on physician-assisted suicide. In Washington v. Glucksberg, the applicants had died by the time of the Supreme Court's decision. Where did they go? Were they ever really there for the law? The Supreme Court decision attempts to recompose the notion of identic wholeness in the face of bodies associated with death & decay. It is, in other words, an attempt to arrest the process of death by composing a narrative that valorizes life. The case becomes a narrative about the threat to life or, more precisely, a threat to a particular way of life. In other words, the state's interest in preserving life becomes the interest in preserving the life of the state. The state must live on. The question then moves from being one of whether the individual applicant in a case concerning physician-assisted suicide should live or die to one that asks should we the court live or die? 32 References. Adapted from the source document.

The Evolution of Funerary Ritual in Urbanizing China -- Belief in Karma and Mokṣa at the End of Life in India- Death and the Afterlife in Japan -- Return to Nature? Secularism and Politics of Death Space in Hong Kong -- Death and Dying: Belief, Fear and Ritual in Vietnamese Culture -- Negotiating Traditions and Modernity: Chinese Death Rituals in Singapore -- The Bureaucratic Professionalization of Funeral Rites in Tehran's Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery -- Death and Burial Practices in Contemporary Zulu Culture, South Africa -- Death in Botswana: Life Among the Ashes -- Ancestors and Death: From West Africa to Southwest Europe -- Living Coffins and Death Among the Ga of Ghana -- The Yoruba of Nigeria and the Ontology of Death and Burial -- Transformation of Funeral Rituals in Togo -- Rituals Around Life and Death in Mexico; The Day of the Dead -- Continuity and Ruptures in Brazilian Funeral Rites -- The Right to a Dignified Death in Argentina -- Superstar-Saints and Wandering Souls: The Cemetery as a Cultural Hotspot in Latin American Cities -- He taonga tuku iho: Indigenous End of Life and Death Care Customs of New Zealand Māori -- Communicating with the Dead in an Australian Aboriginal Culture: The Tiwi from Melville and Bathurst Islands -- Death and Dying in American Indian Cultures -- The Beauty of the Afterlife Among the Inuit of Nunavut -- Eternity Calling: Modernity and the Revival of Death and the Afterlife

The Latin root of the English word culture ties together both worship and the tilling of the soil. In both interpretations the outcome is the same: a rightly-directed culture produces either a bountiful harvest or falls short of the mark, materially or spiritually. This volume offers a critical examination of the nature and depth of our contemporary cultural crisis, focused on its lack of traditional orientation and moral understanding.

Includes bibliographical references

Death, Culture and Leisure: Playing Deadis an inter- and multi-disciplinary volume that engages with the diverse nexuses that exist between death, culture and leisure. At its heart, it is a playful exploration of the way in which we play with both death and the dead.

In the past, culture was a kind of vital consciousness that constantly rejuvenated and revivified everyday reality. Now it is largely a mechanism of distraction and entertainment. Notes on the Death of Culture is an examination and indictment of this transformation - penned by none other than the Nobel winner Mario Vargas Llosa, who is not only one of our finest novelists but one of the keenest social critics at work today. Taking his cues from T. S. Eliot - whose treatise Notes Towards the Definition of Culture is a touchstone precisely because the culture Eliot aimed to describe has since vanished - Vargas Llosa traces a decline whose ill effects have only just begun to be felt. He mourns, in particular, the figure of the intellectual: for most of the twentieth century, men and women of letters drove political, aesthetic, and moral conversations; today they have all but disappeared from public debate. But Vargas Llosa stubbornly refuses to fade into the background. He is not content to merely sign a petition; he will not bite his tongue. A necessary provocateur, here vividly translated by John King, provides an impassioned and essential critique of our time and culture.

"With intense and violent portrayals of death becoming ever more common on television and in cinema and the growth of death-centric movies, series, texts, songs and video clips attracting a wide and enthusiastic global reception, we might well ask whether death has ceased to be a taboo. What makes thanatic themes so desirable in popular culture? Do representations of the macabre and gore perpetuate or sublimate violent desires? Has contemporary popular culture removed our unease with death? Can social media help us to cope with our mortality, or can music and art present death as an aesthetic phenomenon? This volume adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the discussion of the social, cultural, aesthetic and theoretical aspects of the ways in which in popular culture understands, represents and manages death, bringing together contributions from around the world focused on television, cinema, popular literature, social media and the internet, art, music and advertising"--