TAMING TIME, TIMING DEATH
Taming Time, Timing Death
Social Technologies and Ritual
Edited by
DORTHE REFSLUND CHRISTENSEN
Aarhus University, Denmark
RANE WILLERSLEV
University of Oslo, Norway
First published 2013 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge
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Copyright 2013 Dorthe Refslund Christensen and Rane Willerslev
Dorthe Refslund Christensen and Rane Willerslev have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Taming time, timing death : social technologies and ritual.
1. DeathSocial aspects. 2. TimeSociological aspects. 3. Time perspective. 4. Funeral rites and ceremonies.
I. Christensen, Dorthe Refslund. II. Willerslev, Rane, 1971
306.9dc23
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Christensen, Dorthe Refslund.
Taming time, timing death : social technologies and ritual / by Dorthe Refslund Christensen and Rane Willerslev.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4094-5068-9 (hardback) 1.DeathSocial aspects. 2. Time perspective. 3. TimeSociological aspects. 4. Funeral rites and ceremonies. I. Willerslev, Rane, 1971 II. Title.
HQ1073.C477 2013
306.9dc23
2012040432
ISBN 9781409450689 (hbk)
ISBN 9781315611846 (ebk)
Contents
Rane Willerslev, Dorthe Refslund Christensen and Lotte Meinert
Conceptualizations of Death, Materiality and Time
Stuart McLean
Knut Rio
Michael C. Kearl and Michael Hviid Jacobsen
Deaths Time: Mourning and Remembrance
Rane Willerslev
Dorthe Refslund Christensen and Kjetil Sandvik
Piers Vitebsky
Living with the Dead: Ancestors, Landscape and Agency
Mikkel Bille
Jesper stergaard
Lotte Meinert and Susan Reynolds Whyte
Rune Nyord
Self-death: Corporeality and Willed Death
Kristian Bjrkdahl and Karen Lykke Syse
Henrik Hvenegaard Mikkelsen
Murray Last
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Mikkel Bille holds a PhD in anthropology from University College London (2009). His doctoral work was on material culture among the Bedouin in Jordan. He is currently working on sustainable lighting technologies relating to cultural notions of atmosphere in both Jordan and Denmark. He has edited An Anthropology of Absence (2010) with Tim Flohr Srensen and Frida Hastrup.
Kristian Bjrkdahl is Research Fellow at the University of Oslo, Norway, where he is writing a dissertation on neopragmatism and humananimal relations. He is a researcher at the Centre for Development and the Environment (SUM) at the same institution. His background is in interdisciplinary cultural studies, and his main research interest is Richard Rortys pragmatism, book history and reception studies, and the rhetoric of the animal and environmental movements.
Dorthe Refslund Christensen, MA, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Department of Aesthetics and Communication at Aarhus University, Denmark. Her research interests include the ritualization and mythologization of transformation in performative identity strategies and everyday life practices, as well as off- and online community building.
Michael Hviid Jacobsen is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Masters Programme in Humanistic Palliative Care at Aalborg University, Denmark. He has written and edited many books within the sociology of death and dying, most recently Deconstructing Death (2012). Besides this he works on sociological theory and is inspired particularly by the work of Zygmunt Bauman and Erving Goffman. He is also a founder and member of the board of directors of the Nordic Network of Thanatology.
Michael C. Kearl is Professor of Sociology at Trinity University, USA, where he has taught for 35 years. Author of Endings: A Sociology of Death & Dying (Oxford University Press, 1989), he has published extensively on such subjects as the political uses of the dead in civil religion, the centrality of abortion and euthanasia in Americas culture wars, the increasing roles of the dead in popular culture, growing old in death-denying cultures, and American immortalism and its battles against extinction.
Murray Last is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology, University College London. In 1967 he published The Sokoto Caliphate, which has now been published also in Hausa as Daular Sakkwato. He is co-editor (with G.L. Chavunduka) of The Professionalisation of African Medicine (1986) and has published over a hundred articles on northern Nigeria.
Stuart McLean is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota. He has carried out fieldwork in Ireland and, more recently, the Orkney Islands. His research interests include historical and philosophical anthropology, the relationship between the living and the dead and exploring possibilities of creative collaboration between anthropology, art and literature. His publications include The Event and its Terrors: Ireland, Famine, Modernity (2004).
Lotte Meinert is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Culture and Society at Aarhus University, Denmark. She leads a research project on recovery after war in Northern Uganda, as well as a Center for Cultural Epidemics (EPICENTER). She has carried out long-term fieldwork in Uganda since 1993 and is the author of Hopes in Friction: Schooling, Health and Everyday Life in Uganda (2009).
Henrik Hvenegaard Mikkelsen is a PhD student in anthropology at Aarhus University and Moesgaard Museum, Denmark, where he also completed his MA. His interests include personhood, violence and egalitarianism, which will be explored in his dissertation based on recent, extended fieldworks among the Bugkalot of the Philippines. His research concerns the relation between cosmology and masculinity and how cosmology is inscribed in the male body, along with the social and surrounding territorial world.
Rune Nyord was trained as an Egyptologist at the University of Copenhagen and since 2010 he has held the Lady Wallis Budge Fellowship at Christs College, Cambridge. His research focuses on ancient Egyptian language and religion. He is the author of
