Zahra Newby - The Materiality of Mourning: Cross-disciplinary Perspectives

Tangible remains play an important role in our relationships with the dead; they are pivotal to how we remember, mourn and grieve. Historians of funerary monuments have often been reluctant to theorize about grief, preferring the cold certainties of social structure and elite self-representation to the messy world of lived experience. Yet without a consideration of how objects function in the context of human emotions, we are left with an incomplete analysis of the nature of grief and mourning. The Materiality of Mourning brings together three major themes of current research: emotion, memory studies, and the agency of material objects. The volume, co-edited by a classist and an anthropologist, brings together eleven original chapters by scholars in history, art history, thanatology, religious studies, archaeology, sociology, and political science. It presents analysis of a diverse and compelling range of objects, from the blood-stained uniforms of World War One soldiers to bone fragments recovered from exhumed graves in crowded Singapore, from an ivory doll found beside the mummy of a child in a Roman tomb to the disarticulated remains of bodies recovered from the World Trade Center Towers following 9/11. Cumulatively, the chapters form an innovative and provocative volume that will not only appeal to scholars of material culture, and of the emotions, but to anyone concerned with the wider questions of how societies can better deal with dying, death and grief.