Prof's Choice

Rituals, transformations, emotions, and death.

PETER METCALF AND RICHARD HUNTINGTON, Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual (Cambridge University Press, 1991) This cross-cultural study of rituals surrounding death deals with a wide variety of examples from various continents and epochs and demonstrates that in understanding other people's death rituals we are also able to gain a better understanding of our own.

LORING M. DANFORTH, The Death Rituals ofRural Greece (Princeton University Press, 1982) This compelling text written by an anthropologist and dramatic photographic essay by Alexander Tsiaris convey the emotional power of the death rituals of a small Greek village the funeral, the singing of laments, the daily visits to the graves, and especially the rite of exhumation in which women play the central role.

ELLEN BADONE, The Appointed, Hour: Death, Worldview, and Social Change inBrittany (University of California Press,1989) This insightful work examines responses to death in a region of western Europe that has long been noted for its devotion to the dead and for the centrality of death in the local culture.

MYRA BLUEBOND LANGER, The Private World ofDying Children (Princeton University Press,1987) In a moving combination of literary and ethnographic writing, the author examines leukemic children, aged three to nine, in a hospital ward, and shows how the children come to know that they are dying, how and why they attempt to conceal this knowledge from their parents and the medical staff, and how these adults in turn try to conceal from the children their awareness of the child's impending death.

PETER METCALF, A BorneoJourney into Death: BerawanEschatology from Its Rituals (University of Pennsylvania Press,1982) Metcalf penetrates the surface features of the elaborate and complex funerary rituals of the Berawans to reveal their religious significance. He demonstrates how the rituals and social organization death serve as crucial points of entry into the cosmology of a non Western culture.

DAVID E. STANNARD, ThePuritan Way of Death: AStudy in Religion, Culture, andSocial Change (Oxford University Press,1977)'A comprehensive study of the seventeenth century Americans' beliefs and rituals surrounding death which are so different from our own.

SERGEI KAN, Symbolic Immortality: The Tlingit Potlatch ofthe Nineteenth Century (Smithsonian, 1989) This comprehensive treatment of the elaborate mortuary practices of the Tlingit Indians of southeastern Alaska examines their funerals, intermediary mortuary feasts, and complex final memorial potlatch rites as a total social phenomenon, with emotional religious, economic, and sociopolitical dimensions.