13 - Beyond the Norms

Summary

Relational death

No one, and nothing, dies alone. That is perhaps the most comprehensive theme that gathers all the chapters in this volume. We do not mean to deny the social and affective realities of loneliness or solitude that sometimes attend death. Instead, we wish to emphasize that each of the 12 chapters in this volume draw attention to the inevitable socio-ecological relationalities involved in dying, death and deathcare. Beyond the truism that death makes kindred of us all, the chapters collected here reveal complex interconnections among human and nonhuman creatures, environments, geographies, temporalities, narratives and scales of being. The relationalities explored in this volume are variously material, affective and discursive; they extend across differing scales of space and time, and across dependencies, disruptions, renewals, losses and absences. Still, death's complex relationality does not lack structure. Indeed, though death may sometimes appear to be the dissolution or disorganization of life's resoluteness and orderliness, what the chapters contained in this volume reveal is that dying and death, too, harbour orderly relationalities of being and becoming, knowing and making, in which various networks of actors collaborate, contend and toil towards states and activities that confound received norms regarding dying, death, living and life.

Haraway's compost heap – the ‘wormy pile’ in which possibility is madly made over (2016) – is not a venue for impotent chaos. It is a generative, mind-boggling, hope-ridden meaning maker. It may be said that the chapters in this volume form a generative compost heap as well, to the extent that they chip, shred and layer the different categories, norms, subjects and objects they cover. By breaking down these component parts, this volume's contributors form fertile grounds from which to think through and approach death and dying in new and unexpected ways. For instance, they highlight the relevance of disparate literatures that draw on scientific, materialist, environmental and ecological, and affective perspectives that challenge our thinking of death as a solely human affair. They compost the materiality of dying and dead bodies – whether they be humans, microbes, seas, legal documents, death banners, seals, television characters – with the cultural values, meanings and discourses that surround conceptions of them.