Series Editors’ Preface

Summary

About the series

Studying death can tell us an incredible amount about life. More specifically, it can illuminate a seemingly endless evolving relationship between humans and mortality. From sense-making and rituals around dying to how deceased persons are disposed of and even interwoven within human/nonhuman grief as ecologies shift, studying deaths not only deepens our understandings about loss and endings, but also of societies and culture. By attending to these matters, this book series seeks to shine a light on the cultural and social dimensions of death, exploring the wider contexts in which it is experienced, (re)presented and understood.

At a time when recognising the differences inherent in these broader sociocultural contexts has never been more important, the series adopts a broad use of the term ‘culture’ to enable us to bring together a rich multidisciplinary set of monographs and edited collections. We appreciate that the concept of culture has long been debated in several disciplines, most notably within anthropology, as well as contested in terms of how to optimally study ‘culture’. While this series will acknowledge this, we do not seek to replicate some of these wider theoretical and epistemological debates. Rather, we want to open out ‘culture’ to include anthropological, sociological, historical and philosophical perspectives as well as drawing on media and culture studies, art and literature. By adopting such an open position to what culture is and how it can be known, we welcome both the sharing of new empirical work within the series as well as theorising about how engagements with death (re)shape understandings of what culture is, how it operates and what the future of culture(s) may be.

As social scientists spanning anthropology, sociology, criminology and cultural studies, and supported by an international editorial board that includes experts in death, dying and the dead our default position when thinking about death is typically two-fold. First, that death and dying are inherently social; that is, they are not only about biological or material processes and endings. Second, by attending to and foregrounding ‘the social’ when it comes to death, issues of culture and cultural practices necessarily organically come to the fore.