Funeral Culture

AIDS, Work, and Cultural Change in an African Kingdom

Casey Golomski (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

232 Seiten

2018
Indiana University Press (Verlag)
9780253036452 (ISBN)

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Contemporary forms of living and dying in Swaziland cannot be understood apart from the global HIV/AIDS pandemic, according to anthropologist Casey Golomski. In Africa's last absolute monarchy, the story of 15 years of global collaboration in treatment and intervention is also one of ordinary people facing the work of caring for the sick and dying and burying the dead. Golomski's ethnography shows how AIDS posed challenging questions about the value of life, culture, and materiality to drive new forms and practices for funerals. Many of these forms and practicesnewly catered funeral feasts, an expanded market for life insurance, and the kingdom's first crematoriumare now conspicuous across the landscape and culturally disruptive in a highly traditionalist setting. This powerful and original account details how these new matters of death, dying, and funerals have become entrenched in peoples' everyday lives and become part of a quest to create dignity in the wake of a devastating epidemic.

Casey Golomski is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Hampshire. His work has appeared in journals such as Material Religion; Social Dynamics; Culture, Health, and Sexuality; and American Ethnologist.

Acknowledgements

Note on Transliteration

Introduction Funeral Culture: Dignity, Work, and Cultural Change

Chapter 1 Reckoning Life: Dying from AIDS to Living with HIV

Chapter 2 Religious Healing and Resurrection: "Faith Without Work is Dead"

Chapter 3 The Secrets of Life Insurance: Savings, Care, and the Witch

Chapter 4 Grounded: Body Politics of Burial and Cremation

Chapter 5 Life in a Takeaway Box: Mobility and Purity in Funeral Feasts

Chapter 6 Commemoration and Cultural Change: Memento Radicalis

Conclusion The Afterlives of Work

Appendix

I. siSwati-American English Glossary

II. List of Abbreviations

References

Index

Erscheinungsdatum	19.08.2018
Zusatzinfo	17 b&w illus. - 17 Illustrations, black and white
Verlagsort	Bloomington, IN
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	318 g
Themenwelt	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie ► Volkskunde
Themenwelt	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Mikrosoziologie
ISBN-13	9780253036452 / 9780253036452
Zustand	Neuware