Rest in Plastic

Death, Time and Synthetic Materials in a Ghanaian Ewe Community

Isabel Bredenbröker (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

322 Seiten

2024
Berghahn Books (Verlag)
9781805395034 (ISBN)

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In Peki, an Ewe town in the Ghanaian Volta Region, death is a matter of public concern. By means of funeral banners printed with synthetic ink on PVC, public lyings in state, cemented graves and wreaths made from plastic, death occupies a prominent place in the world of the living. Rest in Plastic gives an insight into local entanglements of death, synthetic materials and power in Ewe community. It shows how different materials and things that come to shape power relations, exist in a delicate balance between state and local governance, kin and outsiders, death and life, the invisible and the visible, movement and containment.

Isabel Bredenbröker is a Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft Walter Benjamin Postdoctoral Researcher, who works for the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage and the Herman von Helmholtz- Zentrum für Kulturtechnik at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

List of Illustrations

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Death, Time and Synthetic Materials

Part I: Place: Afterlives of Colonialism

Chapter 1. Death and Power: The Nation, Indigenous Concepts and Colonial Remnants

Chapter 2. Death in Peki: Sequences

Part II: Containment: Good Death (Ku)

Chapter 3. To the Cemetery! Navigating between Worlds in Cement and Plastic

Chapter 4. From Morgue to Family Compound: Overcoming Socio-Material Constraints

Part III: Transformations: Bad Death (Ametsiava) and Beyond

Chapter 5. Bad Death: Normalizing the Accident

Chapter 6. Playing Tricks on Death: Alternative Strategies

Conclusion: The Agency of the Dead, the Agency of Synthetic Materials

References

Index

Erscheinungsdatum	07.05.2024
Reihe/Serie	Material Mediations: People and Things in a World of Movement
Zusatzinfo	Bibliography; Index
Verlagsort	Oxford
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie ► Volkskunde
Themenwelt	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Mikrosoziologie
ISBN-13	9781805395034 / 9781805395034
Zustand	Neuware