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75 books match the query 'Death & Dying' and 4 start with b

cover of Being Dead Otherwise

Being Dead Otherwise

Anne Allison

Duke University Press, 2023

With an aging population, declining marriage and childbirth rates, and a rise in single households, more Japanese are living and dying alone. Many dead are no longer buried in traditional ancestral graves where descendants would tend their spirits, and individuals are increasingly taking on mortuary preparation for themselves. In Being Dead Otherwise Anne Allison examines the emergence of new death practices in Japan as the old customs of mortuary care are coming undone. She outlines the proliferation of new industries, services, initiatives, and businesses that offer alternative means---ranging from automated graves, collective grave sites, and crematoria to one-stop mortuary complexes and robotic priests---for tending to the dead. These new burial and ritual practices provide alternatives to long-standing traditions of burial and commemoration of the dead. In charting this shifting ecology of death, Allison outlines the potential of these solutions to radically reorient sociality in Japan in ways that will impact how we think about the end of life, identity, tradition, and culture in Japan and beyond.
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cover of Big Brother and the Grim Reaper: Political Life After Death

Big Brother and the Grim Reaper

Political Life After Death

Benjamin Ginsberg

Michigan State University Press, 2024

States are thought only to exercise power over the land of the living. Benjamin Ginsberg argues otherwise, exploring the state’s reach into the realm of the Grim Reaper, bureaucratizing death to strengthen the state’s hold on life. He notes that increasingly institutions are using the regulation of death as an essential source of power. They do this by not only threatening death to their enemies but also securing loyalty and obedience by extending citizens’ lives and promising to effectuate the postmortem fulfillment of citizens’ antemortem desires. The state treats the loyal dead with respect, sometimes offering them a place in the secular afterlife of honor and memory, while consigning the faithless to the void.
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cover of Bittersweet Sounds of Passage: Balinese Gamelan Angklung Cremation Music

Bittersweet Sounds of Passage

Balinese Gamelan Angklung Cremation Music

Ellen Koskoff

University of Illinois Press, 2025

An important presence through centuries of musical and social change, gamelan angklung is a small, four-tone bronze-keyed ensemble that remains ubiquitous at cremations in Bali. Ellen Koskoff offers a compelling portrait of these little-studied orchestras and their members: rice farmers, eatery owners, and other locals who do not see themselves as musicians or what they play as music.

Koskoff examines the history, cultural significance, and musical structures of contemporary gamelan angklung cremation music through the lens of three intertwined stories: existing scholarship on this music, written mostly by Western composers and scholars; the views of those performing and experiencing the music who regard it as dharma--ritual obligation, a basic concept in Balinese Hinduism; and the music itself, with a musical analysis focusing on changes in rasa--feeling, flavor and musical flow.

A journey inside a tradition, Bittersweet Sounds of Passage reveals the overlooked music of an important ritual in Balinese village life.

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cover of Black Americans in Mourning: Reactions to the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln

Black Americans in Mourning

Reactions to the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln

Leonne M. Hudson

Southern Illinois University Press, 2025

Centering Black grief in the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination

On April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth carried out the first presidential assassination in United States history. The euphoria resulting from General Lee’s surrender evaporated at the news of Abraham Lincoln’s murder. The nation—excepting many white Southerners—found itself consumed with grief, and no group mourned Lincoln more deeply than people of color. African Americans did not speak with a monolithic voice on social or political issues, but even Lincoln’s Black contemporaries who may not have approved of him while he was alive mourned his death, understanding its implications for their future.

Beginning with the assassination itself and chronicling Lincoln’s three-week-long national funeral, historian Leonne M. Hudson captures the profound sadness of Black Americans as they mourned the crafter of the Emancipation Proclamation and the man they thought of as their earthly Moses, father, friend, and benefactor. Hudson continues the narrative by detailing the postwar efforts of African Americans to gain citizenship and voting rights.

Black Americans in Mourning includes the tributes of prominent figures such as Frederick Douglass, Martin R. Delany, and Elizabeth Keckley, who raised their voices to honor Lincoln, as well as formal expressions of grief by institutions and organizations such as the United States Colored Troops. In a triumph of research, Hudson also features the voices of lesser-known Black people who mourned Lincoln across the country, showing that the outpouring of individual and collective grief helped set the stage for his enduring glorification.

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