The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Death

A novel look at death and dying, this Handbook tackles ritual change, catastrophic loss, and 21st-century living with the dead.

Bringing together scholars from a range of perspectives, this Handbook provides a fresh look at the anthropology of death. We ask how rituals change and deathcare happens, whose death counts, how societies make sense of and live with death, and why death matters beyond concerns of just human life.Shaped by important shifts in the field and a global pandemic, this Handbook provides a fresh look at the anthropology of death. It is split into five parts, with chapters examining how deathcare happens and the kinds of relationships that arise between the living, the dying, and the dead; how rituals change and also endure; and how societies make sense of and live with death – both everyday and catastrophic. It draws on theories of social death and necropolitics, as well as death's materiality and more-than-human experiences of death and grief, inviting a broader understanding of the subject itself. With contributors from within and beyond the fields of anthropology and death studies, it bridges gaps in scholarly dialogues around life from death and death's afterlife of mourning and memory. The ethnographically grounded individual studies combine to underscore why death matters in new and urgent ways beyond concerns of just human life.