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Articulate Necrographies
Comparative Perspectives on the Voices and Silences of the Dead
Edited by Anastasios Panagiotopoulos and Diana Espírito Santo
Afterword by Magnus Course
272 pages, 1 illus., bibliog., index
ISBN 978-1-78920-304-2 $135.00/£99.00 / Hb / Published (July 2019)
ISBN 978-1-80539-745-8 $34.95/£27.95 / Pb / Not Yet Published (January 2025)
eISBN 978-1-80539-925-4 eBook
Reviews
“The chapters in this book are scholarly and sophisticated, their data and conceptual approaches clearly stated. What makes this an original and fascinating contribution to end of life studies is the common focus on “sustaining necrographies,” culturally specific narratives of the active overlap between the concerns of the living and the interests and experiences of their dead. This book is an impressive piece of scholarship, is clearly written, and offers an unexpected approach to the subject of death that is timely and fascinating.” • James W. Green, University of Washington
Description
Going beyond the frameworks of the anthropology of death, Articulate Necrographies offers a dramatic new way of studying the dead and their interactions with the living. Traditional anthropology has tended to dichotomize societies where death “speaks” from those where death is “silent” – the latter is deemed “scientific” and the former “religious” or “magical”. The collection introduces the concept of “necrography” to describe the way death and the dead create their own kinds of biographies in and among the living, and asks what kinds of articulations and silences this in turn produces in the lives of those affected.
Anastasios Panagiotopoulos is a senior post-doctoral researcher at Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia – Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal. His research includes the role of divination in Afro-Cuban religiosity, as this is related to issues of personhood, the historical imagination, race and secularism, among others.
Diana Espírito Santo is currently Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology at the Anthropology Program, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. She has worked on Afro-Cuban forms of spirit mediumship and Afro-Brazilian religions. Her recent publications include Developing the Dead: Mediumship and Selfhood in Cuban Espiritismo (University Press of Florida, 2015).