The New Death

Death is the great universal, but the practices and discourses surrounding it are profoundly particular. As such, death is an ideal subject for anthropological inquiry. Over time, older questions persist as new topics and ways of approaching the study of death emerge with the potential to illuminate how individuals and groups understand fundamental notions of the body, personhood, kinship, temporality, and the spirit within contemporary contexts. This seminar will explore death through its relationships with race, technology, humor, violence, climate, and other attendant topics. By reading texts in the anthropology of death, Black Studies, and other fields, consulting various media, and engaging memorial sites, the course will consider the ethics and aesthetics of studying and writing about death, the politics of memorialization, and more. “The new death” is a theoretical and ethnographic provocation to interrogate how the contemporary inflections of death shape the questions and intensify the stakes of social life.