George MacDonald’s best-known and most influential works are his two fantasy novels for adults: Phantastes and Lilith. They are also, arguably, his least typical works. It can be difficult for modern-day readers to comprehend these idiosyncratic texts through the distorting glass of the twentieth century, particularly the development of psychoanalysis and genre fantasy. This chapter, then, offers a door into these complex, fascinating texts by reading MacDonald’s fantasy novels on their own terms. It positions each novel within its biographical context, indicating how it relates to other works MacDonald was writing at the time, and re-examines the question of why he turned to this genre at the beginning and ending of his career. It then offers a comparative analysis of the two novels. What emerges is a glimpse into MacDonald’s profound effort to maintain hope and faith in face of his own mortality and devastating personal tragedy.

This chapter discusses how MacDonald’s view of childhood played a significant part in making his view of life and death. MacDonald often writes in his works and in letters to his family that we do not lament the death of anyone whom we love, because death is an entrance to ‘more life’. This view can be attributed to MacDonald’s deep devotion to his Christian faith and his affinity for the German Romantics, but the process of his arriving at this firm belief could also be related to the intimate relationship with his family that he developed in childhood. Drawing from this biographical context, the chapter details two views of children in his works: children whose purity brings them inherently closer to God and children whose innocence manifests as stubbornness and ignorance, but who can mature with the help of others. It particularly considers Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood (1871) and The Princess and Curdie (1883) to show how remembering childhood or inventing happy memories of childhood through storytelling helps the protagonists endure hard times and heal from spiritual disease.

Taking up the framework established by recent scholarship that Beethoven was not only a solitary hero but also an empathetic and communicative composer, this paper argues that Beethoven’s composing was, among other things, significantly embedded in the multifaceted culture of friendship of the late Enlightenment.

In his Elegischer Gesang, Op. 118 of 1814, dedicated to his friend Johann Freyherr von Pasqualati, Beethoven used an elevated text rich in associations and tailored the piece specifically to the dedicatee in setting a public memorial to his deceased wife. This piece, like the piano sonata op. 90 of the same year for his friend Moritz Lichnowsky, expresses not only private friendship (as we understand it today) but rather a broader idea of friendship encompassing both “friendship of virtue” and “friendship of utility” as described by Aristotle, which was prevalent in the eighteenth century.

When the Elegischer Gesang was finally published in August 1827, it took on a new meaning: It was taken (because of to its high opus number and its posthumous publication) as Beethoven’s swan song in the expectation of his own death.

This chapterexamines whether and how sudden and unexpected shocks at the micro level, meso level, and macro level trigger disenchantment by depriving ex-immigrants of feeling sufficiently ontologically grounded, secure, and stable in their pursuit of mobility within host societies. Micro-level shocks like relationship break-ups or a friend or family member suddenly becoming seriously ill or dying and often do lead to immigrants giving up. Macro-shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic induced so much suffering across the entire population and therefore substantially reduces an immigrants’ networks of social support from anyone who could help them cope with a loss of ontological security. A meso-level shock designed to drive away migrants – the spike of violent physical and verbal hate crimes against immigrants of East Asian origin in Western societies since 2020 that demanded that they go back to their country of origin – paradoxically led them to acculturate into a migrant-destination society more rapidly and therefore did not lead to disenchantment with immigration.

The Afterword briefly illustrates the significance of Thomas’s views on meaning, suffering and death by considering recent arguments (and their underlying assumptions) in the debate around assisted dying (euthanasia) in the United Kingdom.

Situates wetnursing within a wider spectrum of gendered exploitation within which enforced wetnursing sits at one end and informal networks of support where women share breastmilk lie at the other. Women in the antebellum South practiced forms of wetnursing at both ends of this spectrum, although the exploitative angle dominated, as to be expected under a system of slavery. While enslavers commonly regarded wetnurses through the prism of the “Mammy” trope, antislavery activists also utilized the practice, sometimes as a means of sentimentalizing motherhood, while those formerly enslaved recalled the callousness of enslavers in forcing women to breastfeed infants not their own, sometimes at the expense of their own. Explores the multiple reasons for people’s deployment of a wetnurse, including convenience for enslavers, sickness and ill-health (including perceptions of low milk supplies), and the death of a mother. Considers informal modes of milk-sharing by the enslaved (often hard to investigate within written archives), the hiring of wetnurses and, finally, the reasons why white women breastfed children not biologically their own, including sometimes enslaved babies.

In 2021, the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil, there was an exponential increase in the number of deaths in the country. These deaths can be explained, among other factors, by the easing of restrictions on social isolation and the delay in purchasing vaccines. In that context, family members and friends had to deal with abbreviated funeral rituals experienced in a context of necropolitics. In this chapter, based on the analysis of the death of Vítor, a forty-six-year-old Pentecostal pastor, we see how new protocols aimed at containing the spread of the virus affected the traditional rites, shortening their sequences and phases – thus reducing community participation to a minimum – and, in turn, how they drove the creation of new possible rituals. If, on the one hand, the new possible rites point to a process of creating funerals that combines in-person tributes and the use of new technologies, on the other, they highlight the consequences of mourning experienced in a context of political tension mainly due to the actions of a conservative and denialist government.

This chapter explores time, death, and memory, analyzing material cultures of death in relation to deceased bodies, their material and visual representation, in historical contexts. It discusses anthropological perspectives on memory and time as articulated through material object domains, examining related issues of: temporal stasis (e.g., memorial effigies); process (e.g., transi tombs); temporal dimensions of memento mori; the interplay of preservation and decomposition in memory objects; aspects of fragmentation and display; and the imagery of darkness, light, and instruments used in the measurement of time. Each of these – significant in Western material cultures of death and memory – is examined in terms of how it materializes or visualizes bodies in transformation. Even when deceased bodies are represented as static, they tend to be animated through their relation to death, figured or evoked as moving presence. Bodies after death exist in time, perhaps most forcefully represented as decaying, disintegrating, or disappearing. Tracing aspects of death’s temporalities, as conveyed in memory objects and images, this chapter shows how varied and changing effects of time are registered by bodies rendered in paper, ivory, wood, wax, and other materials for memorial purposes and as means to reflect on acts of remembering.

This chapter draws from research the author has undertaken into the politically charged circumstances of life and death in situations of state violence in France in the late 1950s and early 1960s, during the Algerian war of independence. It reflects on the author’s engagements with the morgue record book of the Institut médico-légal (IML) in Paris for the year 1961, which is stored in the archives of the Prefecture of the Paris police. This ledger includes entries on corpses received at the morgue. Through the fall of 1961, there were a number of entries for corpses received at the IML in which no identifying name was listed. Instead, persons were listed with the title “inconnu” – “unknown,” “unidentified,” unrecognized.” With many of these entries, small photographs were affixed to the sides of the pages. In reflecting on the presence of these photographs of the unidentified dead, the author delves into the complicated play of death and life, and actuality and imagining, that marks the unsettling appearance of these photographs. The haunting aftereffects of the photographs tie into questions of image, memory, body and corpse, the phenomenon of death life, and representations of violence in histories of French colonialism.

This concluding chapter considers how we as editors approach the anthropology of death from varied positions and histories of engagement. We reflect on how individually we have studied – and, in Ruth Toulson’s case, practiced – alongside deathcare workers, from morticians and funeral home directors to pathologists and forensic scientists; how we have examined traces of death and dying through archives and testimonial evidence; and how we have learned of the rites of the dead from surviving families and mourners, the needs of the living, and the social worlds that bind the two together. Our aim is not to wrap up the preceding chapters with any neat bow, but to reflect on what this field has meant to us individually as scholars and as people who have experienced the death of loved ones and thought deeply about the meaning of those losses. Finally, we reinforce one of the volume’s key arguments – that the anthropological study of death is one of studying processes and contexts of being with the dead. Taken together, this Handbook’s compilation of chapters underscore why death matters in new and urgent ways beyond concerns of just human life.

This work examines how organized crime is emergent from the material conditions of life and death. Focusing on Brazil, I develop the idea of “muted martyrdom” to show how longstanding and banal efforts to maintain highly unequal conditions of life and death, both actively through violent policing and passively through the non-provision of life-giving infrastructures, are productive of novel techniques of “life insurance” for populations that, under the global and social relations of capitalism, must not be subject to techniques of life-saving. By returning to the political economy of life and death, which is to say how both life and death are commodified in and via social relations, I push toward a broader understanding of insurable and un-insurable life, which matters because it tells us that death and its material conditions are a powerful force and epistemological means for reading capitalism’s harms and the contestation it instills.

War has a complex relationship to creativity and the arts. War is a mythic and hallowed subject of art, where it is often depicted in sacred terms as the testing ground of foundational leaders and the cauldron from which societies emerge. Yet based as it is in killing and destruction, war damages both society and creative faculties. War ends lives, destroys cultural treasures, disrupts artistic careers, and wreaks havoc on social networks through which artists develop and share work. War’s violence inflicts physical and psychological disabilities that limit creative expression. Those negative impacts can, paradoxically, spur creativity: war experience pushes artists to invent new forms of expression and has led to whole artistic movements (such as Surrealism). War also leads to creative interventions in fields like medicine, technology, and communication. War also changes how societies conceptualize creativity itself. “Creativity” emerged as a social scientific concept during World War II and became an important area of Cold War investigation, one cultivated to impart competitive edge. Creativity research will continue to deepen our understanding of how humans make and survive war.