Classic Maya elites promoted cultural cohesion and coherence of their hieroglyphic writing system across a politically fragmented landscape through ritual participation and exchange of religious artifacts.

Liturgy, as the formal rite of Catholic devotion, underwrote every stage of the ideology, practice and history of crusading, the first large-scale lay religious movement and the greatest collective devotional endeavour of the Middle Ages. It was the chief means of sacralising warfare and thus making war holy. And it was also understood to be an essential aspect of fighting and a means of victory, and thus was one of the weapons of crusading strategy and warfare. As churchmen repeatedly explained, just as the Israelites won against the Amalekites only so long as Moses raised his hands in prayer (Exodus 17:9–13), so Christians must pray to God for forgiveness and aid if the crusaders were to gain victory in battle. In 1217, in organising liturgical services in support of the Fifth Crusade, Pope Honorius III explained that Christians must fight ‘visible enemies with invisible weapons, that is, prayers’ if they were to win. Liturgical prayer and supplication undergirded much of crusading, and between 1095 and c. 1500 liturgy became a central and ingrained feature of crusade culture in the Latin West.

Chapter 8 explores Homeric religion as lived practice rather than abstract theology. It examines fate and choice, divine agents and human responsibility, and the rituals that connected communities to the sacred. The chapter discusses sacred places, prayer and sacrifice, and the afterlife, showing how epic memory uses the gods to think through uncertainty, mortality, and the limits of control.

This chapter is a comparative long-term community study of Muslim Roma who migrated from North Macedonia to New York City starting in the 1960s and who now number several thousand people. Drawing on Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, it illustrates the multiple identities of varied community members via family, work, ritual and cultural productions. It especially examines music as a window into community expression; tellingly, song lyrics often deal with migration. Music is highly valued in all social occasions and as part of the ritual and economic web. Music is shared in a wide transatlantic social media network that forms the soundscape of Macedonian Romani family and community life. In fact, some musicians are the most mobile members of their communities. Ethnographic fieldwork from which this chapter has developed took place among Macedonian Roma in North Macedonia, the United States, Western Europe, Canada and Australia since 1988.

Chapter 4 analyzes the concept of the unnameable or ineffable in ritual and art. The ineffable refers to the difficulty of comprehending specific contexts of intense individual and collective experience that frequently arise during the ritual process. The ensuing totality or emptiness of meaning emerges as a challenge to account for that which eludes logical representation within the social order. The chapter also explores how the experience of the ineffable manifests in the realm of art and aesthetic experience, investigating how this problem has been addressed within continental philosophy, particularly within phenomenology and poststructuralism. Finally, the chapter analyzes poetry’s role as a privileged means of accounting for that which lacks a name and apparent meaning, and of presenting itself to consciousness’s immediacy. Through poetry, it becomes possible to preserve the transient process of the experience of the hidden and unnameable in its existential and anthropological dimensions.

The Introduction presents the book’s general argument. It describes the main objectives and central themes related to the conceptualization of not-knowing. It argues for an anthropology of that which remains nameless in anthropology, lost in the gaps between culture, structure, and process. Not-knowing refers to the difficulty of accounting for certain intense individual and collective experiences that often arise in ritual, spiritual, and religious contexts and, in many ways, defy any attempt at complete rationalization. It deals with situations in which meaning is broken, forcing anthropologists to think beyond reason. It describes how an otherness of a radical nature unfolds before the anthropologist’s gaze, both in its experiential dimension and ethnographic and argumentative construction, as well as the discipline´s blind spots. The Introduction also describes the book’s structure, the organization of each chapter, and its contribution to anthropology.

Looking broadly at the place of Scripture in the Byzantine Church, this chapter focuses on the place and symbolism of the Gospel reading in the Divine Liturgy. The reader is provided with an overview of the various manuscripts used in the liturgical rite and the Biblical readings deployed therein, as well as an outline of the rites in the Divine Liturgy that surround the recitation of the Gospel. Using as a case study the Christmas Day reading found in an illustrated lectionary, now at the Vatican Library (Vat. gr. 1156), the chapter walks the reader through the variety of evidence preserved in Byzantine Gospel lectionaries for understanding the performance of the liturgy, the chanting of the Gospel text and the artistic and scribal practices of the manuscript tradition. Through this chapter, readers will gain a better understanding of how the Gospel was recited in the Byzantine Church, while also acquiring a sense of the various primary and secondary sources for undertaking further research in this area of study.

In Singaporean Chinese funerals, small patches of fabric, pinned to the bereaved’s sleeves, have replaced elaborate mourning gowns. Anthropologists, examining the transformation of ritual in similar contexts – supposedly secularizing, rationalizing, post-industrial, late-capitalist worlds – have read such changes as evidence of the simplification of ritual and of ritual’s declining centrality in the marking of death. In this chapter, however, I argue that the shift from gowns to patches is more complex, inextricably linked to the policies of the Singaporean state regarding identity. Gowns were linked to the complexities of Chinese folk religion, a blend of Buddhism, Taoism, and ancestor worship that linked Singaporeans to their histories in Mainland China. The patch, however, articulates a unified Singaporean Chinese identity, described as “Buddhist bland.” Broadly, I address why, when rituals change, some elements are abandoned, seemingly without regret, while others are retained, becoming orthopraxy. While we might expect that the ritual elements that are retained are those that carry the most meaning, in this example, I suggest, the opposite is the case.

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 examines the Aliseda Hoard discovered in southwest Spain in 1920, where it has long and widely been valued as an icon of Orientalizing goldsmithing. The original context is undocumented, and the jewelry has variously been associated with an aristocratic female burial, a hoard or a sanctuary. Renewed research allows us to reinterpret the hoard as the ‘keimelion’ of the house or aristocratic lineage of Aliseda, where it was buried in a ritual area. This was a place for celebrating spring between the seventh/sixth and fifth centuries BCE and represents the sense of locality developed on the northern periphery of Tartessos.

In providing an overview of the state of the discipline, this chapter introduces the Handbook not as a comprehensive inventory of the anthropology of death but as a mesh of cross-cutting inquiries into the subject matter. We begin by sketching some of the field’s touchstones and how they’ve been reimagined and reengaged with in recent years. We set forth our vision as to how this compilation of scholarship adds to the discipline’s intellectual remit and how it wrestles with broader movements and preoccupations that extend beyond the object (death) itself. The diverse contexts of being with the dead explored throughout the chapters illustrate how living with the dead and dying among the living are processes nested within and in dynamic interplay with ethical, political, economic, ontological, and epistemological arenas. This analytical focus on being with the dead, we argue, foregrounds relationships and draws together scholarship often positioned outside the traditional ambit of the anthropology of death. Finally, we contextualize this editorial effort, reflecting on the exceptional conditions of death, namely a global pandemic, that shaped both the course of the collection and the subject of so many of its contributions.

This chapter examines the placing of COVID-19 grief through ethnographic vignettes from three distinct contexts: the prolonged search by one woman in Guayaquil, Ecuador, to find and bury her mother’s body; the ritualized micro-eulogies and use of public health data that characterized Kentucky’s state response to the pandemic; and the community efforts to create a national commemorative space in Washington, DC, for lives lost to COVID in the absence of state recognition. Drawing on philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of the ethical imperative to care for the deceased, we show how individual acts of mourning – what we call “micro-eulogies” – confront the silences and erasures surrounding COVID-19 death. These quotidian practices of naming, honoring, and remembering the dead emerge alongside and against narratives of revisionism and calls to “move on.” In attending to the specificity of these three places – geographic, sociopolitical, symbolic – and the movement of individual and collective grief between the private and the public, the chapter explores what it means for the experience of COVID-19 loss to be located. It argues that localizing pandemic grief is an act of refusal, one that demands a collective reckoning and response.

This chapter examines shifts in funeral rituals during the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on Zoom-mediated funerals as sites of negotiation between traditionalization and mediatization. Drawing on anthropological theories of ritual and discourse, the authors use a semiotic lens to analyze how mourners navigated the intersection of cultural expectations, technological affordances, and new media ecologies in the context of death. Drawing on the experiences of participants in US-based funerals conducted on Zoom in 2020, the chapter explores how participants used language and metacommunication to contextualize and reframe rituals in response to the absence of tactile, in-person mourning. Examples presented here illustrate how officiants and family members juxtaposed traditional religious and cultural expectations with the mediated nature of online ceremonies, transforming Zoom into a “sacred space,” even as they debated the technical difficulties of online rituals. Transcripts of recordings of Zoom-mediated funerals and interviews with participants show the process by which mourners forged a relationship between expectations for traditional funerals and an imagined imperative for mediatized responses to contemporary crises. The authors argue that rituals, far from being static or solely symbolic, are dynamic processes that respond to changing social and technological conditions and combine mediatization and traditionalization to co-construct meanings.

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.