How is death different from life? Or, what precisely is the relationship between life and death, categories generally defined in terms of each other? In anthropology, two strands of scholarship have unsettled any presuppositions that life and death are opposite and wholly separate domains: on the one hand, cosmological and ontological frames of regeneration and continuity and, on the other, political and political economic analytics of exclusion and exploitation. These strands likewise have generally been engaged as wholly separate discourses. In this part, our authors address construing and producing life from death in both ontological and political economic registers. In doing so, they provide a critical bridge between the reflections on dying, deathcare, and the material of the corpse found in the preceding two parts and the more explicit framing of necropolitics that ties together Part IV as well as Part V’s look beyond death.

Chapter 8 applies the theory of globalized state-led development to China. Chinese reformers, a group of policy-makers that led the transition from a planned to a market economy, have much in common with developmentalists elsewhere in terms of their embrace of the developmental canon and the use of state financial institutions to achieve their policy goals. As part of a wider process of policy learning and experimentation, reformers began to support the outward investments of national firms in 1979. Policy debates ensued regarding the merits of this policy leading to its uneven adoption. Once the policy debate was resolved, the state launched its Go Global policy in 2000 and leveraged state financial institutions to shape the foreign investments of Chinese firms to meet the goal of indigenous innovation. The chapter details how the resulting Chinese globalized state-led development model is distinctive in its form and scale.

This chapter examines the evolution of African-American short fiction in the 1940s, focusing on Ralph Ellison’s contributions. It traces the genre’s development from early twentieth-century foundations through the Harlem Renaissance to a flourishing in the 1940s. Ellison’s stories, including “Flying Home” and “King of the Bingo Game,” exemplify the decade’s shift toward more experimental, psychologically complex narratives that blend African-American folklore with modernist techniques. The chapter argues that this period was pivotal in African-American literature, as writers like Ellison combined vernacular traditions with high modernist styles to address themes of identity, alienation, and the American experience. This synthesis laid the groundwork for major novels of the 1950s and beyond, marking the 1940s as a transformative decade that propelled African-American literature into a new era of artistic achievement.

The long eighteenth century saw two opposed tendencies in Christian expression in the English-speaking world. On the one hand was the religion of the Enlightenment, which emphasised reason and tolerance, while on the other hand were those sometimes called ‘enthusiasts’, who valued emotion in their relation to the deity. In this chapter texts by major religious writers of the period – Joseph Butler, John Wesley, and George Whitefield – are examined, with a view to determining how their distinctive lexical choices aligned with their theology. All three were at one time members of the Church of England, but their thinking diverged markedly as the century progressed; Wesley and Whitefield are now recognised as leaders in the emergence of Methodism, although they too came to differ about basic matters of belief. The chapter ends with an examination of the ‘language of feeling’ in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, showing how ‘exemplary fiction’ was impacted by the contemporary religious lexicon.

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 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.

Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, nursing homes were underfunded, under-regulated, and wildly at risk of a mass viral event. For decades industry watchers had called for oversight, but media accounts regarding home closures were misleading and poorly sourced. Increased private equity interest and legislative inaction heightened risks across the sector. COVID-19 was a perfect storm, preying on these systemic challenges and decimating robust, lively resident populations. More than 200,000 elder and disabled residents of nursing homes died of COVID-19 or related causes between March 2020 and March 2022. That number is grossly underestimated because nursing homes, which self-report their number of ill and deceased, feared bad reputations; many concealed deaths, mis-ascribed causes of death, or sent ill residents to nearby hospitals to avoid deaths on site. The conclusion of lawyers, staff, residents, and experts is that, while COVID-19 was a disaster waiting to happen, the mass deaths experienced in nursing homes could have been prevented. Since the initial years of COVID-19, some efforts by subsequent state and federal administrations have addressed inadequacies, but on the whole, little has been done to correct the many challenges the industry continues to face, even as the US elder population continues to rise.

Early 2016 served as a spectacular point of collapse for the Indian public university. I opened this book by setting the frame of this ‘collapse’ in an incident of student arrests. ‘Seditious’ slogans, allegedly raised by the arrested students, were sound-mixed within television studios and superimposed as a voice-over to the university's presumed war against ‘national interests’. There was a slow and steady build-up of forces towards this spectacle for more than two decades,1 but the effect of the spectacular is most compelling when it combines with the force of an exception. The exception in this case was Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) – one of the few havens of relatively free academic inquiry, surviving in stark contrast to vast expanses of intellectual barrenness and political conformism that passed for public university culture in the rest of the country.

It is true that the founding conception behind the establishment of JNU in 1969, and the breadth of legislative-administrative will that allowed it (Kidwai 2017; Batabyal 2020: 86-91) tried balancing the need for social mobility with the desire for social justice. To achieve a bureaucratic codification of this balance – at the heart of a university ‘idea’ which stratifies rights of access through proof of deserving – was not an easy task, and there is enough historical testimony to its long tortuous processes (Thorat 2020: 108–113). Some of such testimony will find its place later in this chapter, when I discuss whether this delicate balance may be given the name of ‘academic freedom’.

The Foxes of Harrow by Frank Yerby, as well as Knock on Any Door by Willard Motley, were widely read novels adapted into films in the 1940s. The tendency among some scholars to not fully acknowledge that The Foxes of Harrow and Knock on Any Door explore the negative consequences of discrimination upon African Americans may be because both novels focus on protagonists who are not Black characters. Through the depiction of relationships between white and Black characters, Yerby and Motley subversively highlight ironic historical inequitable treatment of African Americans within a democracy. Film versions of The Foxes of Harrow and Knock on Any Door feature less content about civil rights due to concerns that post–World War II attitudes about race would affect profits. This examination contends that Frank Yerby and Willard Motley in The Foxes of Harrow and Knock on Any Door strongly advocated for civil rights within African American literature.

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.

From the beginning of Manin’s conjecture, higher dimensional algebraic geometry plays important roles in its foundational aspects. This is already evident in early papers in this field, for example, [BT98b], [Tsc03], and it has been more systematically used in recent papers [HTT15], [LTT18], [HJ17], [LT17], [LT19a], [Sen21], [LST22], and [LT19b]. Indeed, the key inputs in the latter are the developments of higher dimensional algebraic geometry in the last decade, that is, the minimal model program [BCHM10] and the boundedness of singular Fano varieties (BAB conjecture) [Bir19] and [Bir21]. In this chapter, we review the necessary notions and results from higher dimensional algebraic geometry and the minimal model program.