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.

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.

The torpedoing of the troop transport SS Tuscania on February 5, 1918, was the U.S. Army’s first mass-casualty event of World War I. Along with dozens of British crew members, 215 American soldiers perished. The disaster sent shockwaves across the United States and led to a scandal in the War Department, as angry families demanded more accurate lists of the living and the dead. Several important reforms came in the wake of the tragedy, including the addition of serial numbers to U.S. Army identification discs (or “dog tags”) and new guidelines for the proper care of personnel rosters. While the military struggled to meet the public’s expectations, propagandists responded to the sinking energetically. “Remember the Tuscania!” instantly became a ubiquitous war cry on the American home front. At the same time, visual messaging linked the Tuscania’s fatalities to a new symbology of wartime death, one built around the motivational figure of the Spartan Mother and the icon of the Gold Star. Largely forgotten today, the sinking of the Tuscania offers a revealing case study in the evolving relationship between the U.S. government and the families from which citizen-soldiers are drawn.

Going beyond the philosophical horizon of the foregoing, the Epilogue attends to two defining absences at work in the Gospel of Mark, regularly regarded as the first of its genre: first, the centurion sees Jesus die and, on the basis of this death, avows that Jesus is God’s son, yet seemingly without empirical support; second, the best manuscripts end the text without narrating any resurrection appearances, a scandal to early readers and to some contemporary commentators. The theological development of aletheism argues that these two absences are Mark’s way of capturing the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy: “Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior.”

Chapter 4 turns to the danse macabre and the pathologization of motor disorders in two novels preoccupied with non-normative embodiment: Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Smollett’s Humphry Clinker. Eighteenth-century conduct manuals often defined proper “carriage,” “comportment,” “mien,” and “air” in opposition to unusual or awkward motion. Resisting the all-too-common assumption that eccentric bodies function primarily as comic relief, Landreth looks to essays by Hume and Erasmus Darwin together with modern theorizations of ableism and motion sickness to read Sterne’s and Smollett’s novels as experiments in crafting new forms of sensorimotor selfhood. Both novels dispute practices of self-observation championed by Lockean philosophy and the Richardsonian novel tradition and ultimately challenge the assumption that the expression of one’s interior selfhood is – or should be – the main aim of fiction.

A wealth of primary sources documents Vasari’s meticulous planning for his posthumous commemoration, his death, and his heirs’ execution of his final wishes. This final chapter explores Vasari’s death and the fate of his earthly remains, as well as the unique place his high altar for the Pieve occupies within the tradition of funerary monuments and chapels made by and for early modern Italian artists and architects. As the largest and principal altar of one of Arezzo’s most prestigious churches and the site of Vasari’s burial, it is nothing less than the most personal work of his long and prolific artistic career. Its alienation in the nineteenth century from the church for which it was made and nearly all of the other works with which Vasari intended it to be seen, however, has long obscured its significance.

Turning from the pulpit to the courtroom, Chapter 4 demonstrates the centrality of frenzy to what would later come to be termed the ‘insanity defence’. The English common law had its own framework for classifying mental illness, one which ran parallel to the medical nosologies explored in Chapter 1. This chapter explores the different categories of ‘madness’ recognizsed by early modern common lawyers – partial versus total, continual versus intermittent – and shows where frenzy fitted within this framework. It then turns to look at how these theories were mobilized in a specific legal context: coroners’ inquests into unexplained drownings. Where suicide was suspected, it argues, a story about frenzy – told right – offered an escape route for suspects and their families. Crucial, here, was the issue of culpability: frantic persons could not be held accountable for what they did while their wits were impaired. Without the capacity for consent, crime was impossible.

The book ends with a brief Postscript on not reading letters. It examines the correspondence between Keats’s friend and carer Joseph Severn and Keats’s friends back in London as the poet is dying in Rome in the winter of 1820–1. The correspondence records how, having effectively stopped writing poetry more than a year earlier, Keats is now no longer able to read, let alone write, even letters. The chapter argues that this epistolary stoppage has itself fed into the cultural reception of the life and work of a poet who has become admired, respected, and loved for his correspondence as much as for his poems.

Chapter 1 tracks frenzy’s trajectory as a medical diagnosis between 1500 and 1700. It offers an introduction to frenzy as it was understood by eight medical practitioners, four of whom came of age in a time of relative stability in English medicine (1560–1640) and four in a time of rapid change (1640–1700). It shows how, from the mid seventeenth century, the old humoral definition of frenzy was altered to fit new medical philosophies – chemical, mechanistic, and corpuscular – and new models of human physiology. Tracing the contours of the disease over two centuries, it highlights points of continuity as well as change. Throughout this period, it argues, theorists from diverse schools explained frenzy’s effects with reference both to the solid structures of the body and the fluids which flowed through them. This chapter argues that it was the devastating effects of brain disease which galvanized medical theorists to seek to explain disorders of the mind as disruptions of material ‘animal spirits’.

The last chapter brings the volume full circle as it looks into the ultimate confines of perception, across the limits of death. Contrasting with the Christian sacralization of the last breath, physiological research at the time revealed various stages in death, when vital organs fail one after the other, raising the troubling possibility of sensory remanence running through nervous fibres as the body gradually dies. These specters of sensations were invested by the Romantic imagination. This chapter investigates paradoxical imaginings of sensation after death in Keats’s Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil, Percy Shelley’s ‘The Sensitive-Plant’, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which registers the dawn of sensation in a creature composed of tissues taken from the charnel-house, learning to feel through dead flesh. Such sensory experiments offer imaginative answers to the paradoxical question: what do the dead see through closed eye, through empty orbits?