Chapter 3 examines an absurd, tic-tac-toe-faced avatar created by Art Spiegelman, known as “OXO.” I argue that Spiegelman’s adoption of the “OXO” persona functions as a coded emblem of his process of coming to terms with traumatic loss. The figure of “OXO” and his tic-tac-toe-faced family first appeared in 1983, contemporaneously with Spiegelman’s work on Maus.  Conjugating comics with tic-tac-toe yields a new understanding of the comics grid itself as an alternating game of reading and looking: a game that undisciplines the grid and makes it playful. Moreover, perceived as a face, tic-tac-toe embodies the complexities of inherited identity, or an identity dictated by the play of external forces. OXO’s symbolic richness helps Spiegelman revisit his 1972 “Prisoner on the Hell Planet: A Case History,” the first comic he produced on his long road to Maus. This chapter presents an extended case study of a one-page “OXO” comic, “Lost,” in which the cartoonist reenters and reimagines both recent and distant memories of loss, in an ongoing and necessarily incomplete effort to master them.

The figure of a spiral line leaps into Art Spiegelman’s Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! (2008). I propose Spiegelman’s spiral as an emblem for the comics form, which underlines its plastic “being” or ontology as continuous transformation and co-mixing. I then move to situate Spiegelman’s comics form in relation to larger, longer histories of modernist aesthetics. Reading the resonances of Spiegelman’s spiral backward through twentieth-century literature and the visual arts suggests his pages as cells of modernist formal experiment after modernism. Finally, I switch back to (re)examine Spiegelman’s spiral as a ploy for his Mom’s attention, not MoMA’s. The form of Spiegelman’s spiral may be an abstract line, but it cannot be purified of the context of its autobiographical origins in a scene of mother–child play. Here the spiral’s dynamic form morphs to embody the continual oscillation in Spiegelman’s work between filiation and affiliation. In this dialectical spiral of filiation–affiliation–filiation, Spiegelman’s work recalls Edward Said’s account of modernism, which offers us new grounds for situating the cartoonist in a modernist lineage.

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.

Our final part of the volume addresses what we have loosely framed as reflections on an anthropology of death “beyond death.” It opens with Aja M. Lans’s powerful critique of the ways in which the material afterlife of death in the form of human skeletal collections has historically worked to erased life – specifically Black lives and the biographies of living people whose remains have become objects of display or tools of bioarchaeological pedagogy. In exploring her own encounters with the violence inherent in producing and maintaining those collections, she invites us to consider the “corporeality of the body and its exploitation both during life and after death.” Her chapter sets the scene for the chapters to follow, each in its own way wrestling with questions that extend from the phenomenon and experiences of death. The framing of “beyond death” that binds these particular chapters urges reflection not only on death’s afterlife of mourning and memory but also some of the radical innovations and ruptures introduced by the pandemic that have both methodological and theoretical consequences for the field going forward.

Starting in the late 1820s, African American poets began to write in concert with the abolition movement, and their work began to appear in anti-slavery periodicals. In these efforts, they translated the aesthetic theories of European Romanticism, and imagined Black consciousness beyond the confines of slavery and racism. Especially in the two decades before the Civil War, poets such as George Moses Horton, Ann Plato, Joseph Cephas Holly, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper undertook a wildly various range of formal experiments in the service of ending slavery and reconstructing Black cultural life. This chapter undertakes a survey of a number of the antebellum period’s Black poets, with the idea of thinking through the prophetic scope of their claims on history. It argues that in taking this posture, the Black Romantic poets anticipated more recent claims about the long-durational character of the Black radical tradition.

This chapter provides a survey of iconographic themes found in the pottery, figurines, fibulas, terracotta, metalwork, jewelry, and seals produced across Greek-speaking communities. Rejecting a traditional assumption of close ties with the Homeric epics, the study combines two approaches to offer a more socially embedded understanding of image-making in early Greece. Examining the iconography within multiple contexts, from the types of objects on which imagery appears to their archaeological contexts and the material behavior associated with their use, reveals that not just politics but also social reproduction lay behind artistic development. Second, it demonstrates how expanding the discussion to the larger world of representations adds further dimensions to the ways in which the Greeks projected an imagined ideal society. Themes discussed include mourning, warriors and weapons, battle, hunting, horse culture, dance, abduction, divinities and religious iconography, animals, hybrid monsters, and mythic narrative. The developments of Geometric art can be understood as responses to the new complexities of social hierarchy and gender, access to the wider world, the growing integration of religious institutions into community life, and political alliances that constituted the experience of the city-state.

An examination of Meredith Monk’s 1976 opera Quarry in the context of her other works of music theater and film, as well as selected music compositions from the full span of her career. The analysis reads the opera alongside scholarship on the "post-memory" generation (characterized by its distance from the Holocaust), as well as on photography, monuments and "counter-monuments," and other memorial art.

This shorter chapter focuses on one groundbreaking bio-psycho-social network meta-study related to historical trauma in the virtual absence of social science studies. It centers on studies on health and associated health disparities in diaspora populations with migrants from India and Pakistan of the second and third generations. Topics are suicide rates of South Asian women, somatoform symptoms and disorders, and physical health conditions like cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. In addition, an anthology is included on psychiatric, historical, and literary science case studies in which one chapter analyzes the metaphorical use of ‘madness’ as a description of the historical events. It presents small-scale studies from microeconomics on the impact of education, the autoethnography of cultural mourning, and a psychological experiment that examines social identity theory in relation to mutual rejection between Hindus and Muslims. As potential remedies, various forms of commemoration are examined, as they have evolved in India and in the diaspora over the last decade.

This chapter discusses how individuals approach the end of life within their particular social worlds. Focusing on the subjective processes of traversing transitions between life, death, and an afterlife, psychological anthropology analyzes how such transitions are simultaneously singular and shared, embodied and historical. The chapter highlights five themes. It shows how the end of life is a period in which personhood may be particularly unstable, giving rise to ethical demand to make, remake or unmake personhood. The chapter shows how narrative approaches shed light on the temporalization of living in the face of finitude. The chapter discusses how person-centered approaches reveal that the singularity of loss often exceeds moral and social attempts to contain grief. It discusses political subjectivity in psychological anthropology that highlights how historical inequality and violence settle in embodied disorders, hauntings, and abandonment. Discussing questions of empathy and emotion, the chapter concludes by drawing attention to the potential of ethnographic studies of dying and afterlives to theorize the limits and possibilities of understanding others.

Joyce wrote as a kind of archaeologist: Ulysses, Henri Lefebvre wrote, marked ‘the momentous eruption of everyday life into literature’, in which Joyce’s sprawling prose ‘rescues, one after the other, each facet of the quotidian from anonymity’. Famously, Joyce even risked censorship in order to drag into view details about the career of the human body that other novelists had ignored. This chapter analyzes Joyce’s engagement with the everyday by focusing on scenes of mourning, when the everyday suddenly becomes at once visible and painfully fragile. These moments – funerals, wakes, and death rites – constitute a steady yet largely unexamined through-line running from Joyce’s first story to his last novel. Death itself is at once the most common and the most shocking of experiences, an event that rends the fabric of our everyday life as we try to readjust our habits around an often abrupt and painful absence. Seen this way, Joyce’s works become not only archaeological digs into the ever-vanishing everyday but also documents of human and cultural resilience amid the fury of modernity.

Chapter 5 explores the effects of identity strategies. In this chapter, an intersectional approach illuminates the parameters of identity and affect that define the universal citizen. The chapter argues that when activists embody identity strategies in public events, activists politicize the terms of personhood and citizenship, giving rights a specific, embodied form. The chapter first examines Free Gender’s deployment of their strategy of commensurability during their participation in memorial services for deceased lesbians. It shows how memorial services are a moment when members of the organization can provide support to the deceased’s family, the local community, and each other. By embodying the confluence of the identities of lesbian, African, and community member during this community activity, the organization challenges dominant notions of who is entitled to the right to live free of violence. The chapter then examines La Fulana’s participation in the annual Pride march in Buenos Aires. The deployment of lesbian visibility challenges the gendered and heteronormative parameters of the ideal citizen through lesbians’ embodied enjoyment and pleasure in public activity. The chapter concludes by considering the importance of embodiment and emotional context to the successful deployment of identity strategies.

Returning to Part II of the book, this chapter revisits the underlying metapsychology of victimhood. Exploring Freud’s account of mourning and melancholia, it considers the psychological need to mourn and the danger of melancholia. Mourning involves absorbing the loss of a loved identification and the need thereafter to return to an evolved sense of wholeness. This links it metapsychologically to guilt and the need to be at one again after violation. Melancholia is a way of internalising an external trauma and judging from it that one lacks worth. The case study is Patricio Guzmán’s film Nostalgia for the Light (2010) on the aftermath of Chile’s dictatorship (1973–90). The film focuses on women who search the Atacama Desert for remains of murdered family members or reflect on the loss of ‘disappeared’ parents. In a film that is the director’s own act of mourning, the women insist on their right to mourn and reject the state’s melancholia-inducing implication that their loss does not matter. The film’s metaphysical and aesthetic beauty places it on the victims’ side. ‘Nostalgia’ in its title reflects loving memory of the past as a means of anchoring engagement in the present rather than escaping it.

In 235 years, only about two dozen women have experienced the role of “mourner in chief” as current or former first ladies grieving a presidential husband. This chapter examines the performances of six of these women in different historical contexts and under very different circumstances: Martha Washington, Mary Lincoln, Lucretia Garfield, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jacqueline Kennedy, and Nancy Reagan. This analysis considers first ladies’ performances of mourning during presidents’ illness or assassination; funerals and memorial services; and the expanse of time for which they survived their husbands. Through these case studies, the authors consider how a first lady’s mourning can shape her husband’s legacy, and what it can teach us about how Americans grieve.