This chapter examines one of the most distinctive features of Bishop’s work: her frequent use of correctio. When using this rhetorical scheme, writers will correct, question, rephrase or offer alternatives to their words and phrases in the body of the text itself (rather than, say, in the process of redrafting). The first part of this chapter gives an account of: correctio’s history; its characterisation in early-modern and twentieth-century rhetorical manuals; its risks and rewards; and its indiscriminate approval by Bishop’s critics. The chapter then analyses its frequent use by three major influences on Bishop: George Herbert, William Wordsworth and Marianne Moore. The main part of this chapter then examines Bishop’s use of correctio in relation to visual art, nature writing, memory, the representation of consciousness, scepticism, and elegy.

This chapter examines a remarkable effort to memorialize ‘Alamgir in the decades after his death. This enterprise is noteworthy because it was unprecedented in Mughal history: no other emperor, not even ‘Alamgir’s much-admired great-grandfather Akbar (r. 1556–1605), was eulogized with the same intensity and for so many decades after his death. In its early stages this project was led by a small group of noble ‘Alamgir loyalists. In time, however, the effort extended to other parts of the rapidly disintegrating empire as well as, unexpectedly, to groups that had either been only nominally under Mughal rule or had actively opposed it. The end product was a trove of histories, administrative manuals, collections of orders and correspondence, and miniatures depicting ‘Alamgir. Although the participants’ motivations for eulogizing ‘Alamgir varied, the results point to a broad consensus about his greatness, among both Muslims and Hindus, across much of northern and central India that lasted until the late eighteenth century and the onset of British colonial rule.

Chapter 15 examines Brazil’s military dictatorship period (1964–85) through three key novels: Mariluce Moura’s 1982 Revolta das vísceras, Fernando Bonassi’s 2003 Prova contrária, and Bernardo Kucinski’s 2011 K.: relato de uma busca. It places these works alongside three important legal milestones that shaped Brazil’s reckoning with its past: the 1979 Amnesty Law, the 1995 Law of the Disappeared, and the 2012 creation of the National Truth Commission. More than just literary contributions, these novels engage deeply with the politics of memory prevalent when they were written. Together, they reveal both ongoing themes and sharp breaks in how Brazilian novels have responded to the dictatorship across five decades. A common thread is their focus on women involved with the revolutionary Left in the late 1960s and early 1970s, each grappling in her own way with the long-lasting trauma of political disappearances.

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 uses creative, narrative nonfiction writing to portray a deathbed conversation or confession of sorts between a dying person and their healthcare providers. While literary in style, it is based on seven years of the author’s immersive field research in post-Apartheid South Africa in long-term and frail care homes. After providing background on long-term care and the history of racial segregation in that country, the chapter depicts a scene where white and Black nursing staff provide palliative care for and converse with a dying white woman whose character is composed from life history interviews with multiple residents of the home. As a contribution to the anthropology of death, the chapter shows how humanistic and literary approaches can be used to represent voices of dying people, as well as the ways histories of racial violence and inequality can be highlighted in research on long-term and palliative care.

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 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.

This chapter explores the central role of nostalgia, youth, and memory across the works of William Burroughs, challenging his reputation as an anti-sentimental icon of literary transgression. Thom Robinson traces Burroughs’ shifting relationship with nostalgia – from early satirical treatments in The Yage Letters and Naked Lunch, through the melancholic repetitions of the cut-up era, to the queer adolescent utopias of his later novels. These texts, including The Wild Boys, Cities of the Red Night, and The Place of Dead Roads, draw heavily on Burroughs’ own youth, subvert the moral codes of institutions like the Boy Scouts of America, and reimagine coming-of-age as a site of resistance and sexual awakening. Through his admiration for Denton Welch and incorporation of children’s literature tropes, Burroughs ultimately transforms nostalgia from a regressive impulse into a creative, disruptive force – an affective mechanism through which the past might be rescripted in defiance of normative adulthood.

This article reflects on the state of war and society scholarship in the context of current global conflicts. It argues for bridging the gap between traditional military history and the war and society school to gain a deeper understanding of war's complexities. It uses examples from contemporary conflicts and historical analyses to explore themes such as comradeship, gender, memory, and culture, demonstrating their relevance in interpreting modern warfare. In emphasizing the importance of interdisciplinary approaches in examining war's multifaceted impact on societies and individuals, it calls for war and society scholars to engage more directly with contemporary issues, applying their insights to foster a more nuanced comprehension of the roots and implications of war.

Chapter 1 attends to the historical context of British bomb testing through an exploration of contrasting accounts of nuclear risk. It juxtaposes archival and official narratives of military risk management with test veterans’ own memories of hazardous events. This reveals the jarring mismatch that test veterans experienced when encountering official records detailing moments their younger selves experienced first-hand. I explore how radiation measurement technologies, material infrastructures, and a military culture of hierarchical trust negated the perception of risk, yet still left room for servicemen to experience doubt and fear. This chapter also places the harms to service personnel in the wider colonial context of racial hierarchies and the theft of lands, revealing how stories of Indigenous injury became uncertain undercurrents within test veterans’ own narratives.

Museums not only preserve memory but manufacture it. Today, there is a global process of constructing collective memories of twentieth-century wars and genocides. It can be considered global because of the geographic and temporal reach of the two world wars and their subsequent memorialization, because of a shared set of challenges in representing what cannot be shown in war violence, because the responses to those challenges have entailed the creation of networks of international experts (architects, academics, curators, etc.), who often use common tropes and stereotypes to produce museums and their exhibitions, and because of a worldwide circulation of visitors who, sometimes denounced as engaging in a type of “dark tourism,” discover intimate connections between their own lives, past and present, and the sufferings of others.

This introduction reflects on the conceptual benefits, challenges, and limits of putting into conversation military history and global history. It regards the two world wars as times of both disruption and heightened connectedness. Severed trade, breaches in diplomatic relations, enforced immobility, and economic sanctions were paired with new connections, contacts, networks, emulations, and reroutings. Four key perspectives define the volume’s approach. First, decentering the study of the world wars widens the geographic, chronological, and social scope of historians’ outlook, introducing a more diverse historical narrative. Second, focusing on the mobility of people, ideas, and goods, which the world wars both engendered and deepened, raises important questions about what was absorbed, adapted, and rejected as part of these circulations. Third, emphasizing encounters helps to show the impact of global warfare at the local level, highlights the transformation of individual and collective identities, and forces a reflection on the lives of those who remained untouched, at least apparently, by faraway events. Finally, this volume explores global languages: the shared systems of conceptualization and communication – including commemorative practices and international and humanitarian law – which developed on account of the world wars’ extreme violence.

The First World War has recently been reinvented in the West as the grand stage to play the anthem of “multiculturalism”: A colonial and violent past often gets sanitized and instrumentalized for a political agenda of social cohesion. This chapter uncovers this story through a focus on South Asia, which contributed 1.5 million soldiers to the war. In the process, it examines the color of war memory and practices of remembrance, the archive and the digital revolution, and diversity and recolonization, as well as the work of literary and artistic imagination in interrogating the colonial past.

This chapter focuses on the cultures of war victory in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and their successor states, a topic which illustrates global themes in the history and memory of war in the twentieth century and beyond. The First World War left a complex legacy of societal division, conflicting experiences, memories, continuities, and ruptures. This chapter shows how a complex legacy evolved in the twentieth century, and how it was reshaped by successive regimes and political orders to better fit shifting political interpretations of global history.

In Ngugi wa Thiong’os works, Agĩkũyũ cultural history is almost always perceived through its tensions and contestations with the British colonial enterprise. This is unsurprising because Ngugi is a product of these two cultures. In his early works, it is the powerful image of the mother that calls our attention to Ngugi’s rootedness in the Gĩkũyũ cultural foundation. Still, it is his mother, Wanjiku – herself a victim of dislocation that came with the chaos and violence of colonial occupation – who becomes the conduit to Ngugi’s new identity as a Western-educated colonial subject. Wanjiku is to Ngugi what Nyokabi, in Weep Not, Child, is to Njoroge: an adjuvant of assurance and hope during moments of crisis. One of these crises is a demand by modernity for Ngugi to shun the past in which his mother and all she represents reside. The past, however, resists complete erasure because its marginalisation enables the rise of a new and modern order. In wrestling with this crisis, Ngugi’s life of writing has been characterised by an unceasing search for a form that can create new cultural mythos. In this chapter, I argue that Ngugi’s unending search is now manifested in his new translation project.

This chapter analyses a set of rarely utilised recorded interviews produced by linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner with formerly enslaved people in the 1930s. This chapter argues that through using oral history and memory studies methods, recorded testimonies provide historians with unique opportunities to consider formerly enslaved people’s memories about, and feelings towards, slavery. In their interviews, the elderly African Americans evidenced the complex long-term emotional legacy of slavery: the lingering emotional impact of violence, the communal fear of slavery’s return, the anger about exploitative labour regimes and the pride they felt in their labour achievements. Despite this complex emotional legacy, the interviewees composed their memories with statements of survival and hope, utilising these emotions as scaffolds to create a coherent narrative of their life from slavery into freedom. In doing so, formerly enslaved people created their own emotional framework to understand and document slavery’s impact, counteracting white people’s continued attempts to present slavery as a benevolent institution and restrict African Americans’ emotional expressions.

Mongolia hovers on the edge of early English drama: While no playtexts survive from the Elizabethan period featuring their history, there are consistent allusion to the peoples of the Tatary tribes unified under Chinggis Khan in English theatrical documents from 1536 onward. This chapter takes as a key case one of the eight surviving backstage-plots of the period to consider the stage life of Chinggis Khan inaugurated by the lost “Tamar Cham” plays. The two plays proved highly successful in the Elizabethan era and continued to haunt the paratextual record of early English performance into the late eighteenth century. The chapter explicates the financial data of the “Tamar Cham” plays in a repertorial context invested in Mediterranean tyrants to situate two newly discovered medieval source documents that together suggest a particular nostalgia in a fantasy if global unity.