As he challenges classical semiological accounts of cultural representation in this ethnography of Melanesian religious phenomenology, Thomas Maschio shows that ritual and poetic performance are about the enactment, expression, and invention of the self. Maschio demonstrates how such emotions as nostalgia, anger, sadness, and grief are creatively transformed during the course of religious performance and expression into a form of cultural memory--one that juxtaposes a pattern of cultural meaning with the emotional feeling of plenitude the Melanesian Rauto call makai. Evoked during initiation, mourning, and agricultural rites, and figuring prominently in Rauto discourse about the self, makai joins personal memory to patterned sets of images and meanings that Westerners would call culture.

Is death merely the cessation of life? Are our final years simply a wearing out of the body? Are hospitals and funeral homes--the bureaucratic machinery of death--capable of handling the profound spiritual dimension of dying? In The Last Passage, Donald Heinz offers wise answers to these questions in a book that urges us to "recover a death of our own" and to view our final years as a fulfillment, a "last career." Despite the recent spate of books on death and dying, death remains a fact our culture tries desperately to ignore. In other times and in other cultures, preparing for death was seen as an important spiritual task--perhaps the most important task of our lives. Heinz argues that we can reconceive of death, reinvest it with meaning, and save it from becoming a meaningless biological event. Seeking appropriate models for such a reconstruction, Heinz offers a fascinating overview of the many ways death has been envisioned and ritualized throughout human history, from the Tibetan Book of the Dead to 15th century Christian ars moriendi--manuals on the art of dying--and from Jean Paul Sartre to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. He also surveys the more recent contributions of psychologists, anthropologists, cultural critics, and death awareness advocates, whose efforts have largely failed to integrate death into a larger human story and the larger human community. Finally, Heinz shows us how we might create rituals through the use of music, visual arts, dance, drama, and language that would enable us to approach death with reverence, as the spiritual consummation of our lives.

This collection explores the role of memoria histórica in its broadest sense, bringing together studies of narrative, theatre, visual expressions, film, television, and radio that provide a comprehensive overview of contemporary cultural production in Spain in this regard. Employing a wide range of critical approaches to works that examine, comment on, and recreate events and epochs from the civil war to the present, the essays gathered here bring together research and intercultural memory to investigate half a century of cultural production, ranging from “high culture” to more popular productions, such as television series and graphic novels. A testament to the conflation of multiple silencings – be they of the defeated, victims of trauma or women – this project is about hearing the voices of the unheard and recovering their muted past.

Tangible remains play an important role in our relationships with the dead; they are pivotal to how we remember, mourn and grieve. The chapters in this volume analyse a diverse range of objects and their role in the processes of grief and mourning, with contributions by scholars in anthropology, history, fashion, thanatology, religious studies, archaeology, classics, sociology, and political science. The book brings together consideration of emotions, memory and material agency to inform a deeper understanding of the specific roles played by objects in funerary contexts across historical and contemporary societies.

From the collections of the British Library and other major archives in Britain and America, this includes work from leading spirit photographers from the 1870s to 1930s.

Death at Arbours tells the story of Emily Clayton who spent her childhood in an orphanage in London where for undisclosed reasons, she was never adopted. When Emily's marriage takes her to the United States, she remains there when her young husband dies mysteriously. After years of indecision, she finally returns to England to seek her parentage. Her search leads to a wealthy but reclusive London family who invites her to their country estate, Arbours, where she finds the answers to her quest but nearly loses her life.

A story of a victor - not a victim. A saga of survival interwoven with love, betrayal, catastrophe, grief, rebellion, armed resistance, persecution, chase, self sacrifice, precognition, miracles, discovery, sex and wisdom. It sheds new light on the Holocaust by answering hard questions seldom asked.