DEATH AND CULTURE

Catalog description

This course will explore the invention and reinventions of death over time and space, the conceptualizations of death (friendly death, death as taboo, death sorcery and pollution), rituals and celebrations of death (wakes, wake games and amusements, death meals), common deaths (the good death, sudden death) and uncommon deaths (suicide, homicide, genocide, voodoo death, death by sorcery), traumatic deaths and deaths before their time, the death of children (angel-babies), grief, mourning and melancholia, attachment and loss, remembrance, regenerations and the political lives of dead bodies (the uses of the dead). We will look at the historical transformations of the meaning and timing of death, from the Middle Ages to the later modern medicalization and commodification of death and the dead body, its organs and tissues, the development of regenerative technologies, and the search for corporeal perfectibility.