Mortuary Dialogues

Mortuary Dialogues presents fresh perspectives on death and mourning across the Pacific Islands. Through a set of rich ethnographies, the book examines how funerals and death rituals give rise to discourse and debate about sustaining moral personhood and community amid modernity and its enormous transformations. The books key concept, mortuary dialogue, describes the different genres of talk and expressive culture through which people struggle to restore individual and collective order in the aftermath of death in the contemporary Pacific.

Eric K. Silverman is Professor of Anthropology in the American Studies and Psychology/Human Development Departments at Wheelock College.

List of Figures and Tables

Foreword
Shirley Lindenbaum

Acknowledgements
Map

Introduction: Mortuary Ritual, Modern Social Theory and the Historical Moment in Pacific Modernity
Eric K. Silverman and David Lipset

PART I: TENACIOUS VOICES

Chapter 1. Fearing the Dead: The Mortuary Rites of Marshall Islanders amid the Tragedy of Pacific Modernity
Laurence M. Carucci

Chapter 2. Into the World of Sorrow: Women and the Work of Death in Maori Mortuary Rites
Che Wilson and Karen Sinclair

Chapter 3. Death and Experience in Rawa Mortuary Rites, Papua New Guinea
Doug Dalton

Chapter 4. The Knotted Person: Death, the Bad Breast and Melanesian Modernity among the Murik, Papua New Guinea
David Lipset

Chapter 5. Mortuary Ritual and Mining Riches in Island Melanesia
Nicholas A. Bainton and Martha Macintyre

PART II: EQUIVOCAL VOICES

Chapter 6. Finishing Kapui's Name: Birth, Death and the Reproduction of Manam Society, Papua New Guinea
Nancy C. Lutkehaus

Chapter 7.Transformations of Male Initiation and Mortuary Rites among the Kayan of Papua New Guinea
Alexis T. von Poser

Chapter 8. Mortuary Failures: Traditional Uncertainties and Modern Families in the Sepik River, Papua New Guinea
Eric K. Silverman

Chapter 9. Everything Will Come Up Like TV, Everything Will Be Revealed: Death in an Age of Uncertainty in the Purari Delta, Papua New Guinea
Joshua Bell

Afterword: Mortuary Dialogues in Pacific Modernities and Anthropology
David Lipset, Eric K. Silverman and Eric Venbrux

Index