Overview

Can a state make its people forget the dead? Cemeteries have become sites of acute political contestation in the city-state of Singapore. Confronted with high population density and rapid economic growth, the government has ordered the destruction of all but one burial ground, forcing people to exhume their family members. In this ethnography of Chinese funeral parlors and cemeteries, anthropologist and trained mortician Ruth E. Toulson demonstrates this as part of a larger shift to transform a Daoist-infused obsession with ancestors into a sterile, more easily controlled ""Protestant"" Buddhism. Further, in a context where the dead remain central to family life, forced exhumation tears the social fabric, turning ancestors into ghosts. Using death ritual and grieving as interrogative lenses, Toulson explores the scope of and resistance to state power over the dead, laying bare the legacies of colonialism and consequences of whirlwind capitalist development. In doing so, she offers a new anthropology of death, one both more personal and politicized. Written in accessible prose rich with ethnographic detail, the book is suitable for undergraduate teaching in anthropology, Asian studies, religious studies, sociology, and history.

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9780295753331

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Reviews

""Ruth E. Toulson offers an intimate and unsettling ethnography of grief, ritual, and state power in contemporary Singapore. . . . One of the book's many strengths lies in moments where ethnographic detail and emotional insight converge to reveal the quiet, often painful, dislocations produced by policy. . . . [B]rilliant in its analysis of this ordinary necropolitics."" -- ""Asian Studies Review""

Author Information

Ruth E. Toulson is an anthropologist and faculty member of the Department of Humanistic Studies at Maryland Institute College of Art. She is coeditor of The Materiality of Mourning: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach and The Cambridge Handbook of the Anthropology of Death (forthcoming).

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