Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

- How do the living maintain ongoing relationships with the dead in Western societies?
- How have the residual belongings of the dead been used to evoke memories?
- Why has the body and its material environment remained so important in memory-making?
Objects, images, practices, and places remind us of the deaths of others and of our own mortality. At the time of death, embodied persons disappear from view, their relationships with others come under threat and their influence may cease. Emotionally, socially, politically, much is at stake at the time of death. In this context, memories and memory-making can be highly charged, and often provide the dead with a social presence amongst the living. Memories of the dead are a bulwark against the terror of forgetting, as well as an inescapable outcome of a life's ending.
Objects in attics, gardens, museums, streets and cemeteries can tell us much about the processes of remembering. This unusual and absorbing book develops perspectives in anthropology and cultural history to reveal the importance of material objects in experiences of grief, mourning and memorializing. Far from being 'invisible', the authors show how past generations, dead friends and lovers remain manifest - through well-worn garments, letters, photographs, flowers, residual drops of perfume, funerary sculpture. Tracing the rituals, gestures and materials that have been used to shape and preserve memories of personal loss, Hallam and Hockey show how material culture provides the deceased with a powerful presence within the here and now.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgements (p. ix)
• List of Figures (p. xi)
• 1 Introduction: Remembering as Cultural Process (p. 1)
• 2 Figuring Memor Memory: Y: Metaphors, Bodies and Material Objects (p. 23)
• Note (p. 46)
• 3 Time, Ime, Death and Memor Memory (p. 47)
• 4 Spaces of Death and Memory (p. 77)
• 5 Memories Materializing: Restless Deaths (p. 101)
• 6 Visualizing Death: Making Memories from Body to Image (p. 129)
• 7 Death Writing: Material Inscription and Memory (p. 155)
• Notes (p. 178)
• 8 Ritualizing Death: Embodied Memories (p. 179)
• 9 Memories and Endings (p. 203)
• Note (p. 215)
• Bibliography (p. 217)
• Index (p. 229)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Hallam (Univ. of Aberdeen) and Hockey (Univ. of Hull) offer a wide-ranging consideration of death, memory, and the material world and the sociocultural processes by which they are understood and linked. Each chapter contains detailed theoretical discussions and brief examples drawing on historical and contemporary cases principally from England, but also from the US, other parts of Europe, and beyond. The first several chapters use comparative historical accounts to contemplate historical change and continuity through metaphors and issues related to time and space. Here the authors consider metaphors of memory as they relate to material objects and persons (including the deceased body as object), issues of temporality (e.g., senses of time, instruments of time linked to death, and representations of decay), and external spaces of death versus internal states of memory. The last chapters focus on the materials of memory and the power of objects, including how death is dealt with materially in visual, written, and ritual media. Objects discussed in this section include photographs and relics of the dead, wills and headstones, and other items that derive force from their various relations to the deceased. Upper-level undergraduates and above. C. Hendrickson Marlboro College