Death and Events

This unique volume examines death from a socio-cultural events perspective. Drawing on the empirical and conceptual work produced by an international body of researchers, it is the first publication to look at death, dying, memorialization, and their mediation, from an events orientation. By placing the contribution of these scholars together, this book provides a unique opportunity to instigate an international, critical discussion, around the connectivities associated with death and events. Chapters consider connections to death and events on many levels, including individual, local, communally based, construals of the event landscape; the relationship between death and events into larger socio-cultural frames of reference. Chapteres also consider how death and events are manifest through diverse platforms of mediation, with a discussion of the media presentation of end of life events, and the articulation of death online. Case studies from a wide-ranging selection of countries, from Moscow to Bangladesh to Cambodia, are examined throughout. This will be of great interest to upper-level students and researchers in event studies as well as a variety of other disciplines such as sociology and cultural studies.

Ian R Lamond is a senior lecturer in event studies, teaching on a variety of modules within the School of Events, Tourism, and Hospitality Management at Leeds Beckett University, UK. He is interested in developing a critical approach to event studies that can act as a post-disciplinary conceptual framework. His research interests are concerned with applying the concept of event to a wide range of fields, including anthropology; business and management studies; political and cultural studies; psychoanalysis; and sociological theory. Ruth Dowson has over 25 years' professional experience in events management and has been a Senior Lecturer at the UK Centre for Events Management, Leeds Beckett University, UK since 2007. Ordained in the Church of England in 2012, her academic research combines her passion for church and events. Ruth's published research interests focus on events and church, the eventization of faith, venuefication, and the use of religious buildings for events.

1. Introduction. 2. Funerals as a social process. Rituals and symbols in rural and urban funerals. 3. Dying with dignity: Perception of good death among the Santals of Bangladesh. 4. Memorial space of the necropolis: the case of Novodevichy cemetery. 5. Death, trauma, and the 'event'. 6. Ritualized death in Eastern and Islamic culture: "Taste of Cherry". 7. Burdened with the memories of death: An autoethnographic account of the Real and the Imagined deaths. 8. Living in 'Limbo': Death in everyday Sundarbans. 9. Reframing grief in Colombian armed conflict: Performativities of the photographic image in processes of civil resistance in the Magdalena medio zone (Cimitarra Valley). 10. The role of cultural institutions in navigating transnational social spaces of cosmopolitan memory: A reading of the TuolSleng Genocide Museum. 11. Remember your brothers. Memory and inspiration in the video-testaments of the Islamic State. 12. The assisted dying movement: How media platforms influence our response to events that challenge the boundaries of contemporary social control. 13. Conclusion