Rest in Plastic

Provides a rich ethnographic exploration of how funerals, graves, banners, and other synthetic materials have become central to the public expression of death in an Ewe community in Ghana.
Tells the story of different materials and things that come to shape power relations, always in a delicate balance between state and local governance, kin and outsiders, death and life, the invisible and the visible, movement and containment.
Based on field research in an Ewe community in the Ghanaian Volta Region. Makes an original contribution to anthropology, material culture studies, and African studies by examining the intersections of death, power, governance, and the visible presence of memory in contemporary Ghana.

Isabel Bredenbröker is a Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft Walter Benjamin Postdoctoral Researcher, who works for the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage and the Herman von Helmholtz- Zentrum für Kulturtechnik at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.