A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Results by Title
31 books about Mortality
31 books about Mortality
Andersonvilles of the North
The Myths and Realities of Northern Treatment of Civil War Confederate Prisoners
James M. Gillispie
University of North Texas Press, 2008
Babylost
Racism, Survival, and the Quiet Politics of Infant Mortality, from A to Z
Monica J. Casper
Rutgers University Press, 2021
The U.S. infant mortality rate is among the highest in the industrialized world, and Black babies are far more likely than white babies to die in their first year of life. Maternal mortality rates are also very high. Though the infant mortality rate overall has improved over the past century with public health interventions, racial disparities have not. Racism, poverty, lack of access to health care, and other causes of death have been identified, but not yet adequately addressed. The tragedy is twofold: it is undoubtedly tragic that babies die in their first year of life, and it is both tragic and unacceptable that most of these deaths are preventable. Despite the urgency of the problem, there has been little public discussion of infant loss. The question this book takes up is not why babies die; we already have many answers to this question. It is, rather, who cares that babies, mostly but not only Black and Native American babies, are dying before their first birthdays? More importantly, what are we willing to do about it? This book tracks social and cultural dimensions of infant death through 58 alphabetical entries, from Absence to ZIP Code. It centers women’s loss and grief, while also drawing attention to dimensions of infant death not often examined. It is simultaneously a sociological study of infant death, an archive of loss and grief, and a clarion call for social change.
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Beyond Germs
Native Depopulation in North America
Edited by Catherine M. Cameron, Paul Kelton, and Alan C. Swedlund
University of Arizona Press, 2015
There is no question that European colonization introduced smallpox, measles, and other infectious diseases to the Americas, causing considerable harm and death to indigenous peoples. But though these diseases were devastating, their impact has been widely exaggerated. Warfare, enslavement, land expropriation, removals, erasure of identity, and other factors undermined Native populations. These factors worked in a deadly cabal with germs to cause epidemics, exacerbate mortality, and curtail population recovery.
Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America challenges the “virgin soil” hypothesis that was used for decades to explain the decimation of the indigenous people of North America. This hypothesis argues that the massive depopulation of the New World was caused primarily by diseases brought by European colonists that infected Native populations lacking immunity to foreign pathogens. In Beyond Germs, contributors expertly argue that blaming germs lets Europeans off the hook for the enormous number of Native American deaths that occurred after 1492.
Archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians come together in this cutting-edge volume to report a wide variety of other factors in the decline in the indigenous population, including genocide, forced labor, and population dislocation. These factors led to what the editors describe in their introduction as “systemic structural violence” on the Native populations of North America.
While we may never know the full extent of Native depopulation during the colonial period because the evidence available for indigenous communities is notoriously slim and problematic, what is certain is that a generation of scholars has significantly overemphasized disease as the cause of depopulation and has downplayed the active role of Europeans in inciting wars, destroying livelihoods, and erasing identities.
Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America challenges the “virgin soil” hypothesis that was used for decades to explain the decimation of the indigenous people of North America. This hypothesis argues that the massive depopulation of the New World was caused primarily by diseases brought by European colonists that infected Native populations lacking immunity to foreign pathogens. In Beyond Germs, contributors expertly argue that blaming germs lets Europeans off the hook for the enormous number of Native American deaths that occurred after 1492.
Archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians come together in this cutting-edge volume to report a wide variety of other factors in the decline in the indigenous population, including genocide, forced labor, and population dislocation. These factors led to what the editors describe in their introduction as “systemic structural violence” on the Native populations of North America.
While we may never know the full extent of Native depopulation during the colonial period because the evidence available for indigenous communities is notoriously slim and problematic, what is certain is that a generation of scholars has significantly overemphasized disease as the cause of depopulation and has downplayed the active role of Europeans in inciting wars, destroying livelihoods, and erasing identities.
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Building Academic Partnerships to Reduce Maternal Morbidity and Mortality
A Call to Action and Way Forward
Frank W.J. Anderson
Michigan Publishing Services, 2014
This book presents the collective wisdom of a group of Obstetrician/Gynecologists (OB/GYNs) from around the world brought together at the 2012 meeting of the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO) to contribute their ideas and expertise in an effort to reduce maternal and neonatal morbidity and mortality and obstetric fistula in sub Saharan Africa (SSA). The discussions focused on how to increase human capacity in the field of obstetrics and gynecology. The meeting was hosted by the University of Michigan Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology Global Initiatives program and was supported through a grant from the Flora Family Foundation.
Within the pages of this document, the current status of women’s health and OB/GYN training programs in 10 sub-Saharan African countries are described, with a Call to Action and Way Forward to training new OBGYNs in country. These are the words of obstetricians in the field, some who work as lone faculty in fledgling OB/GYN departments. These committed people are charged with the task of not only teaching the next generation, but may be the only OBGYN per 500,000 population or more. Their tireless pursuits are recognized, and their yearning for collegial support is palpable.
Every country should have a cadre of highly trained OB/GYNs to teach the next generation, contribute to policy development and advocate for progressive legislation, conduct the research needed to solve local clinical problems, and contribute to the field of women’s health in general. But most of all, it must be recognized that women across the globe have the right to access a full scope and high quality obstetrical and gynecological care when and where they need it. These pages bring to light successes achieved and shared, and lessons learned that have already spurred new programs and given hope to those eager for a new way forward.
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Death at the Opposite Ends of the Eurasian Continent
Mortality Trends in Taiwan and the Netherlands 1850-1945
Edited by Theo Engelen, John R. Shephard, and Yang Wen-shan
Amsterdam University Press, 2011
This volume examines contrasting historical demographics in Western Europe and Asia, taking the Netherlands and Taiwan as representative populations. Both countries have witnessed steady, continuous improvements in public health, disease prevention, and medical care. The contributors compare the impact of disease and mortality on the lives of individuals and families under very different cultural and social conditions. Death at the Opposite Ends of the Eurasian Continent analyzes a variety of factors, including maternal and infant mortality, as well as the accuracy of Taiwan’s censuses and death reporting.
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Death Stalks the Yakama
Epidemiological Transitions and Mortality on the Yakama Indian Reservation, 1888-1964
Clifford E. Trafzer
Michigan State University Press, 1997
Clifford Trafzer's disturbing new work, Death Stalks the Yakama, examines life, death, and the shockingly high mortality rates that have persisted among the fourteen tribes and bands living on the Yakama Reservation in the state of Washington. The work contains a valuable discussion of Indian beliefs about spirits, traditional causes of death, mourning ceremonies, and memorials. More significant, however, is Trafzer's research into heretofore unused parturition and death records from 1888-1964. In these documents, he discovers critical evidence to demonstrate how and why many reservation people died in "epidemics" of pneumonia, tuberculosis, and heart disease.
Death Stalks the Yakama, takes into account many variables, including age, gender, listed causes of death, residence, and blood quantum. In addition, analyses of fetal and infant mortality rates as well as crude death rates arising from tuberculosis, pneumonia, heart disease, accidents, and other causes are presented. Trafzer argues that Native Americans living on the Yakama Reservation were, in fact, in jeopardy as a result of the "reservation system" itself. Not only did this alien and artificial culture radically alter traditional ways of life, but sanitation methods, housing, hospitals, public education, medicine, and medical personnel affiliated with the reservation system all proved inadequate, and each in its own way contributed significantly to high Yakama death rates.
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The Deaths of the Author
Reading and Writing in Time
Jane Gallop
Duke University Press, 2011
For thirty years the "death of the author" has been a familiar poststructuralist slogan in literary theory, widely understood and much debated as a dismissal of the author, a declaration of the writer's irrelevance to the readers experience. In this concise book, Jane Gallop revitalizes this hackneyed concept by considering not only the abstract theoretical death of the author but also the writer's literal death, as well as other authorial "deaths" such as obsolescence. Through bravura close readings of the influential literary theorists Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, she shows that the death of the author is best understood as a relation to temporality, not only for the reader but especially for the writer. Gallop does not just approach the death of the author from the reader's perspective; she also reflects at length on how impending death haunts the writer. By connecting an author's theoretical, literal, and metaphoric deaths, she enables us to take a fuller measure of the moving and unsettling effects of the deaths of the author on readers and writers, and on reading and writing.
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Differential Mortality in the United States
A Study in Socioeconomic Epidemiology
Evelyn M. Kitagawa and Philip M. Hauser
Harvard University Press, 1973
Two eminent scholars in the field of sociology present the first large-scale study to relate mortality to a broad spectrum of social and economic factors—including education, income, occupation, race, and marital status—with broad application to the public health field.
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Dying in Full Detail
Mortality and Digital Documentary
Jennifer Malkowski
Duke University Press, 2017
In Dying in Full Detail Jennifer Malkowski explores digital media's impact on one of documentary film's greatest taboos: the recording of death. Despite technological advances that allow for the easy creation and distribution of death footage, digital media often fail to live up to their promise to reveal the world in greater fidelity. Malkowski analyzes a wide range of death footage, from feature films about the terminally ill (Dying, Silverlake Life, Sick), to surreptitiously recorded suicides (The Bridge), to #BlackLivesMatter YouTube videos and their precursors. Contextualizing these recordings in the long history of attempts to capture the moment of death in American culture, Malkowski shows how digital media are unable to deliver death "in full detail," as its metaphysical truth remains beyond representation. Digital technology's capacity to record death does, however, provide the opportunity to politicize individual deaths through their representation. Exploring the relationships among technology, temporality, and the ethical and aesthetic debates about capturing death on video, Malkowski illuminates the key roles documentary death has played in twenty-first-century visual culture.
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Help Your Marriage Survive
The Death Of A Child
Paul Rosenblatt
Temple University Press, 2000
Many parents who have experienced the death of a child struggle with painful and at times overwhelming marital problems. Grieving can create great marital distance, and it can magnify those problems that existed before the child's death. Grieving parents often fear that divorce is a real possibility. This book can help.
Based on intensive interviews of 29 couples who experienced the death of a child, this book offers perspectives and advice on common marital problems experienced by bereaved parents. Each couple's problems are unique, but often the problems are connected to couple communication, sexuality, parenting of other children, the use of alcohol and drugs, blaming, and differences in such areas as whether to have another child, how to grieve, how to talk about the child who died, whether to go outside the marriage for support, and what to do with things and spaces that were the child's.
Although the book deals with pain and marital distress, it offers a message of hope. Grieving parents can and do get through the hard times, based on respect for differences, mutual understanding, and shared history.
Based on intensive interviews of 29 couples who experienced the death of a child, this book offers perspectives and advice on common marital problems experienced by bereaved parents. Each couple's problems are unique, but often the problems are connected to couple communication, sexuality, parenting of other children, the use of alcohol and drugs, blaming, and differences in such areas as whether to have another child, how to grieve, how to talk about the child who died, whether to go outside the marriage for support, and what to do with things and spaces that were the child's.
Although the book deals with pain and marital distress, it offers a message of hope. Grieving parents can and do get through the hard times, based on respect for differences, mutual understanding, and shared history.
[more]
Imagining Progress
Science, Faith, and Child Mortality in America
Kristin Johnson
University of Alabama Press, 2024
Explores the intellectual history of Americans’ divergent assumptions about God, nature, and science
Offering fascinating examples from the works of diverse writers and thinkers such as Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, W. E. B. Du Bois, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Harriet Shelton Dover, Kristin Johnson traces the history of Americans’ complicated faith in science and the various triumphs and tragedies that faith has inspired. Imagining Progress reveals many of the complex factors involved in the polarized state of contemporary American attitudes toward science, scientists, public health, medicine, and science policy.
Humankind has always wrestled with the existence of suffering, how to respond to suffering, whom to care for, and in what ways. For two centuries, many American ministers, physicians, and scientists believed that an omnipotent and omniscient God created the world such that people might relieve suffering through ingenuity and learning. Others responded to the new worldview introduced by the scientific revolution as a threat to the divine order. In Imagining Progress, Johnson traces the history of Americans’ evolving relationship with science and religion at “one of its most dramatic places”—the bedsides of dying children. It’s here, in the crucible of parental despair, that she illuminates diverging assumptions about God, nature, and history.
From Cotton Mather’s campaign for smallpox inoculation to battles over teaching evolution in the 1920s, Johnson adroitly weaves an interdisciplinary history of medicine, science, theology, and activism. She follows a wide cast of characters from across theological, scientific, and political spectrums. What emerges is a kaleidoscopic portrait of diverse, often contradictory hopes and anxieties inspired by new theories of nature and human existence. Johnson also discerns a problematic pattern of invoking science both to ameliorate the suffering of some children while ignoring the suffering of others.
Offering fascinating examples from the works of diverse writers and thinkers such as Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, W. E. B. Du Bois, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Harriet Shelton Dover, Kristin Johnson traces the history of Americans’ complicated faith in science and the various triumphs and tragedies that faith has inspired. Imagining Progress reveals many of the complex factors involved in the polarized state of contemporary American attitudes toward science, scientists, public health, medicine, and science policy.
Humankind has always wrestled with the existence of suffering, how to respond to suffering, whom to care for, and in what ways. For two centuries, many American ministers, physicians, and scientists believed that an omnipotent and omniscient God created the world such that people might relieve suffering through ingenuity and learning. Others responded to the new worldview introduced by the scientific revolution as a threat to the divine order. In Imagining Progress, Johnson traces the history of Americans’ evolving relationship with science and religion at “one of its most dramatic places”—the bedsides of dying children. It’s here, in the crucible of parental despair, that she illuminates diverging assumptions about God, nature, and history.
From Cotton Mather’s campaign for smallpox inoculation to battles over teaching evolution in the 1920s, Johnson adroitly weaves an interdisciplinary history of medicine, science, theology, and activism. She follows a wide cast of characters from across theological, scientific, and political spectrums. What emerges is a kaleidoscopic portrait of diverse, often contradictory hopes and anxieties inspired by new theories of nature and human existence. Johnson also discerns a problematic pattern of invoking science both to ameliorate the suffering of some children while ignoring the suffering of others.
[more]
Irrevocable
A Philosophy of Mortality
Alphonso Lingis
University of Chicago Press, 2018
In his latest book, the prolific writer and thinker Alphonso Lingis brings interdisciplinarity and lyrical philosophizing to the weight of reality, the weight of things, and the weight of life itself. Drawing from philosophy, anthropology, psychology, religion, and science, Lingis seeks to uncover what in our reality escapes our attempts at measuring and categorizing. Writing as much from his own experiences and those of others as from his longstanding engagement with phenomenology and existentialism, Irrevocable studies the world in which shadows, reflections, halos, and reverberations count as much as the carpentry of things.
Whether describing religious art and ritual, suffering, war and disease, the pleasures of love, the wonders of nature, archaeological findings, surfing, volcanoes, or jellyfish, Lingis writes with equal measures of rigor and abandon about the vicissitudes of our practices and beliefs. Knowing that birth, the essential encounters in our lives, crippling diseases and accidents, and even death are all determined by chance, how do we recognize and understand such chance? After facing tragedies, what makes it possible to live on while recognizing our irrevocable losses?
Lingis’s investigations are accompanied by his own vivid photographs from around the world. Balancing the local and the global, and ranging across vast expanses of culture and time, Irrevocable sounds the depths of both our passions and our impassioned bodies and minds.
Whether describing religious art and ritual, suffering, war and disease, the pleasures of love, the wonders of nature, archaeological findings, surfing, volcanoes, or jellyfish, Lingis writes with equal measures of rigor and abandon about the vicissitudes of our practices and beliefs. Knowing that birth, the essential encounters in our lives, crippling diseases and accidents, and even death are all determined by chance, how do we recognize and understand such chance? After facing tragedies, what makes it possible to live on while recognizing our irrevocable losses?
Lingis’s investigations are accompanied by his own vivid photographs from around the world. Balancing the local and the global, and ranging across vast expanses of culture and time, Irrevocable sounds the depths of both our passions and our impassioned bodies and minds.
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Lessons in Mortality
Doctors and Patients Struggling Together
Allen B. Weisse, M.D.
University of Missouri Press, 2006
It doesn’t take a trip to the doctor to know that the bond between physicians and patients isn’t what it used to be. Specialization, rising costs, managed care, the insurance industry, the shadow of litigation—so many factors have changed what was once a traditional relationship grounded in respect and caring.
In light of the altered climate in health care, this thoughtful book deals with the way that today’s doctors and patients view themselves and one another. Allen Weisse has observed the changing medical scene during half a century of treating patients and training future physicians, and he writes frankly here about how doctors and patients have come to deal with illness in the twenty-first century.
Weisse first recalls his own brush with death as a young man diagnosed with testicular cancer—a time when one thinks of God and Death and little else. He then shares true stories of how different people have dealt with cancer, heart disease, stroke, infectious disease, AIDS, and other dire diagnoses—narratives enhanced by professional savvy and enriched by the kind of empathy that the survivor of such a calamity can provide.
Drawing from a storehouse of experiences shared by colleagues, patients, and friends, Weisse writes with passion, conviction, and clarity to encourage a renewal of the openness and trust that seem to be lacking in today’s doctor-patient relationships. These are accounts both uplifting and disturbing—some sad, others tinged with humor—intended to make doctors and patients alike come to a fuller realization that we are all together in this delicate but crucial business of staying alive.
While not quite foreseeing a return to the Norman Rockwell image of the family physician, Weisse urges the kind of care and compassion that patients often feel is lacking from their doctors, and he reassures victims of seemingly hopeless conditions that, despite the obstacles they often face, there are still health care professionals who truly have their patients’ welfare foremost in mind. Lessons in Mortality is just what the doctor ordered for a health care system in crisis: an honest look at the medical profession that encourages greater understanding on the part of both physicians and patients, reminding us that what we most need is one another.
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Managing Motherhood, Managing Risk
Fertility and Danger in West Central Tanzania
Denise Roth Allen
University of Michigan Press, 2004
In Managing Motherhood, Managing Risk, Denise Roth Allen persuasively argues that development interventions in the Third World often have unintended and unacknowledged consequences. Based on twenty-two months of fieldwork in the Shinyanga Region of west central Tanzania, this rich and engaging ethnography of women's fertility-related experiences highlights the processes by which a set of seemingly well-intentioned international maternal health policy recommendations go awry when implemented at the local level.
An exploration of how threats to maternal health have been defined and addressed at the global, national, and local levels, Managing Motherhood, Managing Risk presents two contrasting, and oftentimes competing, definitions of risk: those that form the basis of international recommendations and national maternal health policies and those that do not. The effect that these contrasting definitions of risk have on women's fertility-related experiences at the local level are explored throughout the book.
This study employs an innovative approach to the analysis of maternal health risk, one that situates rural Tanzanian women's fertility-related experiences within a broader historical and sociocultural context. Beginning with an examination of how maternal health risk was defined and addressed during the early years of British colonial rule in Tanganyika and moving to a discussion of an internationally conceived maternal health initiative that was launched on the world stage in the late 1980s, the author explores the similarities in the language used and solutions proposed by health development experts over time.
This set of "official" maternal health risks is then compared to an alternative set of risks that emerge when attention is focused on women's experiences of pregnancy and childbirth at the local level. Although some of these latter risks are often spoken about as deriving from spiritual or supernatural causes, the case studies presented throughout the second half of the book reveal that the concept of risk in the context of pregnancy and childbirth is much more complex, involving the interplay of spiritual, physical, and economic aspects of everyday life.
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Meaning and Mortality in Kierkegaard and Heidegger
Origins of the Existential Philosophy of Death
Adam Buben
Northwestern University Press, 2016
Death is one of those few topics that attract the attention of just about every significant thinker in the history of Western philosophy, and this attention has resulted in diverse and complex views on death and what comes after. In Meaning and Mortality, Adam Buben offers a remarkably useful new framework for understanding the ways in which philosophy has discussed death by focusing first on two traditional strains in the discussion, the Platonic and the Epicurean. After providing a thorough account of this ancient dichotomy, he describes the development of an alternative means of handling death in Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger, whose work on death tends to overshadow Kierkegaard's despite the undeniable influence exerted on him by the nineteenth-century Dane. Buben argues that Kierkegaard and Heidegger prescribe a peculiar way of living with death that offers a kind of compromise between the Platonic and the Epicurean strains.
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Migrant Deaths in the Arizona Desert
La vida no vale nada
Edited by Raquel Rubio-Goldsmith, Celestino Fernández, Jessie K. Finch, and Araceli Masterson-Algar
University of Arizona Press, 2016
Winner of the 2017 International Latino Book Award for Best Nonfiction – Multi-Author
Migrant Deaths in the Arizona Desert addresses the tragic results of government policies on immigration. The contributors consist of a multidisciplinary group who are dedicated to the thousands of men, women, and children who have lost their lives while crossing the desert in search of a better life. Each chapter in this important new volume seeks answers to migrant deaths, speaking to the complexity of this tragedy via a range of community and scholarly approaches.
The activists, artists, and scholars included in this volume confront migrant deaths and disappearances in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as they reflect on the startling realities of death, migration, and public policy. Chapters touch on immigration and how it is studied, community responses to crisis, government policy, definitions of citizenship, and the role of the arts and human expression in response to state violence. Collectively the contributions throw a spotlight on the multivocal, transdisciplinary efforts to address the historical silence surrounding this human tragedy.
Despite numerous changes in the migration processes and growing attention to the problem, many people who attempt border crossings continue to disappear and die. This book offers a timely exploration of the ways that residents, scholars, activists, and artists are responding to this humanitarian crisis on their doorstep.
Migrant Deaths in the Arizona Desert addresses the tragic results of government policies on immigration. The contributors consist of a multidisciplinary group who are dedicated to the thousands of men, women, and children who have lost their lives while crossing the desert in search of a better life. Each chapter in this important new volume seeks answers to migrant deaths, speaking to the complexity of this tragedy via a range of community and scholarly approaches.
The activists, artists, and scholars included in this volume confront migrant deaths and disappearances in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as they reflect on the startling realities of death, migration, and public policy. Chapters touch on immigration and how it is studied, community responses to crisis, government policy, definitions of citizenship, and the role of the arts and human expression in response to state violence. Collectively the contributions throw a spotlight on the multivocal, transdisciplinary efforts to address the historical silence surrounding this human tragedy.
Despite numerous changes in the migration processes and growing attention to the problem, many people who attempt border crossings continue to disappear and die. This book offers a timely exploration of the ways that residents, scholars, activists, and artists are responding to this humanitarian crisis on their doorstep.
[more]
Migration and Mortality
Social Death, Dispossession, and Survival in the Americas
Edited by Jamie Longazel and Miranda Cady Hallett
Temple University Press, 2021
Death threatens migrants physically during perilous border crossings between Central and North America, but many also experience legal, social, and economic mortality. Rooted in histories of colonialism and conquest, exclusionary policies and practices deliberately take aim at racialized, dispossessed people in transit. Once in the new land, migrants endure a web of systems across every facet of their world—work, home, healthcare, culture, justice—that strips them of their personhood, denies them resources, and creates additional obstacles that deprive them of their ability to live fully.
As laws and policies create ripe conditions for the further extraction of money, resources, and labor power from the dispossessed, the contributors to this vibrant anthology, Migration and Mortality, examine restrictive immigration policies and the broader capitalist systems of exploitation and inequality while highlighting the power of migrants’ collective resistance and resilience.
The case studies in this timely collection explore border deaths, detention economies, asylum seeking, as well as the public health and mental health of migrants. Ultimately, these examples of oppression and survival contribute to understanding broader movements for life and justice in the Americas.
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Mortality and Morality
A Search for Good After Auschwitz
Hans Jonas
Northwestern University Press, 1996
Mortality and Morality both consummates and demonstrates the basic thrust of Jonas's thought: the inseparability of ethics and metaphysics, the reality of values at the center of being.
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Mortality and Morbidity in the United States
Carl L. Erhardt and Joyce E. Berlin
Harvard University Press, 1974
Musings on Mortality
From Tolstoy to Primo Levi
Victor Brombert
University of Chicago Press, 2013
“All art and the love of art,” Victor Brombert writes at the beginning of the deeply personal Musings on Mortality, “allow us to negate our nothingness.” As a young man returning from World War II, Brombert came to understand this truth as he immersed himself in literature. Death can be found everywhere in literature, he saw, but literature itself is on the side of life. With delicacy and penetrating insight, Brombert traces the theme of mortality in the work of a group of authors who wrote during the past century and a half, teasing out and comparing their views of death as they emerged from vastly different cultural contexts.
Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus, Giorgio Bassani, J. M. Coetzee, and Primo Levi—these are the writers whose works Brombert plumbs, illuminating their views on the meaning of life and the human condition. But there is more to their work, he shows, than a pervasive interest in mortality: they wrote not only of physical death but also of the threat of moral and spiritual death—and as the twentieth century progressed, they increasingly reflected on the traumatic events of their times and the growing sense of a collective historical tragedy. He probes the individual struggle with death, for example, through Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilych and Mann’s Aschenbach, while he explores the destruction of whole civilizations in Bassani, Camus, and Primo Levi. For Kafka and Woolf, writing seems to hold the promise of salvation, though that promise is seen as ambiguous and even deceptive, while Coetzee, writing about violence and apartheid South Africa, is deeply concerned with a sense of disgrace. Throughout the book, Brombert roots these writers’ reflections in philosophical meditations on mortality. Ultimately, he reveals that by understanding how these authors wrote about mortality, we can grasp the full scope of their literary achievement and vision.
Drawing deeply from the well of Brombert’s own experience, Musings on Mortality is more than mere literary criticism: it is a moving and elegant book for all to learn and live by.
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On the Bones of the Serpent
Person, Memory, and Mortality in Sabarl Island Society
Debbora Battaglia
University of Chicago Press, 1990
Sabarl island—created, in myth, from the bones of a serpent—is a coral atoll in the Louisiade archipelago of Papua New Guinea. The Sabarl speak of themselves as true "islanders": persons separated from the means of both physical and social survival. The Sabarl struggle for continuity—of the physical and social person and of social relations, of cultureal values, of paternal influence in a matrilineal society—is the subject of Debbora Battaglia's sensitive ethnography of loss and reconstruction: the first major work on cultural responses to mortality in the southern Massim culture area and an important contribution to studies of personhood in Melanesia.
The creative focus of Sabarl cultural life is a series of mortuary feasts and rituals known as segaiya. In assembling and disassembling commemorative food and objects in segaiya exchanges, Sabarl also assemble and disassemble the critical social relations such objects stand for. These commemorative acts create a collective memory yet also a collective experience of forgetting social bonds that are of no future use to the living. Sabarl anticipate this disaggregation in patterns of everyday life, which reveal the importance of categorical distinctions mapped in beliefs about the physical and metaphysical person.
Using remembrance and forgetting as an analytic lens, Battaglia is able to ask questions critical to understanding Melanesian social process. One of the "new ethnographies" addressing the limits of ethnographic representation and the fragmented nature of knowledge from an indigenous perspective, her finely wrought study explores the dynamics of cultural practices in which decontruction is integral to construction, allowing a new perspective on the ephermeral nature of sociality in Melanesia and new insight into the efficacy of cultural images more generally.
The creative focus of Sabarl cultural life is a series of mortuary feasts and rituals known as segaiya. In assembling and disassembling commemorative food and objects in segaiya exchanges, Sabarl also assemble and disassemble the critical social relations such objects stand for. These commemorative acts create a collective memory yet also a collective experience of forgetting social bonds that are of no future use to the living. Sabarl anticipate this disaggregation in patterns of everyday life, which reveal the importance of categorical distinctions mapped in beliefs about the physical and metaphysical person.
Using remembrance and forgetting as an analytic lens, Battaglia is able to ask questions critical to understanding Melanesian social process. One of the "new ethnographies" addressing the limits of ethnographic representation and the fragmented nature of knowledge from an indigenous perspective, her finely wrought study explores the dynamics of cultural practices in which decontruction is integral to construction, allowing a new perspective on the ephermeral nature of sociality in Melanesia and new insight into the efficacy of cultural images more generally.
[more]
Out of Time
Geoff Schmidt
University of North Texas Press, 2011
Partial Stories
Maternal Death from Six Angles
Claire L. Wendland
University of Chicago Press, 2022
A close look at stories of maternal death in Malawi that considers their implications in the broader arena of medical knowledge.
By the early twenty-first century, about one woman in twelve could expect to die of a pregnancy or childbirth complication in Malawi. Specific deaths became object lessons. Explanatory stories circulated through hospitals and villages, proliferating among a range of practitioners: nurse-midwives, traditional birth attendants, doctors, epidemiologists, herbalists. Was biology to blame? Economic underdevelopment? Immoral behavior? Tradition? Were the dead themselves at fault?
In Partial Stories, Claire L. Wendland considers these explanations for maternal death, showing how they reflect competing visions of the past and shared concerns about social change. Drawing on extended fieldwork, Wendland reveals how efforts to legitimate a single story as the authoritative version can render care more dangerous than it might otherwise be. Historical, biological, technological, ethical, statistical, and political perspectives on death usually circulate in different expert communities and different bodies of literature. Here, Wendland considers them together, illuminating dilemmas of maternity care in contexts of acute change, chronic scarcity, and endemic inequity within Malawi and beyond.
By the early twenty-first century, about one woman in twelve could expect to die of a pregnancy or childbirth complication in Malawi. Specific deaths became object lessons. Explanatory stories circulated through hospitals and villages, proliferating among a range of practitioners: nurse-midwives, traditional birth attendants, doctors, epidemiologists, herbalists. Was biology to blame? Economic underdevelopment? Immoral behavior? Tradition? Were the dead themselves at fault?
In Partial Stories, Claire L. Wendland considers these explanations for maternal death, showing how they reflect competing visions of the past and shared concerns about social change. Drawing on extended fieldwork, Wendland reveals how efforts to legitimate a single story as the authoritative version can render care more dangerous than it might otherwise be. Historical, biological, technological, ethical, statistical, and political perspectives on death usually circulate in different expert communities and different bodies of literature. Here, Wendland considers them together, illuminating dilemmas of maternity care in contexts of acute change, chronic scarcity, and endemic inequity within Malawi and beyond.
[more]
Rationalizing Epidemics
Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600
David S. Jones
Harvard University Press, 2004
Ever since their arrival in North America, European colonists and their descendants have struggled to explain the epidemics that decimated native populations. Century after century, they tried to understand the causes of epidemics, the vulnerability of American Indians, and the persistence of health disparities. They confronted their own responsibility for the epidemics, accepted the obligation to intervene, and imposed social and medical reforms to improve conditions. In Rationalizing Epidemics, David Jones examines crucial episodes in this history: Puritan responses to Indian depopulation in the seventeenth century; attempts to spread or prevent smallpox on the Western frontier in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; tuberculosis campaigns on the Sioux reservations from 1870 until 1910; and programs to test new antibiotics and implement modern medicine on the Navajo reservation in the 1950s. These encounters were always complex. Colonists, traders, physicians, and bureaucrats often saw epidemics as markers of social injustice and worked to improve Indians' health. At the same time, they exploited epidemics to obtain land, fur, and research subjects, and used health disparities as grounds for "civilizing" American Indians. Revealing the economic and political patterns that link these cases, Jones provides insight into the dilemmas of modern health policy in which desire and action stand alongside indifference and inaction.
[more]
Riding Lucifer's Line
Ranger Deaths along the Texas-Mexico Border
Bob Alexander
University of North Texas Press, 2013
Seven Letters to Melin
Essays on the Soul, Science, Art and Mortality
Josef Šafarík
Karolinum Press, 2020
Josef Šafařík’s Seven Letters to Melin is an exploration of man’s alienation from nature—and from himself—in the modern technological age. Conceived as a series of letters to Melin, an engineer who believes in the value of science and technical progress, the book grows skeptical of such endeavors, while also examining mankind’s search for meaning in life. To help uncover this meaning, Šafařík posits a dichotomy between spectator and participant. The role of participant is played by Robert, an artist who has committed suicide. The spectator, embodied by the scientist Melin, views the world from a distance and searches for explanations, while the artist-participant creates the world through his own active engagement.
Through these exchanges, Šafařík argues for the primacy of artistic creativity over scientific explanation, of truth over accuracy, of internal moral agency over an externally imposed social morality, and of personal religious belief over organized church-going. Šafařík is neither anti-scientific nor anti-rational; however, he argues that science has limited power, and he rejects the idea of science that denies meaning and value to what cannot be measured or calculated.
Šafařík’s critiques of technology, the wage economy, and increased professionalization make him an important precursor to the philosophy of deep ecology. This book was also a major influence on the Czech president Václav Havel; in this new translation it will find a fresh cohort of readers interested in what makes us human.
Through these exchanges, Šafařík argues for the primacy of artistic creativity over scientific explanation, of truth over accuracy, of internal moral agency over an externally imposed social morality, and of personal religious belief over organized church-going. Šafařík is neither anti-scientific nor anti-rational; however, he argues that science has limited power, and he rejects the idea of science that denies meaning and value to what cannot be measured or calculated.
Šafařík’s critiques of technology, the wage economy, and increased professionalization make him an important precursor to the philosophy of deep ecology. This book was also a major influence on the Czech president Václav Havel; in this new translation it will find a fresh cohort of readers interested in what makes us human.
[more]
Sex and Death on the Western Emigrant Trail
The Biology of Three American Tragedies
Donald K. Grayson
University of Utah Press, 2018
During the winter of 1846–1847, members of the Donner Party found themselves stuck in the snows of the Sierra Nevada on their journey to California, losing many in their group to severe cold and starvation. Those who survived did so by cannibalizing their dead comrades. Today the Donner Party may be the most famous of American overland emigrant groups, but it was not the only one to face extreme conditions. Ten years after the Donner Party, two groups sponsored by the Mormon Church, the Willie and Martin handcart companies ran into similar difficulties. Unlike the Donner Party, however, these people were following a well-traveled path, but they were doing it in a novel way—pushing and pulling their goods and children in handcarts some 1,300 miles from Iowa to Utah. Caught in early winter storms in Wyoming, 200 members of these two companies died along the trail.
The plights of these emigrant groups have been addressed by different historians in different ways; this book is the first to examine the tragedies in terms of biology. Grayson shows that who lived or died can largely be explained by age, sex, and family ties. His investigation reveals what happens when our cultural mechanisms for dealing with famine and extreme cold are reduced to only what our bodies can provide within structured social contexts. His results are surprising and not always intuitive as he investigates who survived in these life threatening situations.
The plights of these emigrant groups have been addressed by different historians in different ways; this book is the first to examine the tragedies in terms of biology. Grayson shows that who lived or died can largely be explained by age, sex, and family ties. His investigation reveals what happens when our cultural mechanisms for dealing with famine and extreme cold are reduced to only what our bodies can provide within structured social contexts. His results are surprising and not always intuitive as he investigates who survived in these life threatening situations.
[more]
Shadows in the Valley
A Cultural History of Illness, Death, and Loss in New England, 1840-1916
Alan Swedlund
University of Massachusetts Press, 2009
How does the experience of sickness, death, and loss change over time? We know that the incidence and virulence of particular diseases have varied from one period to another, as has their medical treatment. But what was it like for the individuals who suffered and died from those illnesses, for the health practitioners and institutions that attended to them, and for the families who buried and mourned them?
In Shadows in the Valley, Alan Swedlund addresses these questions by closely examining the history of mortality in several small communities in western Massachusetts from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century—from just before the acceptance of the germ theory of disease through the early days of public health reform in the United States. This was a time when most Americans lived in rural areas or small towns rather than large cities. It was also a time when a wide range of healing practices was available to the American public, and when the modern form of Western medicine was striving for dominance and authority. As Swedlund shows, this juncture of competing practices and ideologies provides a rich opportunity for exploring the rise of modern medicine and its impact on the everyday lives of ordinary Americans.
To indicate how individuals in different stages of their lives were exposed to varying assaults on their health, the book is structured in a way that superimposes what the author calls "life-course time" onto chronological time. Thus the early chapters look at issues of infancy and childhood in the 1840s and 1850s and the last chapters at the problems of old age after 1900. The reader becomes familiar with specific individuals and families as they cope with the recurrent loss of children, struggle to understand the causes of new contagions, and seek to find meaning in untimely death. By using a broad time frame and a narrow geographical lens, Swedlund is able to engage with both the particularities and generalities of evolving medical knowledge and changing practice, and to highlight the differences in personal as well as collective responses to illness and loss.
In Shadows in the Valley, Alan Swedlund addresses these questions by closely examining the history of mortality in several small communities in western Massachusetts from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century—from just before the acceptance of the germ theory of disease through the early days of public health reform in the United States. This was a time when most Americans lived in rural areas or small towns rather than large cities. It was also a time when a wide range of healing practices was available to the American public, and when the modern form of Western medicine was striving for dominance and authority. As Swedlund shows, this juncture of competing practices and ideologies provides a rich opportunity for exploring the rise of modern medicine and its impact on the everyday lives of ordinary Americans.
To indicate how individuals in different stages of their lives were exposed to varying assaults on their health, the book is structured in a way that superimposes what the author calls "life-course time" onto chronological time. Thus the early chapters look at issues of infancy and childhood in the 1840s and 1850s and the last chapters at the problems of old age after 1900. The reader becomes familiar with specific individuals and families as they cope with the recurrent loss of children, struggle to understand the causes of new contagions, and seek to find meaning in untimely death. By using a broad time frame and a narrow geographical lens, Swedlund is able to engage with both the particularities and generalities of evolving medical knowledge and changing practice, and to highlight the differences in personal as well as collective responses to illness and loss.
[more]
Spectacular Death
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and (Un)Representability
Edited by Tristanne Connolly
Intellect Books, 2011
A collection of essays on the medical and social articulation of death, this anthologyconsiders to what extent a subject as elusive as death can be examined. Though it touches us all, we can perceive it only in life—with the predictable result that we treat it either as a clinical or social problem to be managed or as a phenomenon to be studied quantitatively.
This volume goes beyond these models to self-reflexively question how the management of death is organized and motivated and the ways that death is at once feared and embraced. Drawing on the very latest in the medical humanities, Spectacular Death gives us an enlightening new perspective on death from the classical world to the twenty-first century.
[more]
Swing Low, Sweet Chariot
The Mortality Cost of Colonizing Liberia in the Nineteenth Century
Antonio McDaniel
University of Chicago Press, 1995
In the early nineteenth century, thousands of emancipated and freeborn blacks from the United States returned to Africa to colonize the area now known as Liberia. In this, the first systematic study of the demographic impact of this move on the migrants, Antonio McDaniel finds that the health of migrant populations depends on the adaptability of the individuals in the group, not on their race.
McDaniel compares the mortality rates of the emigrants to those of other migrants to tropical areas. He finds that, contrary to popular belief, black immigrants during this period died at unprecedented rates. Moreover, he shows that though the emigrant's mortality levels were exceptionally high, their mortality patterns were consistent with those of other populations.
McDaniel concludes that the greater the variance between the environment left and the environment entered, the higher the probability of contracting a new disease, and, in some cases, of death from these diseases. Additionally, a migrant's health can be affected by dietary changes, differences in local pathogens, inappropriate immunities, and increased risk of accidents due to unfamiliar surroundings.
McDaniel compares the mortality rates of the emigrants to those of other migrants to tropical areas. He finds that, contrary to popular belief, black immigrants during this period died at unprecedented rates. Moreover, he shows that though the emigrant's mortality levels were exceptionally high, their mortality patterns were consistent with those of other populations.
McDaniel concludes that the greater the variance between the environment left and the environment entered, the higher the probability of contracting a new disease, and, in some cases, of death from these diseases. Additionally, a migrant's health can be affected by dietary changes, differences in local pathogens, inappropriate immunities, and increased risk of accidents due to unfamiliar surroundings.
[more]
Tired of Weeping
Mother Love, Child Death, and Poverty in Guinea-Bissau
Jonina Einarsdottir
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004
In this comprehensive and provocative study of maternal reactions to child death in Guinea-Bissau, West Africa, anthropologist Jónína Einarsdóttir challenges the assumption that mothers in high-poverty societies will neglect their children and fail to mourn their deaths as a survival strategy. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted from 1993 to 1998 among the matrilineal Papel, who reside in the Biombo region, this work includes theoretical discussion of reproductive practices, conceptions of children, childcare customs, interpretations of diseases and death, and infanticide. Einarsdóttir also brings compelling narratives of life experiences and reflections of Papel women.
[more]
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