Social Memory, Identity, and Death: Anthropological Perspectives on Mortuary Rituals

This current volume is a response to those who envision the four fields of anthropology as mutually exclusive entities, and all the papers demonstrate the efficacy of a cross-field or cross-disciplinary approach to analyzing rituals associated with death. The authors engage both ethnographic and archaeological perspectives on mortuary practices, and to describe the interdependence of crafting social memories and identities in mortuary practices, a subject that has received considerable attention from both archaeologists and ethnographers. The powerful combination of ethnographic and archaeological research into mortuary practices in the same volume highlights the interconnections between the archaeology and ethnography and illustrates an exciting dialogue between archaeologists and ethnographers. This rich collection of archaeological and ethnographic case studies of death, identity, and social memory illustrates how much archaeologists can learn from ethnographers, and ethnographers from archaeologists.