{"product_id":"necropolitics-of-the-ordinary-death-and-grieving-in-contemporary-singapore-9780295753331","title":"Necropolitics of the Ordinary: Death and Grieving in Contemporary Singapore","description":"\u003cp\u003e \u003cb\u003eCan a state make its people forget the dead?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eCemeteries have become sites of acute political contestation in the city-state of Singapore. Confronted with high population density and rapid economic growth, the government has ordered the destruction of all but one burial ground, forcing people to exhume their family members. In this ethnography of Chinese funeral parlors and cemeteries, anthropologist and trained mortician Ruth E. Toulson demonstrates this as part of a larger shift to transform a Daoist-infused obsession with ancestors into a sterile, more easily controlled \"Protestant\" Buddhism. Further, in a context where the dead remain central to family life, forced exhumation tears the social fabric, turning ancestors into ghosts. Using death ritual and grieving as interrogative lenses, Toulson explores the scope of and resistance to state power over the dead, laying bare the legacies of colonialism and consequences of whirlwind capitalist development. In doing so, she offers a new anthropology of death, one both more personal and politicized. Written in accessible prose rich with ethnographic detail, the book is suitable for undergraduate teaching in anthropology, Asian studies, religious studies, sociology, and history.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eRuth E. Toulson is an anthropologist and faculty member of the Department of Humanistic Studies at Maryland Institute College of Art. She is coeditor of \u003ci\u003eThe Materiality of Mourning: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Cambridge Handbook of the Anthropology of Death\u003c\/i\u003e (forthcoming).\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"University of Washington Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50927126479122,"sku":"9780295753331","price":34.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_796b5551-fe8a-4ecf-ad5f-64a11936b5fa.jpg?v=1738983934","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/necropolitics-of-the-ordinary-death-and-grieving-in-contemporary-singapore-9780295753331","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}