San Antonio College Library

Information on the various funeral customs in the world, particularly those conducted by people who were acquainted with the deceased. Matsunami (international cultural studies, Ueno Gakuen U., Japan) began collecting the information after he was asked to hold memorial services for fatalities from several major plane crashes, and mediated between survivors of many countries and cultures and the airline companies over appropriate measures to be taken....

"Funerary practices have long been a classic topic of anthropological inquiry, which has tended to focus on death rituals as expressions and reinforcers of community ties and values. In this book, the author looks at funerals as an urban business, based on her fieldwork at a large Japanese funeral company. Her central theme is the progressive commercialization of what once were primarily religious rituals." "The book depicts the process of contemporary...

"This book is an exploration in social history, showing how the practices surrounding death and burial can illuminate urban culture and experience. Vanessa Harding focuses on the crowded and turbulent worlds of early modern London and Paris, and makes use of rich contemporary documentation to compare and contrast their experience of dealing with the dead. The two cities shared many of the problems and pressures of urban life, including high mortality...

"During the twentieth century, Russia, Ukraine, and other territories of the former Soviet Union experienced more bloodshed and violent death than anywhere else on earth: fifty million dead, in an epic of destruction that encompassed war, revolution, famine, epidemic, and political purges. How did Russians cope with loss on such a scale and how does such a society mourn? In Night of Stone, Catherine Merridale asks Russians the most difficult questions...

Drawing on the sociological theory of Max Weber, this volume charts the significance of death to the emerging religious cults in the pre-Christian and early Christian world.