Brenda Mathijssen

Body disposition encompasses the practices and processes for handling human remains after death. Israel’s current default, state-funded body-disposition policy is accumulative, perpetual burial. Ac...

Despite extensive research on the functions and meanings of ritual, the question of ritual efficacy remains a topic of debate. This paper explores how the concept of worlding can contribute to the study of ritual efficacy. Based on theoretical literature and qualitative research into cremation and perinatal loss, it proposes that rituals can be understood as worlding practices characterized by an entanglement of virtuality and actuality. In rituals, individuals frame a subjunctive time-space, playfully speculating with multiple experiential realities (what could be) while being anchored in the present (what is). The paper demonstrates that this intricate entanglement is key to the self-and-world-making quality of rituals and is crucial to understanding their efficacy. Furthermore, it shows that the value of the concept of worlding lies in its emphasis on embodied experiences, the active nature of our being in the world, and the recognition of power dynamics. Ritual worlding enables individuals to navigate the ambiguities that accompany life and death.

In Chap. 1 Avril Maddrell, Brenda Mathijssen, Yasminah Beebeejaun, Katie McClymont and Danny McNally untangle the embodied, gendered, racialised and institutionalized cremation practices of Hindu communities in three case study towns: Northampton and Swindon in England and Newport in Wales. They argue that attending to questions of (in)adequate funerary infrastructure and norms – including prompt cremation; accommodating ritual requirements for witnessing the charging the cremator; the negotiation of designated sites for the disposition of cremated remains in local rivers; and local bus services – are essential steps to creating and maintaining a sense of inclusiveness, lived citizenship and justice for these communities. The chapter underscores the changing local-national-international mobilities of cremated remains and other evolving practices and beliefs to reflect the role of varied corporeal, material, institutional and religious-emotional (im)mobilities that are instrumental in shaping contemporary Hindu funerary practices and experiences in England and Wales. This raises issues regarding inclusive funerary provision for Hindus in England and Wales, as well as providing conceptual insights regarding the material and spiritual mobilities of the dead, their remains and their mourners.

Birth and death are fundamental human experiences

Fieldwork encounters are not only contingent to biographical subjectivities, but are mediated by a confluence of identity, place and embodiment. This paper offers reflexive accounts of researchers with various socio-cultural and disciplinary backgrounds, who collaborated as a team to examine the varied funerary experiences and needs of established minorities and recent migrants in England and Wales. Focusing on the researchers’ varied personal experiences with death and bereavement and on their performances of minority and majority ethnic and migrant identities, the paper highlights the mediated and embodied nature of fieldwork. It argues that reflection on the various aspects of intersectional researcher identity is necessary for a rigorous fieldwork practice that takes transparency and politics into account. This facilitates a deeper understanding of the positionality of both researchers and interlocutors, and the situated co-production of knowledge. In doing so, the paper illustrates that conducting research with a diverse team of researchers contributes to better understanding the complexity and multifacetedness of social phenomena.

This paper shows how the human corpse can function as an aesthetic-therapeutic for the deceased, the bereaved and for death care professionals. It understands the human corpse as a liminal entity that is characterised by a specific materiality, biography and self-referentiality. Because of these attributes the corpse can be employed as an aesthetic-therapeutic by the bereaved and by death care professionals in response to a death. On the basis of participant observation in the death care industry and qualitative interviews with bereaved people and funeral professionals in the Netherlands, the paper discusses four engagements with the dead body in the period prior to the funeral: i) caring, ii) sustaining, iii) restoring, and iv) disregarding the dead body. Crucially, it shows how such engagements can contribute to the well-being of those involved, including the deceased, who is often understood to be sentient. Furthermore, by focusing on cases where the corpse is disregarded, the paper argues that an aesthetic-therapeutic understanding of the human corpse is hegemonic in the death care industry. The analysis and conclusion offer insights to scholars in the interdisciplinary field of death studies, as well as reflections for practitioners in end-of-life and death care.

Troyer’s Technologies of the Human Corpse explores human relationships with dead bodies from nineteenth century embalming techniques to contemporary transhumanist ideals and tissue transactions. It...

This book explores the funerary culture in the Netherlands through a mixture of photographs, figures and case studies. The nine chapters demonstrate the process of funeralising and ideas about death in the Netherlands, providing an overview of contemporary funerary practices and their changes over time.

Samenvatting van: B.M.H.P. Mathijssen: Making Sense of Death. Ritual Practices and Situational Beliefs of the Recently Bereaved in the Netherlands. Date of defense: June 28, 2017, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.