Organizer: The Center for Southeast Asian Studies at UH Manoa

Type/Location: Hybrid / Honolulu, HI

Description:

The Center for Southeast Asian Studies is excited to host a book talk with Dr. Ruth E. Toulson, author of the newly released book, Necropolitics of the Ordinary: Death and Grieving in Contemporary Singapore.

Abstract:

Can a state make its people forget the dead?Cemeteries 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 uses death ritual and grieving as interrogative lenses, exploring 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.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Ruth E. Toulson is an anthropologist and faculty member in the Department of Humanistic Studies at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She is the co-editor of The Materiality of Mourning: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach and the forthcoming The Cambridge Handbook of the Anthropology of Death.

Registration Link:

To attend the event virtually, please register here.