000			01949nam a22002297a 4500
005			20251111144710.0
008			251111b |||||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
020			_a9780295753331
028			_aBrijwasi Book Distributors _bH-87, Lalita Park, Laxmi Nagar, Delhi _cBW/000326 _d4/11/2025
082			_a306.90 TOU
100			_aToulson, Ruth E.
245			_aNecropolitics of the Ordinary _b: Death and Grieving in Contemporary Singapore. _c/Ruth E. Toulson.
260			_a, Singapore _b: University of Washington Press _c, 2024.
300			_axvi, 178p. _c: 24cm.
365			_b2174
520			_aCemeteries 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.
650			_aNecropolitics
650			_aDeath and Grieving
650			_aPolitical contestation
700			_aRuth E. Toulson
942			_cBOOK
999			_c66608 _d66608