Death Across Cultures

Helaine Selin was a Faculty Associate and Science Librarian at Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts, USA, from which she retired in 2012. She is the editor of the Encyclopedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures (3rd ed. Springer 2016) and seven books in Springer’s Science Across Cultures series, on Astronomy, Mathematics, Medicine, Nature, Childbirth, Parenting, and Happiness.Robert M. Rakoff, emeritus professor of politics and environmental studies at Hampshire College, received his B.A. from Oberlin College and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Washington in the U.S.He taught at the University of Illinois/Chicago and worked for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development before coming to Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts in 1979.His teaching and research interests include environmental history and policy; the politics of land use; US welfare policy; the culturalconstruction of nature; creative non-fiction writing about the outdoors; and the political economy of farming and rural life.

• The Evolution of Funerary Ritual in Urbanizing China.- Belief in Karma and Mokṣa at the End of Life in India- Death and the Afterlife in Japan.- Return to Nature? Secularism and Politics of Death Space in Hong Kong.- Death and Dying: Belief, Fear and Ritual in Vietnamese Culture.- Negotiating Traditions and Modernity: Chinese Death Rituals in Singapore.- The Bureaucratic Professionalization of Funeral Rites in Tehran’s Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery.- Death and Burial Practices in Contemporary Zulu Culture, South Africa.- Death in Botswana: Life Among the Ashes.- Ancestors and Death: From West Africa to Southwest Europe.- Living Coffins and Death Among the Ga of Ghana.- The Yoruba of Nigeria and the Ontology of Death and Burial.- Transformation of Funeral Rituals in Togo.- Rituals Around Life and Death in Mexico; The Day of the Dead.- Continuity and Ruptures in Brazilian Funeral Rites.- The Right to a Dignified Death in Argentina.- Superstar-Saints and Wandering Souls: The Cemetery as a Cultural Hotspot in Latin American Cities.- He taonga tuku iho: Indigenous End of Life and Death Care Customs of New Zealand Māori.- Communicating with the Dead in an Australian Aboriginal Culture: The Tiwi from Melville and Bathurst Islands.- Death and Dying in American Indian Cultures.- The Beauty of the Afterlife Among the Inuit of Nunavut.- Eternity Calling: Modernity and the Revival of Death and the Afterlife.