Death, modernity, and the body
Subtitle: Sweden 1870-1940
By: Eva Åhrén ; translated by Daniel W. Olson.
Series: Rochester studies in medical history; Rochester studies in medical history
Publisher: University of Rochester Press
Published: 2009
Place of publication: Rochester, N.Y
Language: eng
Number of pages: 215
ISBN-13: 9781580463126
Subjects: Funeral rites and ceremonies -- Sweden -- History; Mourning customs -- Sweden -- History; Human body -- Social aspects -- Sweden; Human body -- Symbolic aspects -- Sweden; Sweden -- Social life and customs
Work titles: Doden, kroppen och moderniteten.
Description: "Originally published in Swedish in 2002, Death, Modernity, and the Body explores the impact of modernization on customs and practices surrounding the dead body in Sweden in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This period of intense social and cultural change transformed Sweden from an agricultural society to a modern industrial state. The book focuses on five arenas: medical research and education, displays of the dead body for entertainment purposes, funerary preparations of the body, memorial photography, and cremation." "The book takes an original approach to the history of death in modern society by focusing on the dead body in intersecting cultural domains. Medical, scientific, and technological history are thereby connected to popular culture, social and political history, as well as ethnography and anthropology. The scholarly literature on the history of death is disproportionately focused on the Anglophone world, France, and Germany. This study contributes to the scholarship by examining the case of Sweden, where modernization was exceptionally rapid and pervasive, and full of interesting particularities."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: The modernization of death; title: On the usefulness of the dead; title: Death on display; title: Preparing the dead body; title: Picturing the dead; title: Purifying flames; title: Abjection and modern rituals.