Announcement: Book Talk – Necropolitics of the Ordinary: Death and Grieving in Contemporary Singapore
Jan 29, 2025 3:00 PM, Moore Hall 258 and ZOOM
Registration Here
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.
Date&Time: Jan 29, 2025 3:00 PM
Location: Moore Hall 258 and Zoom
About the Book
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.
Praise for the Book
“The treatment of the dead in Singapore is transforming with sometimes violent
rapidity. Ruth Toulson brings us into the mortuaries, the embalming of autopsied
bodies, and the contentious exhuming of graves through careful, vivid portraits
and an enthralling narrative touch.”
Caitlin Doughty, author of From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good
Death
“As the state razes its burial grounds and forces the dead into high-rise
columbaria, the transformation of Singapore’s necroscape has been as radical as
everyday. With deft analytics and soulful ethnography, Toulson takes us into the
politics of new styled corpses, funerals, and graves. Showcasing the refusal to let
mortuary ritual die, Necropolitics of the Ordinary takes a dazzling tour through the
destruction of the mortuary past into the revolutionary forms emerging today
alongside the creative care given the dead by new-age professionals.”
Anne Allison, author of Being Dead Otherwise
About the Author
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.
Don’t miss this opportunity to engage with Dr. Toulson’s groundbreaking work and gain new insights into the politics of death and memory in contemporary Singapore.