Calling all academic colleagues interested in death, design and enlightenment ideas, I encourage you to submit a paper to our panel at next year’s ASA conference to be held in Edinburgh!
CFP for ‘Designing Death: Fashioning ends of life and beyond’ panel
ASA2014: Decennial Conference
Edinburgh
19th-22nd June 2014
Deadline for paper abstract submission is 5th January 2014.
Paper abstracts of 250 words maximum submitted via the web link below. None members and students are welcome to submit a paper abstract to our panel. For further information see:
http://www.nomadit.co.uk/asa/asa2014/panels.php5?PanelID=2758
We look forward to hearing from you!
Dr Hannah Rumble and Dr Arnar Arnason
(Dept. of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen)
Panel Summary:
This panel presents research from across disciplines and cultures to discuss the many ways in which the legacy of the Enlightenment endures or is challenged in funerary practices and expectations surrounding end-of-life.
It could be argued that an enduring legacy of the Enlightenment is the persistent ideological emphasis upon reason and individualism rather than faith, tradition and emotion in Western public and cultural life. Such an emphasis, always suspect, is thrown into particularly acute relief when confronting mortality. This panel seeks to bring together scholars’ work from across disciplines and cultures to discuss the many ways in which the legacy of the Enlightenment endures or is challenged in funerary practices and expectations surrounding end-of-life. The Enlightenment’s aim to reform society through reason, to challenge ideas grounded in tradition and faith, and advance knowledge through the scientific method can be exemplified by various cultural designs of death; not least the development of cremation and discourses surrounding suicide, euthanasia and organ donation amongst many other examples. In speaking of designing death we are both alluding to the agency of people in being creators of things or processes that are fashioned in relation to death and dying, as well as what is culturally designed through an encounter with mortality. And in the process of designing an encounter with death, to what extent are beauty, order and harmony qualities that are valued? How are encounters with death and dying both products of the designer and the designed? And how does the legacy of the Enlightenment endure or become obsolete in the process of designing death or in the design itself? We actively encourage an engagement with these questions from a diverse range of disciplinary, theoretical and ethnographic perspectives.
