Here are 100 books that Celebrations of Death fans have personally recommended if you like
Celebrations of Death.
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I grew up in a family of beautiful, accomplished women at a time when most women stayed home. But the spectacular women in my mother's family also suffered spectacularly, and I was determined to understand family life at its very roots. I studied anthropology and, over a 15-year period, lived in a remote part of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea among a group of Gimi women who spent most of their time apart from men. I shared women's difficult daily lives, participated in their separate rites, learned their myths, and, through my writing, have devoted myself to giving them voices of their own.
A classic of ethnographic description and symbolic analysis based upon fieldwork among the Ndembu of Zambia—a must read for anyone interested in sociological and psychological implications of ritual belief and practice in a small-scale, non-literate, kinship-based society.
A stellar example of what is lost by cancelling "colonialist" literature and discarding the very concepts of "culture" and "religion" as relics of Western intellectual imperialism.
In 10 essays on color symbolism, circumcision rites, rites of passage, social dynamics, and more, Turner lays the groundwork for his proposition that ritual is the key to religion and religion is the key to culture.
A pioneering work of high quality, this collection of anthropological studies provides one of the most detailed records available for an African society-or indeed for any group-of the semantics of ritual symbolism. It combines unusually detailed ethnographic description, based upon field work among the Ndembu of Zambia, with remarkable theoretical sophistication. Professor Turner describes the ritual phenomena in terms both of practice and of their sociological and psychological implications within a preliterate society.
Case histories illustrate the function of ritual in creating community harmony. Data on circumcision rites and medical practices and an essay on color classification have wide implications…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I grew up in a family of beautiful, accomplished women at a time when most women stayed home. But the spectacular women in my mother's family also suffered spectacularly, and I was determined to understand family life at its very roots. I studied anthropology and, over a 15-year period, lived in a remote part of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea among a group of Gimi women who spent most of their time apart from men. I shared women's difficult daily lives, participated in their separate rites, learned their myths, and, through my writing, have devoted myself to giving them voices of their own.
Malinowski's pioneering work on people of the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea still holds a thrill because, after a century, it remains unique in its depth and precision.
Malinowski was an aristocrat and a snob who, like the armchair thinkers he admired, considered himself a scientist after Darwin. But when World War I broke out, as a Pole in London, he risked deportation to Austria-Hungary or internment as an 'enemy alien'.
Instead, Malinowski remained 'stuck' in the Trobriands for the duration of the War where, with the scrupulousness of one trained in math and physics and the intensity of an 'imprisoned' participant-observer, he produced the first firsthand accounts of indigenous life.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been…
I grew up in a family of beautiful, accomplished women at a time when most women stayed home. But the spectacular women in my mother's family also suffered spectacularly, and I was determined to understand family life at its very roots. I studied anthropology and, over a 15-year period, lived in a remote part of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea among a group of Gimi women who spent most of their time apart from men. I shared women's difficult daily lives, participated in their separate rites, learned their myths, and, through my writing, have devoted myself to giving them voices of their own.
The discovery that 'rituals of transition' in the lives of individuals—birth, puberty, marriage, childbirth, death—are structurally the same and analogous to a destabilizing "passage" through 'no man's land'—is an insight of genius.
My enduring 'affection' for ivory tower thinkers comes from having actually applied their ideas among a people in the New Guinea Highlands over a period of 15 years.
The methods of these early masters are sometimes faulty—"shreds and patches" of exotic beliefs and practices are grouped together, torn from their contexts in time and geography—but by trying to extend Charles Darwin’s theory of biological evolution into the realm of culture, they came up with universals of human existence that should never be forgotten.
Folklorist Arnold van Gennep's masterwork, The Rites of Passage, has been a staple of anthropological education for more than a century. First published in French in 1909, and translated into English by the University of Chicago Press in 1960, this landmark book explores how the life of an individual in any society can be understood as a succession of stages: birth, puberty, marriage, parenthood, advancement to elderhood, and, finally, death. Van Gennep's command of the ethnographic record enabled him to discern crosscultural patterns in rituals of separation, transition, and incorporation. With compelling precision, he elaborated the terms that would both…
Crossing is a vividly human re-imagining of the love, sacrifices, and accomplishments that two Chinese brothers - American Immigrants - experience as they travel to California to build the Transcontinental Railroad.
I grew up in a family of beautiful, accomplished women at a time when most women stayed home. But the spectacular women in my mother's family also suffered spectacularly, and I was determined to understand family life at its very roots. I studied anthropology and, over a 15-year period, lived in a remote part of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea among a group of Gimi women who spent most of their time apart from men. I shared women's difficult daily lives, participated in their separate rites, learned their myths, and, through my writing, have devoted myself to giving them voices of their own.
This book consists of two exquisite essays, "The Collective Representation of Death" and "The Pre-Eminence of the Right Hand: A Study in Religious Polarity," written by an "armchair" philosopher searching for the origins and essence of human existence in exotic places: he looked for the meaning of death in the mortuary rites of the Dyak in Borneo; and the source of dualistic thinking in human anatomy.
The excitement of these works comes from recognizing ourselves in others, distant in time and space. They serve as a corrective and departure from the current exaggeration of cultures' uniqueness and national identities that lead, ultimately, to indifference about the fates of other peoples.
First published in English 1960. The historical value of Hertz's writings is that they are a representative example of the culmination of two centuries of development of sociological thought in France, from Montesquieu to Durkheim and his pupils. In the intervening years since publication, that development has grown into the systematic comparative study of primitive institutions, based on a great body of ethnographic facts from all over the world: in effect social anthropology.
I love zombie movies. I am also an Egyptologist. The dead affect us in profound ways every day, even without being semi-animated corpses searching for brains. I have always been keenly interested in the relationships we have with our dead, be it Halloween, Día de los Muertos, or an urn on a mantle. The dead are with us and inform our lives. The same was true in ancient Egypt. And to me, this made the ancient Egyptians feel very familiar and accessible. They, too, were anxious about death. They, too, grieved when loved ones were gone and developed practices and beliefs that kept the dead ‘alive’.
Dr. Harrington offers an accessible yet meticulous overview of the role of the dead in ancient Egyptian society, with a general, but not exclusive, focus on the New Kingdom. Her book was published while I was just starting my dissertation and it was inspiring to see a project that dealt with similar themes being published. I admit, I also love this book because it was the first time someone ever made reference to me and my research in a footnote. It made me feel like my work was worthwhile and for that, I am eternally grateful to Dr. Harrington.
Living with the Dead presents a detailed analysis of ancestor worship in Egypt, using a diverse range of material, both archaeological and anthropological, to examine the relationship between the living and the dead. Iconography and terminology associated with the deceased reveal indistinct differences between the blessedness and malevolence and that the potent spirit of the dead required constant propitiation in the form of worship and offerings. A range of evidence is presented for mortuary cults that were in operation throughout Egyptian history and for the various places, such as the house, shrines, chapels and tomb doorways, where the living could…
We are Egyptologists with over six decades of combined experience translating hieroglyphic and hieratic texts and exploring the deserts of Egypt. We are passionate about bringing ancient Egypt and its incredible religious beliefs to life, from translating the funerary compositions in the royal tombs of the Valley of the Kings to writing a new biography of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, often branded the "heretics” of their time. One of our most exciting recent discoveries was the earliest monumental hieroglyphic inscription, a five thousand two hundred and fifty-year-old billboard! We share our adventures on our Instagram @vintage_egyptologist—enjoy the vintage fashion and be enlightened by the Egyptological captions.
Who doesn’t want to read about ancient Egyptian cannibalism? The title seems sensational, since no actual cannibalism is involved—at least as we might conceive of it in the world of the living—but Eyre employs the standard designation for the specific spell in the Pyramid Texts, the oldest major corpus of religious texts to survive from antiquity. A reader new to ancient Egypt might well read the translation of the Cannibal Hymn at the beginning of the book and be utterly confused. By the end of the book, however, the secrets of this 4300 year old text, including its relationship to butchery rituals and the mundane aspects of animal husbandry, are revealed.
The text of the Cannibal Hymn is here examined in its performative and cultural context. In its verbal recreation of a butchery ritual, style and format are typical of the oral-recitational poetry of pharaonic Egypt. It poses questions about the nature of rites of passage and rituals of sacrifice.
Almost Home is a fictional retelling of the last great tragedy of the Civil War.
In late April 1865, almost 2,000 newly freed Union prisoners of war are packed onto the steamer Sultana, in poor repair and with a listed capacity of 376 passengers. Among them are four Indiana soldiers…
I love novels that bring people together who would otherwise never meet each other. I will never forget the connection between Ponyboy and Cherry in The Outsidersor between Bryon and Cathy in That Was Then, This Is Now.Sometimes it’s undeniably romantic, and sometimes it isn’t as clear. The first time I ever missed a character was when I got to the end of those books. I remember thinking, I want to create a world that people will miss when the story is over. I also remember thinking, I will never stop reading books like this. Here are a few that I’ve found along the way.
I had to pick this book because it is air travel that brings Hadley and Oliver together. In this case, they are on a flight together to London where Hadley’s father is getting married after a difficult divorce from her mother. Hadley believes she is dealing with the worst possible thing, but she later learns what brings Oliver to London which is something far more difficult. It is the time on the plane when everything else fades away that draws me to this book. If they hadn’t ended up on the same flight, they never would have met.
Who would have guessed that four minutes could change everything?
Imagine if she hadn't fogotten the book. Or if there hadn't been traffic on the expressway. Or if she hadn't fumbled the coins for the toll. What if she'd run just that little bit faster and caught the flight she was supposed to be on. Would it have been something else - the weather over the atlantic or a fault with the plane?
Hadley isn't sure if she believes in destiny or fate but, on what is potentially the worst day of each of their lives, it's the quirks of…
I’m an American author and writing teacher for both Harvard and Oxford’s online writing programs. I am also a mother of two who lived three years in a tiny backyard guest house with my family in an effort to focus more on what we love. Editing books is a practice I have honed over decades, and when my family was stuck in a living situation that felt unsustainable, the clearest way forward was for me to ask myself how I might edit our way out of it. It worked! In this book, I share the most valuable eight principles that we learned through the process.
A powerful case for thinking deeply and clearly about what legacies we leave behind for those we love.
Leder suggests that an ethical will—unlike an ordinary will—be a summary of our life’s wisdom. Asking such questions as ‘What do you regret?’ and ‘When did you lead with your heart?’ Leder offers a wise and inspiring way to live a life of value that is a blessing for others to remember.
From the bestselling author of The Beauty of What Remains, a guide to writing a meaningful letter about your life.
Writing an ethical will, a document that includes stories and reflections about your past, is an ancient tradition. It can include joy and regrets, and ultimately becomes both a way to remember a loved one who is gone and a primer on how to live a better, happier life. Beloved Rabbi Steve Leder has helped thousands of people to write their own ethical wills, and in this intimate book helps us write…
My name is Cecilia Ruiz and I am a Mexican author and illustrator living in Brooklyn. Apart from desperately trying to make more books, I teach design and illustration at Queens College and the School of Visual Arts. I’m fascinated by visual storytelling and its evocative power. One of my idols, the French filmmaker Robert Bresson, says that art lies in suggestion. Bresson believed that things should be shown from one single angle that evokes all the other angles without showing them.All the books in this list do that—they show us death but they make us think about the mysterious and poetic ways in which life operates.
This is a book I would have loved to write and illustrate. “The bird was dead when the children found it.” says its opening line.
There are many children’s books that deal with grief and loss but The Dead Bird is one of a kind. The kids in the story didn’t know the bird when it was alive. They only meet the bird after it has died and yet, they have a funeral for it. They sing for a bird that once flew and no longer will. They cry for a life that was, but no longer is.
With child-like simplicity and directness, Robinson’s illustrations capture the human need for ritual and closure in the presence of death.
A New York Times Best Illustrated Book of 2016! This heartwarming classic picture book by beloved children's book author Margaret Wise Brown is beautifully reillustrated for a contemporary audience by the critically acclaimed, award-winning illustrator Christian Robinson. One day, the children find a bird lying on its side with its eyes closed and no heartbeat. They are very sorry, so they decide to say good-bye. In the park, they dig a hole for the bird and cover it with warm sweet-ferns and flowers. Finally, they sing sweet songs to send the little bird on its way.
Creativity, Teaching, and Natural Inspiration
by
Mark Doherty,
I have woven numerous delightful and descriptive true life stories, many from my adventures as an outdoorsman and singer songwriter, into my life as a high school English teacher. I think you'll find this work both entertaining as well as informative, and I hope you enjoy the often lighthearted repartee…
Each summer when I was small, I visited my gram. During the day we would go off on one adventure or another—and at night, she enticed me to sleep with the promise of a story. Most often, she read Grimm’s fairytales to me. Full of darkness and also hope (!), they were, and still are, some of my very favorites. And they inspire what I most enjoy writing and reading.
In this fantastical story, which is a companion to Furthermore, a lonesome girl scrubs the skin of the dead to ready souls for the afterlife. (Sounds properly spooky, doesn’t it? I love when books give me chills!) And when things are especially dark, as they are for Laylee, friendship shines all the brighter once it is found.
Our story begins on a frosty night . . . Laylee can barely remember the happier times before her beloved mother died. Before her father, driven by grief, lost his wits (and his way) and she was left as the sole remaining mordeshoor in the village of Whichwood, destined…
