Article written by 2013 Critical Approaches to Human Rights Fellow Alexa Hagerty, featured in Social Anthropology Vol. 22 No. 4: 

Home funerals are a small social movement in which American families care for their dead at home. This article argues that home funerals offer a generative view of the tension between the body as biological and social construction, matter and meaning, object and subject. In home funerals, the dead body is enacted as possessing a fading spark of agency and subjectivity, animating the dead against the grain of medical and scientific conceptions of the corpse as inert object. Home funerals provocatively engage questions about the forms of care and communication available between the living and the dead.

Publication Details

Title
Speak Softly to the Dead: The Uses of Enchantment in American Home Funerals
Authors
Hagerty, Alexa
Publisher
John Wiley & Sons
Publish Date
November 2014
Citation
Hagerty, Alexa, Speak Softly to the Dead: The Uses of Enchantment in American Home Funerals (John Wiley & Sons, November 2014).
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