Mortality, Mourning and Mortuary Practices in Indigenous Australia

Drawing on ethnography of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities across Australia, this volume focuses on the current ways in which indigenous people confront and manage various aspects of death. The contributors construct rich accounts of indigenous practices and beliefs and engage with questions relating to the frequent experience of death within the context of unprecedented change and premature mortality.

Drawing on ethnography of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities across Australia, Mortality, Mourning and Mortuary Practices in Indigenous Australia focuses on the current ways in which indigenous people confront and manage various aspects of death. The contributors employ their contemporary and long-term anthropological fieldwork with indigenous Australians to construct rich accounts of indigenous practices and beliefs and to engage with questions relating to the frequent experience of death within the context of unprecedented change and premature mortality. The volume makes use of extensive empirical material to address questions of inequality with specific reference to mortality, thus contributing to the anthropology of indigenous Australia whilst attending to its theoretical, methodological and political concerns. As such, it will appeal not only to anthropologists but also to those interested in social inequality, the social and psychosocial consequences of death, and the conceptualization and manipulation of the relationships between the living and the dead.