Funeral Culture AIDS, Work, and Cultural Change in an African Kingdom [Hardcover]

Contemporary forms of living and dying in Swaziland cannot be understood apart from the global HIV/AIDS pandemic, according to anthropologist Casey Golomski. In Africas last absolute monarchy, the story of 15 years of global collaboration in treatment and intervention is also one of ordinary people facing the work of caring for the sick and dying and burying the dead. Golomskis ethnography shows how AIDS posed challenging questions about the value of life, culture, and materiality to drive new forms and practices for funerals. Many of these forms and practicesnewly catered funeral feasts, an expanded market for life insurance, and the kingdoms first crematoriumare now conspicuous across the landscape and culturally disruptive in a highly traditionalist setting. This powerful and original account details how these new matters of death, dying, and funerals have become entrenched in peoples everyday lives and become part of a quest to create dignity in the wake of a devastating epidemic.

Casey Golomski is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Hampshire. His work has appeared in journals such asMaterial Religion;Social Dynamics;Culture, Health, and Sexuality; andAmerican Ethnologist.

Funeral Cultureis an intimately observed portrait of changing burial rites in a country struggling under the burden of HIV. Golomski at once plunges into the rhythms of everyday life in Swaziland and gestures out toward broader questions about the work of kinship and death. Brimming with colorful characters and rich descriptions, written in welcoming and accessible prose: this is ethnography at its best. A marvelous accomplishment.

Original and insightful, GolomskisFuneral Cultureis a vivid example of the work of a new generation of Africanist anthropologists. It posits a lucid and compelling account of the work that funerals do to both reproduce and change culture in a context that, at the timelã‡