Ruth McManus

Death in a Global Age

Introduction: Death is Integral to Life Perspectives and Theories on Death and Dying The Social Organisation of Dying and Death: A New Paradigm Emerges Patterns in Life and Death: Shifting Demographic Trends Re-Shape Life Expectancies The Death Industries: Bespoke My Death Funerary Rites: A Decent Send-Off Grief Mass Death: Global Imaginaries Religion: The De-Secularisation of Spiritual Life and Death? Representations Of Mortality: Watching Real Death Is Good? Conclusion: Death in a Global Age

Final arrangements: examining debt and distress

Abstract Prevailing discourses condemn funerals as a costly distress purchase where funeral directors have greedily preyed upon funeral arrangers’ grief laden vulnerability. They explain funerals as distress purchases and so debt as the outcome of irrational decisions made while emotionally overwhelmed. These discourses ignore how people might use funeral purchases in dealing with the experience of death as they obscure rather than explain the emotionally infused decision-making that incurs funeral debt. This paper aims to shed light on this aspect of funeral purchases through a New Zealand-based empirical investigation of how intense feelings connect with decision-making associated with funeral cost and debt. The examination highlights that arranging a funeral, rather than being a hurried, ill-informed, choice-limited, emotionally overwhelming distress purchase, is a complex socio-emotional process that crystallises multiple affects into the culturally sanctioned emotion of responsibility, itself mobilised on class lines embedded in existing societal attitudes to debt and socio-economic structures.

Restoration and Loss after Disaster: Applying the Dual Process Model of Coping in Bereavement

ABSTRACT The article asks whether disasters that destroy life but leave the material infrastructure relatively intact tend to prompt communal coping focusing on loss, while disasters that destroy significant material infrastructure tend to prompt coping through restoration/rebuilding. After comparing memorials to New Zealand’s Christchurch earthquake and Pike River mine disasters, we outline circumstances in which collective restorative endeavor may be grassroots, organized from above, or manipulated, along with limits to effective restoration. We conclude that bereavement literature may need to take restoration more seriously, while disaster literature may need to take loss more seriously.

Contested meanings of recovery: a critical exploration of the Canterbury earthquakes–voices from the social sciences

The Canterbury earthquakes of 2010–2012 have been generation shaping. People living and working in and around the city during this time have had their lives and social landscapes changed forever. The earthquake response, recovery and rebuild efforts have highlighted unheralded social strengths and vulnerabilities within individuals, organisations, communities and country writ large. It is imperative that the social sciences stand up to be counted among the myriad academic research, commentary and analysis. The purpose of this Kōtuitui special issue, ‘Contested meanings of recovery’, is to address a significant gap in New Zealand’s disaster literature, wherein the voices, perspectives and analyses of those living through disaster situations have become material for, rather than contributors to, the knowledge base and debates in literature. One of the key challenges as editors has been how best to arrange the order of papers for this special issue. Each possible order emphasises particular themes over others. Given this overarching focus of the collection, we organised the papers in terms of how they articulated the contested nature of recovery. The first three papers can be brought together through the theme of preparedness. As each explores specific sets of relationships between authorities and already existing and deeply embedded communities, the limits to and underlying power relations of existing models and practices of preparedness are laid bare. ‘Ngā Mōwaho: an analysis of Māori responses to the Christchurch earthquakes’ (Phibbs et al. 2015) generously offers routes to effective inclusion as away forward from themarginalisation and missed opportunities embedded in the emergency planning approach enacted through Civil Defence protocols when the earthquakes began. ‘Clergy views on their role in city resilience’ (Brogt et al. 2015) likewise points out the missed opportunities that come from approaching affected communities geographically, and as vulnerable and therefore helpless, rather than as already standing networks of support (as is found in faith-based communities) that feed across geographic, class and cultural differences. ‘Children with disabilities and disaster preparedness: a case study of Christchurch’ (Ronoh et al. 2015) emphasises that while always already constituted as a special and particularly vulnerable group, childrenwith disabilities and their care support networks have significant insight into and solutions to offer to bridge the gaps, contradictions and unintended exclusions generated in the spaces between generic disaster preparedness tools such as ‘drop, cover and hold’ and the realities of continuing care through emergency situations. The second grouping of papers shifts emphasis as they push against the framing of resilience and vulnerability as mutually exclusive, and recovery as a process that can be socially engineered through pre-organised disaster preparedness protocols.

Changing Ways of Death in Twentieth-Century Australia: War, Medicine and the Funeral Business. By Pat Jalland (Sydney, University of New South Wales Press, 2006, viii plus 409 pp.)

clude essays from both white and black male voices to broaden the perspective. Hopefully, the editors will consider that addition to any revised edition. Notwithstanding this criticism, this is the first serious collection of essays to be published on this important contemporary African American figure. These excellent essays examine the ingredients behind her triumph as a television talk show host, film and play producer, magazine publisher, and self-help guru. I must admit that as an African American historian who once criticized the content of Winfrey’s show and her approach, these essays forced me to revaluate her representation of blackness and led me to better appreciate her ability and indeed her talent to thrive in a white-dominated profession. Harris and Watson’s book is intellectually stimulating and frankly a must-read for those curious about the nature of the “Winfrey phenomenon.”