Necropolitics of the Ordinary: Death and Grieving in Contemporary Singapore

＂In this ethnography of Chinese funeral parlors and cemeteries, anthropologist and trained mortician Ruth Toulson documents a revolution in the way death is ritualized and grieved. Its context is the crowded city-state of Singapore, where cemeteries have become sites of acute political contestation. Confronted with high population density and rapid economic growth, the Singaporean government has ordered the destruction of every burial ground but one, forcing families to exhume the remains of ancestors. Written in accessible prose and with rich ethnographic detail, the book is suitable for undergraduate teaching in anthropology, Asian studies, religious studies, death studies, sociology, and history＂--

Ruth E. Toulson is an anthropologist and faculty member of the Department of Humanistic Studies at Maryland Institute College of Art. She is coeditor of The Materiality of Mourning: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach and The Cambridge Handbook of the Anthropology of Death (forthcoming).