Becoming Dead: The Entangled Agencies of the Dearly Departed

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

This article introduces the themes of the essays in this special issue in juxtaposition with illustrative comparative examples, including one from my work with Samburu pastoralists in northern Kenya. As the title suggests, at the core of the 2003 AAA session of which these articles represent a subset, was a concern with personhood and the entanglement of agencies that occurs in the practices surrounding death. Examining death directly and as its own optic (in the words of Nadia Seremetakis), these articles illuminate the varied implications of death as process. As death erupts unwanted and forcefully into social relations, the ontological status of dead persons wavers uncertainly—a process that can have surprising implications for memory and personhood. Thus, as the session from which these articles are drawn demonstrates, death may demand intensive and loving memory work, but it may as well result in deliberate erasure, in the total annihilation of persons. Thus, death represents a rupture not only of the social fabric but also of the contours of personhood.