Birth and Death: Studying Ritual, Embodied Practices and Spirituality at the Start and End of Life

• Format: eBook
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI - Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute 2022
• Subjects: Religion & beliefs; abortion; Africa; African birth ritual; ancestor worship; Ars moriendi; art; bereaved parents; bereavement; birth; birth altar; birthing justice; body-modification; ceremony; child; childbirth; Chinese birth ritual; contemporary art; cultural practices; death; death rituals; death teacher; Dimasa; embodiment; existential; function of ritualized acts; funeral market; grief; humanism; identity; indigenous birth ritual; infrastructural breaks; life-cycle rituals; material culture; maternity care; memory making; metaphor; miscarriage; mother; motherhood; n/a; neonatal intensive care unit (NICU); new-born; nonreligion; nonreligious; nurses; parent support group; personhood; pregnancy; pregnancy loss; priest; qualitative research; re-sacralization; religion; rite of passage; ritual; ritual performance; ritualization; ritualizing; rituals; sacred; secular; secularity; self-construction; sharing death; sociology of repair; spirituality; stillbirth; symbol; tattoo; The Netherlands; traditional birth; urban
• Online Access: Open Access: DOAB: description of the publication; Open Access: DOAB, download the publication
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (158 p.)
• ISBN: 9783036554150; 9783036554167; books978-3-0365-5416-7
• Access: Open Access

Birth and death are both profound life transitions, revealing deeply existential, social, and spiritual questions in addition to various forms of ritual and ritualizing. While birth and death are often seen as opposites, this edited volume shows that the start and end of life share many ambiguities. They represent a beginning and an end, and lead to ritualizing as well as embodied forms of spirituality. Throughout the book, the authors discuss theoretical and empirical perspectives on rituals at birth and death from multidisciplinary perspectives, such as religious studies, anthropology, philosophy, and sociology. By doing so, they shed light on new forms of ritualizing, as well as on traditional rituals.