Deathpower

Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Cambodia, Erik W. Davis radically reorients approaches toward the nature of Southeast Asian Buddhism's interactions with local religious practice and, by extension, reorients our understanding of Buddhism itself. Through a vivid study of contemporary Cambodian Buddhist funeral rites, he reveals the powerfully integrative role monks play as they care for the dead and negotiate the interplay of non-Buddhist spirits and formal Buddhist customs. Buddhist monks perform funeral rituals rooted in the embodied practices of Khmer rice farmers and the social hierarchies of Khmer culture. The monks' realization of death underwrites key components of the Cambodian social imagination: the distinction between wild death and celibate life, the forest and the field, and moral and immoral forms of power. By connecting the performative aspects of Buddhist death rituals to Cambodian history and everyday life, Davis undermines the theory that Buddhism and rural belief systems necessarily oppose each other. Instead, he shows Cambodian Buddhism to be a robust tradition with ethical and popular components extending throughout Khmer society.

A unique Buddhist tradition, accessible in English for the first time—translations of forty-five Cambodian Dharma songs, with contextualizing essays and a link to audio of stunning vocal performances. Until Nirvana’s Time is the first collection of traditional Cambodian Buddhist literature available in English, presenting original translations of forty-five poems. Introduced, translated, and contextualized by scholar and vocalist Trent Walker, the Dharma songs in this book reveal a distinctive Southeast Asian genre of devotion, mourning, and contemplation. Their soaring melodies have inspired Cambodians for generations, whether in daily prayers or all-night rituals. Trained in oral and written lineages in Cambodia, Walker presents a carefully curated range of poems from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries that capture the transformative wisdom of the Khmer Buddhist tradition. Many of the poems, having been transcribed from old cassette tapes or fragile bark-paper manuscripts, are printed here for the first time. A link to recordings of selected songs in English and Khmer accompanies the book. These frank and compelling poems offer mirrors to our own lives—even as they challenge Buddhist conventions of how to die, how to grieve, and how to repay the ones we love.

Did you know that God wants you to have amazing sex? Join pastor Levi Lusko for a unique and compelling understanding of the power and the pleasure attached to God’s plans for relationships. There is nothing more powerful on earth than the forces of love, sex, and romance. In fact, relationships are a matter of life-and-death importance. But as apps like Tinder foster no-strings-attached sexual encounters, sex is being stripped of any emotional or spiritual significance. So how can you train today for the relationship you want tomorrow? In Swipe Right, Levi Lusko shares with raw honesty from his own life experiences and God’s Word how to: Resist settling for instant pleasure by discovering what your heart really longs for Learn how to avoid and treat sexual scars by careful living today Regret-proof your marriage bed and your deathbed Transform a stagnant marriage by trading predictable nearness for mind-blowing intimacy With equal parts prevention and cure, the book is not just a list of rules to live by but something to live for: God’s powerful plan for our lives. To get there we must learn how to swipe right—to live up in a left, right world—because what we do with sex and romance is one of the most important choices we’ll make. God’s dreams for your life are not intended to kill your joy but to enhance it. Whether you’re fed up with dating and hooking up as usual, tired of being single, numb because of porn and casual sex, or curious about how to improve your marriage, this book is for you.

Death, Power, and Apotheosis in Ancient Egypt uniquely considers how power was constructed, maintained, and challenged in ancient Egypt through mortuary culture and apotheosis, or how certain dead in ancient Egypt became gods. Rather than focus on the imagined afterlife and its preparation, Julia Troche provides a novel treatment of mortuary culture exploring how the dead were mobilized to negotiate social, religious, and political capital in ancient Egypt before the New Kingdom. Troche explores the perceived agency of esteemed dead in ancient Egyptian social, political, and religious life during the Old and Middle Kingdoms (c. 2700–1650 BCE) by utilizing a wide range of evidence, from epigraphic and literary sources to visual and material artifacts. As a result, Death, Power, and Apotheosis in Ancient Egypt is an important contribution to current scholarship in its collection and presentation of data, the framework it establishes for identifying distinguished and deified dead, and its novel argumentation, which adds to the larger academic conversation about power negotiation and the perceived agency of the dead in ancient Egypt.

A thought-provoking examination of death, dying, and the afterlife Prominent scholars present their most recent work about mortuary rituals, grief and mourning, genocide, cyclical processes of life and death, biomedical developments, and the materiality of human corpses in this unique and illuminating book. Interrogating our most common practices surrounding death, the authors ask such questions as: How does the state wrest away control over the dead from bereaved relatives? Why do many mourners refuse to cut their emotional ties to the dead and nurture lasting bonds? Is death a final condition or can human remains acquire agency? The book is a refreshing reassessment of these issues and practices, a source of theoretical inspiration in the study of death. With contributions written by an international team of experts in their fields, A Companion to the Anthropology of Death is presented in six parts and covers such subjects as: Governing the Dead in Guatemala; After Death Communications (ADCs) in North America; Cryonic Suspension in the Secular Age; Blood and Organ Donation in China; The Fragility of Biomedicine; and more. A Companion to the Anthropology of Death is a comprehensive and accessible volume and an ideal resource for senior undergraduate and graduate students in courses such as Anthropology of Death, Medical Anthropology, Anthropology of Violence, Anthropology of the Body, and Political Anthropology. Written by leading international scholars in their fields A comprehensive survey of the most recent empirical research in the anthropology of death A fundamental critique of the early 20th century founding fathers of the anthropology of death Cross-cultural texts from tribal and industrial societies The collection is of interest to anyone concerned with the consequences of the state and massive violence on life and death

An original and stimulating critique of American empire

The social and cultural changes of the last century have transformed death from an everyday fact to something hidden from view. Shifting between the practical and the theoretical, the professional and the intimate, the real and the fictitious, this collection of essays explores the continued power of death over our lives. It examines the idea and experience of death from an interdisciplinary perspective, including studies of changing burial customs throughout Europe; an account of a“dying party” in the Netherlands; examinations of the fascination with violent death in crime fiction and the phenomenon of serial killer art; analyses of death and bereavement in poetry, fiction, and autobiography; and a look at audience reactions to depictions of death on screen. By studying and considering how death is thought about in the contemporary era, we might restore the natural place it has in our lives.