Indeks.

Bibliografia, netografia strony 389-409.

Zawiera: Introduction: Lifestyle and Death-Style in Britain Today // Life Forces: Theoretical Perspectives // Beliefs and Valued Memorials // Ritual and Body Disposal // Christian and Secular Death Rites // Soteriologies // Grief, the Media, and Social Emotions // Military, Sporting, and Celebrity Deaths // Wayfaring Mortality, Fear, and the Good Death // Death-Styles and Lifestyles // Natural Burial and Cultural Memory.

Abstrakt: This anthropology–sociology of British religion aligns lifestyle and what it calls death-style; traditional and innovative forms of funeral and memorial serve as windows upon British life. Traditional cemetery and innovative woodland/green burials, cremation, ashes, and diversity of ritual leaders offer sources for analysing social change, religion, spirituality, and secular world views. Mortality and vitality as key biological dynamics transform and integrate into social forces evident in the British Establishment and the country’s National Health Service and Welfare State. Creative individuals like those who drove development of woodland burial, the National Memorial Arboretum, and the Memorial for those dying in the Falklands War are described here, as are major and minor memorials for military, civilian, and family deaths and disasters. Celebrity deaths ensure that media power is also highlighted, and the pervasive influence of digital social media upon individuals is considered. Social theory and contemporary research on afterlife beliefs combine with historical, literary, mythical, artistic, musical, and theological studies to discuss identity and mortality’s meaning. Issues of cultural wisdom, wellbeing, and mindfulness play their part, alongside theories of reciprocity, dual sovereignty of authority, elective affinity, moral somatics, emotions, the uncanny, and paradigmatic scenes of human embodiment. Classical and often ignored scholars, and national ceremonial and intimate personal grief frame issues of good and bad deaths as ‘establishment’, and innovative sources debate issues of suicide and assisted dying at a time when traditional religion vies with spirituality, ethical committees, and invented ritual to furnish today’s bereaved people with a lifestyle-matching death-style.