Water Graves

Water Graves considers representations of lives lost to water in contemporary poetry, fiction, theory, mixed-media art, video production, and underwater sculptures. From sunken slave ships to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, Valérie Loichot investigates the lack of official funeral rites in the Atlantic, the Caribbean Sea, and the Gulf of Mexico, waters that constitute both early and contemporary sites of loss for the enslaved, the migrant, the refugee, and the destitute. Unritual, or the privation of ritual, Loichot argues, is a state more absolute than desecration. Desecration implies a previous sacred observance--a temple, a grave, a ceremony. Unritual, by contrast, denies the sacred from the beginning. In coastal Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Miami, Haiti, Martinique, Cancun, and Trinidad and Tobago, the artists and writers featured in Water Graves—an eclectic cast that includes Beyoncé, Radcliffe Bailey, Edwidge Danticat, Édouard Glissant, M. NourbeSe Philip, Jason deCaires Taylor, Édouard Duval-Carrié, Natasha Trethewey, and Kara Walker, among others—are an archipelago connected by a history of the slave trade and environmental vulnerability. In addition to figuring death by drowning in the unritual—whether in the context of the aftermath of slavery or of ecological and human-made catastrophes—their aesthetic creations serve as memorials, dirges, tombstones, and even material supports for the regrowth of life underwater.

This book describes the essential processes and techniques for the scientific investigation of atrocity crimes.

The authors provide a comprehensive picture of burial, mourning rituals, commemoration practices and veneration of the dead among the Negev Bedouin. A primary emphasis is the pivotal linkages between the living and the dead embodied in the intermediary role of healers, sorcerers, seers and other arbitrators between heaven and earth, who supplicate -- publicly and privately -- at the gravesite of chosen awliyah (deceased saints). This book brings together integrated findings of three scholars, based on decades of field work that combine close to 65 years of scrutiny. It maps out the locations and particularities of venerated tombs, the identity of the occupants and their individual abilities vis-a-vis the Almighty. Attitudes, beliefs and customs surrounding each gravesite, when combined on a longitudinal scale, reveal changes over time in beliefs and practices in grave worship and burial, mourning and condolence customs. Analysis of the data reveals that the dynamic of grave worship among the Negev Bedouin throws light on ancient traditions in a complex relationship with mainstream Islamic doctrine and the impact of modernity on Bedouin conduct and belief. The authors' observations and interviews with practitioners about their beliefs are compared and augmented with references that exist in the professional literature, including grave worship elsewhere in the Arab world. The Charm of Graves is essential reading for anthropologists, scholars of the sociology of religion, and students of Islam at university and popular levels. The topic has received only marginal attention in existing anthropological works and has been keenly awaited.

"Publications of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia": v. 53, 1901, p. 788-794.

Vols. 4-17 include General public acts passed by the 105th - 118th Legislature of the state of New Jersey and lists of members of the Legislature.

Gathers a selection of the National Book award nominated author's short stories, excerpts, and essays reflecting his life, career, and recurring literary themes