Without exception, all people are faced with the inevitability of death, a stark fact that has immeasurably shaped societies and individual consciousness for the whole of human history. Mirrors of Passing offers a powerful window into this oldest of human preoccupations by investigating the interrelationships of death, materiality, and temporality across far-flung times and places. Stretching as far back as Ancient Egypt and Greece and moving through present-day locales as diverse as Western Europe, Central Asia, and the Arctic, each of the richly illustrated essays collected here draw on a range of disciplinary insights to explore some of the most fundamental, universal questions that confront us.

Sophie Seebach holds a doctorate from Aarhus University. Her recent publications include pieces in the edited collection Mortuary Rites, Memory, and Authority/Agency: The Anthropology of Death in the Early Twenty-First Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and, with Lotte Meinert and Rane Willerslev, in the journal Africa.

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Mirrors of Passing
Sophie Seebach and Rane Willerslev

PART I: DEATH'S TIME

Chapter 1. The Time of the Dead: Anthropology, Literature, and the Virtual Past
Stuart McLean

Chapter 2. Orpheus in Love, Death, and Time
Marina Prusac-Lindhagen

Chapter 3. Death before Time: Mythical Time in Ancient Egyptian Mortuary Religion
Rune Nyord

Chapter 4. When Bad Places Turn Worse: The Necropolitics of Death Sites in Northern KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
Per Detlef Frederiksen

Chapter 5. Narratives of Ebola: Temporal and Material Changes of Social Riverscapes
Theresa Amman

PART II: MATERIALITIES OF DEATH

Chapter 6. "Saving the Dead": Fighting for Life in the Siberian North
Rane Willerslev and Jeanette Lykkegård