What does one do with the dead? Burial, entombment, mummification, or cremation hint at creative ritual possibilities that tell us how we care for the dead. In several contexts, the dead form an unquestionable social good that encompasses a number of tropes, such as designating ancestors for a family, configuring the nation-state on memorials and mortal remains, meditating on death as part of ethical self-formation, and so on. Added to this, is the whole range of beliefs in souls, spirits, ghosts, zombies, saints, and shamans that anthropologists routinely encounter, which testifies to the idea of a vibrant afterlife and puts into serious doubt any conceptualization of death as finitude or cessation. Conversely, the dead and especially mortal remains also entail vital registers of forgetting, of ostracism and of obliteration.
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