Rest in Plastic

Isabel Bredenbröker is a Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft Walter Benjamin Postdoctoral Researcher, who works for the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage and the Herman von Helmholtz- Zentrum für Kulturtechnik at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

• List of IllustrationsForewordPrefaceAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Death, Time and Synthetic MaterialsPart I: Place: Afterlives of ColonialismChapter 1. Death and Power: The Nation, Indigenous Concepts and Colonial RemnantsChapter 2. Death in Peki: SequencesPart II: Containment: Good Death (Ku)Chapter 3. To the Cemetery! Navigating between Worlds in Cement and PlasticChapter 4. From Morgue to Family Compound: Overcoming Socio-Material ConstraintsPart III: Transformations: Bad Death (Ametsiava) and BeyondChapter 5. Bad Death: Normalizing the AccidentChapter 6. Playing Tricks on Death: Alternative StrategiesConclusion: The Agency of the Dead, the Agency of Synthetic MaterialsReferencesIndex

“Rest in Plastic provides a multidimensional analysis of death and funeral rituals in Ghana. It is a solid book that advances scholarship on issues of life and death.” • Samuel Ntewusu, University of Ghana“Bredenbröker reveals perfectly the perception of death and analyses the transcultural aspects of funerals. The deceased become mediators between the living and ancestors, blending the Christian colonial heritage with the traditional values of the Ewe of Peki.” • Kokou Azamede, University of Lomé“It uses well-suited theory and methodology to produce novel and important insights.” • Ing-Marie Back Danielsson, Lund University“The book is well documented, with a wide range of earlier work discussed … the insights drawn from this work are well integrated with the ethnographic chapters.” • Robert Parkin, University of Oxford