Death, Religion, and Transnational Approaches (Co-sponsored by Sociology of Religion Section)

Session Submission Type: Invited Session (90 minute)

Description

This joint session between the Global and Transnational Sociology and Sociology of Religion sections explores the intersections of death, mourning, and religion as vital sites of sociological inquiry. It considers how funeral and mourning rites, ties to those who have died, understandings of the afterlife, and institutions related to death and dying—such as hospices, cemeteries, and funerary services—are deeply influenced by religious ideas and practices. Even in ostensibly secular contexts, discourses of secularism remain entangled with religion, reflecting the shifting ways in which religion is lived and practiced. Death rites are an especially important lens for understanding relationships to the dead and contestations around power and inequality—for example, state repression or diasporic contexts where the ability of religious and racial minorities to perform their death rites remains conditional.

By bringing together scholarship at the intersections of death, religion, and transnational contexts, this session demonstrates how rites for the dead illuminate broader dynamics of power, inequality, and belonging. In doing so, it bridges the concerns of the sociology of religion with those of global and transnational sociology, showing how the study of death and mourning not only enriches our understanding of religious practice and secularism but also opens new avenues for rethinking colonialism, migration, and race.

The papers invited to this session revisit the history of the globally influential hospice movement; examine contestations around migrant death rites in the US and Canada;and analyze African American burial practices and the legal, racial, and spiritual borders that shaped them in colonial Maryland.

Sub Unit

• Global and Transnational Sociology Section / Death, Religion, and Transnational Approaches (Co-sponsored by Sociology of Religion Section)

Cosponsor

• Sociology of Religion Section

Presider

• Becky Yang Hsu, Georgetown University

Individual Presentations

• Where the Dead Belong: Sikh Cremation, Islamic Burial, and the Making of Diasporic Futures - Jyoti Puri, Boston University

• Connection or Conversion? Revisiting International Histories of Hospice Care - Ara Allene Francis, College of the Holy Cross

• 'I'm Afraid That When the Devil Come Take My Master's Body, the Devil May Mistake and Get Mine:' Borders, Necro-Armor, and African American Death Practices - Kami L Fletcher, Goucher College

• Darjeeling’s mane mothers: Gender and ethnopolitics in the Indian Himalayas - Vrinda Marwah, University of South Florida

Session Organizer

• Becky Yang Hsu, Georgetown University