In the U.S. today, death practices are changing rapidly and creatively. Not only did the cremation rate double between 2000 and 2015, but there has been a proliferation of new things to do with ashes – incorporating them into artificial reefs, making them into synthetic diamonds, or blending them into vinyl records. What do these new styles of death tell us about U.S. cosmology and values? What is the status of the subject/object divide in daily life? What is a ‘person’ before and after death? Using ethnographic interviews with object designers collected as part of a documentary film product, I push what an archaeology of the contemporary can do for our understanding of popular ontology and secular spirituality.

Dr. Shannon Dawdy

Professor of Anthropology, University of Chicago

Shannon Lee Dawdy is an anthropologist whose fieldwork combines archaeological, archival, and ethnographic methods with a focus on the U.S. and Latin America. The central thread running through her work concerns how landscapes and material objects mediate human relationships, from an examination of the historical ecologies of capitalism (Building the Devil's Empire: French Colonial New Orleans, 2008) or the emotional trajectories of those who lost their intimate object worlds to Hurricane Katrina (Patina: A Profane Archaeology, 2015). Her current project (through a documentary film and related book) focuses on rapidly changing death practices in the U.S.