Includes bibliographical references and index.

Death and anthropology : an introduction / Antonius C.G.M. Robben -- Magic, science and religion / Bronislaw Malinowski -- The terror of death / Ernest Becker -- Symbolic immortality / Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Olson -- The hour of our death / Philippe Ariès -- How others die : reflections on the anthropology of death / Johannes Fabian -- Death omens in a Breton memorate / Ellen Badone -- The meaning of death in Northern Cheyenne culture / Anne S. Straus -- Kinds of death and the house / María Cátedra -- Displacing suffering : the reconstruction of death in North America and Japan / Margaret Lock -- Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande / E.E. Evans-Pritchard -- Burial alive / Godfrey Lienhardt -- State terror in the netherworld : disappearance and reburial in Argentina / Antonius C.G.M. Robben -- The Andaman Islanders / A.R. Radcliffe-Brown -- Metaphors of mediation in Greek funeral laments / Loring H. Danforth -- Grief and a headhunter's rage / Renato Rosaldo -- Death without weeping / Nancy Scheper-Hughes -- A contribution to the study of the collective representation of death / Robert Hertz -- The rites of passage / Arnold van Gennep -- The phase of negated death / Hikaru Suzuki -- "Thus are our bodies, thus was our custom" : mortuary cannibalism in an Amazonian society / Beth A. Conklin -- Sacrificial death and the necrophagous ascetic / Jonathan Parry -- The nineteenth-century Tlingit potlatch : a new perspective / Sergei Kan -- Dead bodies animate the study of politics / Katherine Verdery.