Thomas W. Laqueur. The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains.

Abstract

Thomas W. Laqueur’s The Work of the Dead contains 711 very full pages, including 119 pages of notes, 30 of index, numerous black-and-white and color illustrations that I would call iconographic documents, and hundreds of interesting archival sources consisting of texts from the sixteenth century to the present and others going back to antiquity. Laqueur furthermore draws from the disciplines of philosophy, literature, anthropology, political science, art, sociology, and archaeology—all of this wrapped in a book of cultural history. First, we look at the masterpiece with awe: How is it possible to do so much, to say so much about the dead in so many societies over such a broad sweep of time, even in a book as capacious as this? The title is an oxymoron: the dead do not work—it is the individuals who bury them (or not),who tend their graves or forget, who mourn (or not), who work through their grief (or not) in philosophical, material, ritual, and spiritual ways. Moreover, corpses are nothing, all is in the “soul”—whatever that term means—and yet to take care of the dead is the epitome of humanity; caring for the dead while one is still living ensures that one’s own humanity will not be lost in death.