Time after death: Material afterlives in the work of estate administration

Abstract

When someone dies without a will and with no close family willing to administer their estate in New York City and other large US cities, the Public Administrator (PA), a small state agency, steps in to take care of the deceased's estate. Because the subject of the PA's work—the deceased—is no longer present, the office relies on things—objects, homes, money, and documents—as legal markers of identity. The afterlife of a person, therefore, is a distinctly material afterlife. Though death may signify an end, it is in fact the beginning of a different kind of time that is orchestrated in stops and starts by the work of the law, people, and material objects. The ethnographic stories told in this essay demonstrate how two temporal categories—the legal and extralegal—come up against each other in tense and uncanny ways, and how this convergence of legal and extralegal temporalities produces the distinctive material afterlives of the dead.