Necropolitics of the Ordinary

"In this ethnography of Chinese funeral parlors and cemeteries, anthropologist and trained mortician Ruth Toulson documents a revolution in the way death is ritualized and grieved. Its context is the crowded city-state of Singapore, where cemeteries have become sites of acute political contestation. Confronted with high population density and rapid economic growth, the Singaporean government has ordered the destruction of every burial ground but one, forcing families to exhume the remains of ancestors. Written in accessible prose and with rich ethnographic detail, the book is suitable for undergraduate teaching in anthropology, Asian studies, religious studies, death studies, sociology, and history"--