Memory and Mourning

Abstract

Keightley and Pickering provide an analysis of the ways in which the death of close others is negotiated through vernacular remembering processes, and in doing so, they explore the limits of the human capacity to manage life transitions. This vernacular perspective makes an important contribution to scholarship on the relationship between memory, loss and mourning which is currently dominated by research on public forms of remembering and on spectacular and exceptional instances of death and loss, ranging from genocide to terrorist atrocities. Keightley and Pickering consider how the mnemonic imagination can facilitate remembering well even in the face of catastrophic loss. Through an analysis of rich ethnographic fieldwork data, they illustrate how, in relation to others in the present, it is possible to maintain and reconstruct a coherent sense of self-identity in the face of radically destabilizing loss.