Book Review of "Mortality, Mourning and Mortuary Practices in Indigenous Australia" Edited by Katie Glaskin, Myrna Tonkinson, Yasmine Musharbash and Victoria Burbank

Abstract

[Extract] Reviewing an edited volume presents a unique set of challenges. In a sole-authored monograph you tune your ears to the voice of a single author and, as each page is turned, you are incrementally immersed in the nuances and refinements of their language and argument. In an edited volume, however, there are many voices, of the authors themselves and of their theorizing and cited “others,” clamouring, at times haphazardly, for centre stage. It can be especially challenging to keep an eye on the particularities of each chapter and on the linkages or disjunctions between them.

The editors of this volume, however, have done an exemplary job in bringing together and discussing the major themes and theoretical approaches adopted by each author in the collection, and it is book-ended by Andrew Strathern’s and Pamela Stewart’s series prefaces and the “Afterword” by Frances Morphy and Howard Morphy. All three overviews contextualize the 11 analyses of dying, death, mourning and mortuary practices in rural and remote Indigenous Australia, and Strathern and Stewart include some considered comparison with Highlands Papua New Guinea.