Consoling Ghosts: Stories of Medicine and Mourning from Southeast Asians in Exile
(Paperback)
Publishing Details
Consoling Ghosts: Stories of Medicine and Mourning from Southeast Asians in Exile
By (Author) Jean M. Langford
University of Minnesota Press
University of Minnesota Press
2nd January 2014
United States
Classifications
General
Non Fiction
Ethnic studies
Sociology: death and dying
Social and cultural anthropology
301
Physical Properties
Paperback
304
Width 140mm, Height 216mm, Spine 38mm
Description
Inspired by conversations with emigrants from Laos and Cambodia, Consoling Ghosts is a sustained contemplation of relationships with the dying and the dead. Jean M. Langford invites us to consider alternate ways of facing death, conducting relationships with the dead and dying, and addressing the effects of violence that continue to reverberate in bodies and social worlds.
Reviews
"Consoling Ghosts is a truly exceptional work. It is both tremendously moving and terrifically insightful. The writing is brilliant and shimmers with both subtlety and lucidity. This is all the more striking, in this instance, given the complexity of thought conveyed in the book. What is ostensibly a rich ethnographic inquiry into a logic of ghosts and haunting, and notions of unfulfilled reciprocity, is actually a much richer meditation on themes regarding the repetitions of violence that haunt migrs from Cambodia and Laos to the United States."Andrew Willford, Cornell University
Author Bio
Jean M. Langford is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Fluent Bodies: Ayurvedic Remedies for Postcolonial Imbalance.
