Description: "Vinciane Despret's unique storytelling, woven with ethnography and family history, assembles accounts of those living their daily lives with their dead"--
Review Quotes:
"Vinciane Despret studies reports of the dead interfering in people's lives--to contest, direct, encourage, or console them. This important book will induce psychotherapists to reconsider Freud's concept of the work of mourning and social scientists to understand in new ways the force of political and religious ancestors on society."--Alphonso Lingis
"Our Grateful Dead is a stirring and insightful study of the active, metamorphic relations that the dead maintain with the living. With characteristic generosity and grace, Vinciane Despret curates stories from dreams and letters, novels and television, organ donations and home funerals and seances, paying sensitive and subtle attention to the modes of practice and perception most conducive to heeding the enigmatic missives of the dead--and making them real."--Matthew Chrulew, coeditor of Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations