The Socialist Cemetery

Chapter 2 charts the development of new mourning rites in East Germany, focusing on the role that music played in these ceremonies. Death rituals articulated a new death culture for the socialist state. This chapter examines three aspects of East German death culture: the reestablishment of ceremonies to honor communist heroes from the Weimar Republic, state burials for East German politicians, and manuals published for funeral planning intended for the general public. Visually and rhetorically, state ceremonies were political displays that marginalized the emotional needs of the mourning community. But the music in these services intoned the new country’s connections to customs that the ruling party were explicitly attempting to displace: the Nazis’ heroic burial customs and the mourning rituals of the Lutheran church. In early efforts to fashion a socialist sepulchral culture across multiple artforms, a gap emerged between political ideology and musical reality that allowed composers, performers, and audiences to enact the work of mourning through music.

Imposing Identity: Death Markers to ‘English’ People in Barbados, 1627–1838

The headstones and epitaphs marking the death of English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish settlers on the Caribbean island of Barbados provide one of the earliest and most complete examples of British death culture overseas. Whilst the island was dominated by plantation slavery during the period in question, the surviving memorials from this period reveal little trace of the chattel slavery that made the island of great geopolitical importance to the British Empire. Instead the memorials examined here demonstrate a deep attachment to the ‘English’ identities of those who died in diaspora. The chapter compares such death culture with that of Jewish settlement on the island, a stream of evidence that demonstrates the island was a sanctuary for Jewish men, women and children from numerous countries during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Sustainable implementation of advance care planning in Asia: An interpretive-systemic framework for national development

Objectives A qualitative interpretive-systemic focus group study was conducted to examine the developmental and implementational underpinnings of Asia's first national Advance Care Planning (ACP) programme constituted in Singapore. Methods 63 physicians, nurses, medical social workers, and allied health workers who actively rendered ACP were purposively recruited across seven major public hospitals and specialist centers. Results Framework analysis revealed 19 themes, organized into 5 categories including Life and Death Culture, ACP Coordination, ACP Administration, ACP Outcomes, and Sustainability Shift. These categories and themes formed an Interpretive-Systemic Framework of Sustainable ACP, which reflects the socio-cultural, socio-political, and socio-spiritual contexts that influence ACP provision, highlighting the need to adopt a public health strategy for enhancing societal readiness for end-of-life conversations. Significance of results The Interpretive-Systemic Framework of Sustainable ACP underscores the importance of health policy, organizational structure, social discourse, and shared meaning in ACP planning and delivery so as to support and empower care decision-making among terminally ill Asian patients and their families facing mortality.

The Outlaw Machine, the Monstrous Outsider and Motorcycle Fetishists: Challenging Rebellion, Mobility and Masculinity in Kenneth Anger’s "Scorpio Rising" and Steven Spielberg’s "Duel"

The paper analyzes the ways in which Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963) and Steven Spielberg’s Duel (1971) draw on and challenge selected road movie conventions by adhering to the genre’s traditional reliance on cultural critique revolving around the themes of rebellion, transgression and roguery. In particular, the films seem to confront the classic road movie format through their adoption of nomadic narrative structure and engagement in a mockery of subversion where the focus on social critique is intertwined with a deep sense of alienation and existential loss “laden with psychological confusion and wayward angst” (Laderman 83). Following this trend, Spielberg’s film simultaneously depoliticizes the genre and maintains the tension between rebellion and tradition where the former shifts away from the conflict with conformist society to masculine anxiety, represented by middle class, bourgeois and capitalist values, the protagonist’s loss of innocence in the film’s finale, and the act of roguery itself. Meanwhile, Anger’s poetic take on the outlaw biker culture, burgeoning homosexuality, myth and ritual, and violence and death culture approaches the question of roguery by undermining the image of a dominant hypermasculinity with an ironic commentary on sacrilegious and sadomasochistic practices and initiation rites in the gay community. Moreover, both Duel’s demonization of the truck, seen as “an indictment of machines” or the mechanization of life (Spielberg qtd. in Crawley 26), and Scorpio Rising’s (homo)eroticization of a motorcycle posit elements of social critique, disobedience and nonconformity within a cynical and existential framework, hence merging the road movie’s traditional discourse with auteurism and modernism.