Culture and grief: Ethnographic perspectives on ritual, relationships and remembering

This introduction to the special issue on Anthropology and grief explores the contributions of an ethnographic approach to the interdisciplinary study of grief. After a brief overview of previous anthropological research, we identify key themes emerging from this global collection of case studies: the benefits of long-term fieldwork in nuancing the complexity of grief and complicating cultural narratives that surround it; the ways in which emotional aspects of grief are shaped by cultural norms and by the manner of death; and the relationships between the living and dead, including ontologies of the dead and culturally sanctioned forms of remembering and forgetting.