Paper long abstract:

Death is an example of what Carrithers has recently referred to as the vicissitudes of life. Individual deaths and mortality more generally frequently demand a response, an attempt to account for their happening, an attempt to make sense of. Evoking Carrithers's anthropological reworking of the notion of rhetoric as the process of convincing self and others, this paper investigates contemporary engagement with death in Iceland. Looking at internet memorial sites, newspaper obituaries and other forms of memorialisation, the paper uses the notion of rhetoric as an analytical tool. Particular attention will be paid to the figure of eternity in its dual sense of death and timelessness as an important element of death in Iceland in the context of economic and political crisis.