Paper Short Abstract:

Examining the role of gift exchange in maintaining relations with the dead, this paper explores creative practices which emerge in the absence of established rites of passage for secular deaths.

Paper Abstract:

“Beneath all rituals is an ultimate danger…. The possibility that we will encounter ourselves making up our conceptions of the world”, wrote Moore and Myerhoff (1977, 8). But what if this danger were subverted into creativity? Shortly after returning from Switzerland where I witnessed the death of a woman I had been working with for the past eight months, I received a package in the mail. Theresa had sent me a small glass ornament with an accompanying note that read “The stars are very beautiful tonight. Much love, Theresa”. Unlike other gifts that Theresa had distributed while planning her assisted death, these gifts were scheduled to arrive, dramatically, after her death – as if from the afterlife. In this paper I argue that faced with dying a secular death dominated by bureaucratic and techno-medical understandings of dying, Theresa turned to gift exchange to experience her death as something other than technical mastery. Gifts became materials which blurred the boundary between the living and the dead. Over the course of fieldwork, I was repeatedly told: “there’s no instruction manual for this”. This signified not only the clandestine nature of organizing an assisted death in Switzerland and the necessary travel and logistical details, but also a broader ambivalence over how to face a secular death. I argue, therefore, that gifts had multiple purposes in Theresa’s death, chief among them, offering a formula through which to approach death from within a milieu where, due to secularization, no rite of passage has been established.