Mortuary Dialogues presents fresh perspectives on death and mourning
across the Pacific Islands. Through a set of rich ethnographies, the
book examines how funerals and death rituals give rise to discourse and
debate about sustaining moral personhood and community amid modernity
and its enormous transformations. The book's key concept, "mortuary
dialogue," describes the different genres of talk and expressive culture
through which people struggle to restore individual and collective order
in the aftermath of death in the contemporary Pacific.