Between Death and Ceremony

Tracing matters of death and ceremony across black studies, indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, critical whiteness studies, and critical decolonial jewish studies, I find myself most interested in that other death, the preliminary death, which precedes biological death. This is not “social death,” the murder of kinship structures. Nor is it the death of the physical organism. This death is ceremonial, practical, and transformative. It is a kind of death practice, a daily practice of dying. Photo essay with images from the 2017 Judaica project embodied audiovisual laboratory: Ben Spatz with Nazlıhan Eda Erçin and Agnieszka Mendel.