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Title 'Plastic stays beautiful': Attributing temporal and moral qualities in Ghanaian Ewe funerary contexts*
Full text http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/18452/29689; http://dx.doi.org/10.18452/29073
Date 2024
Author(s) Bredenbröker, Isabel
Abstract Plastics are as positively durable as they are easily breakable, almost impossible to mend and hard to get rid of. They promise eternal life, but their immortality may quickly turn them into the undead. This paper discusses the use and role of plastics in Ghanaian funerary contexts, specifically in a small-town community in the Ghanaian Volta Region. It investigates plastics' agency as materials that may potentially either contain death successfully or become uncontained matter out of place, just as the dead may become contained or left wandering among the living. Different perspectives on plastics are brought into focus, highlighting how attributed qualities and meanings play into the making of 'good' or 'bad' death. The paper shows that plastics and persons jointly become subject to moral and temporal assessments in the realm between good and bad, finitude and durability. Beyond the ethnographic case study, the paper discusses the political potential of death and plastics within the larger global context of a cultural economy that reflects the ongoing effect of colonialism. - Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschafthttps://doi.org/10.13039/501100001659 - Peer Reviewed
Subject(s) death; funerals; Ewe; Ghana; plastic; materiality; synthetic materials; 300 Sozialwissenschaften; ddc:300
Language eng
Publisher Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Type of publication article; doc-type:article; publishedVersion
Format application/pdf
Rights (CC BY 4.0) Attribution 4.0 International; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Identifier 1359-1835; urn:nbn:de:kobv:11-110-18452/29689-1; 1460-3586; 10.1177/13591835241248342
Repository Berlin - Humboldt University of Berlin
Added to C-A: 2024-07-09;10:44:33