Introduction: Agentive properties of the dead over time and in different social contexts

Abstract

This special issue examines how the dead retain agency in social life, challenging Western ontologies that often deny their influence. Drawing on diverse ethnographic and historical cases, from postwar mass grave exhumations and migrant deaths to Udmurt commemorations, museum ethics, and rural rituals, it explores how the dead, in their material or symbolic forms, and in different social and cultural contexts, co-create social worlds. Focusing on concepts of relational or distributed agency, the issue shows that the agency of the dead emerges through interactions with the living, prompting a rethinking of the boundaries between life and death and the role of the dead in society.