Migrant Death: Funeral and Mourning Practices among Sikh and Muslim Immigrants in the United States

FAIN: FT-278679-21

Jyoti Puri
Simmons College (Boston, MA 02115-5820)

Ethnographic research into attitudes towards death and funeral practices among South Asian immigrants to the United States.

This book project focuses on migrant practices regarding death and mourning in the U.S. from the early 20th century to the present. Centering on death practices among non-Christian migrants, it tracks the inexorable impact of racism, religious intolerance, and white nationalism. It also highlights how burials, cremations, and mourning among Sikh and Muslim migrants dignify communities and forge a vital sense of belonging to the nation, its land and territory. Thus, death offers a unique lens to understand the histories of American social and cultural politics that endure in the 21st century. This view complicates dominant accounts of death in the U.S.—as either essentially private or managed by the funeral industry. It chronicles, too, the need to revise established sociological lineages in the study of death and to expand the scope of South Asian migration studies, issues that have gained additional urgency in the wake of the current pandemic.