AMERICAN AFTERLIVES: REINVENTING DEATH IN THE 21st CENTURY. By Shannon LeeDawdy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021. Pp. xxiii + 246; images. $27.95.

In American Afterlives, anthropologist Shannon Lee Dawdy's focus is on human remains—what is being done with them and what people think and feel about them. Emerging from her co-produced 2020 documentary film set in California, “I Like Dirt,” American Afterlives examines a broader swath of the American landscape, asking two guiding questions: What do you think happens to us when we die? And what do you want done with your body? Positing that the death denial thesis of Ernest Becker and others is overblown, Dawdy avers that in recent decades, Americans have been confronting death in bold ways. While burial and cremation retain prominence, the book showcases innovations related to these methods of bodily disposition, rooted in myriad perspectives on the book's guiding questions. Eschewing reliance on statistical data and opinion surveys, the book will appeal to a general audience, as well as to scholars across disciplines. For scholars of religion, there is much of interest. Dawdy uses the term “material spiritualism” to describe the new death practices emerging in the US, which are emphatically material and aimed to facilitate a relationship between the living and the dead. Dawdy finds that while Americans are becoming more secular, they are also growing more spiritual, and ritual practices around death are prospering, even if shared national rituals are on the decline. Acknowledging the difficulty of separating the spirit of capitalism and the spirit of the new American dead, Dawdy introduces the reader to a number of entrepreneurs who have found a niche in the marketplace. These characters are themselves variegated, but all congenially presented. Other highlights include a fascinating history of the popularity of embalming in the US, incisive analyses of terms used in death care, outlining of consonances between “green burials” and certain practices in Orthodox Jewish and Muslim faiths, and poignant vignettes of the author's own confrontations with death. Given Dawdy's decidedly material focus, those who are interested in the subject of digital afterlives may be disappointed, however, this is not a deficiency of the book, which is impressive for its readability and educational value.