Birth and Death: Studying Ritual, Embodied Practices and Spirituality at the Start and End of Life

Birth and death are fundamental human experiences. Both life transitions are not only meaningful and profound but can also lead to ambiguous feelings, negotiated in embodied, cultural, spiritual, and ritual practices. The liminality and ambiguity of birth and death evoke the need for rituals. Across cultures, rituals accompany birth and death as major life transitions, for instance, by welcoming the child or mother-to-be/parent-to-be through name-giving ceremonies or symbolically transitioning the deceased into the world of the dead. In this edited volume in Religions, we explore new theoretical and empirical research
on birth and death rituals from multidisciplinary perspectives, such as anthropology, psychology, and religious studies, in order to offer novel insights with respect to lived spirituality and religiosity.