Forensic science provides information and data behind the circumstances of a particular death, but it is culture that provides death with meaning. With this in mind, Rite, Flesh, and Stone proposes cultural matters of death as its structuring principle, operating as frames of the expression of mortality within a distinct set of coordinates. The chapters offer original approaches to how human remains are handled in the embodied rituals and social performances of contemporary funera...

Pedro Almodóvar may have helped put queer Iberian cinema on the map, but there are multitudes of LGBTQ filmmakers from Catalonia, Portugal, Castile, Galicia, and the Basque Country who have made the Peninsula one of the world’s most vital sources for queer film. Together, they have produced a cinema whose expressions of queer desire have challenged the region’s conservative religious and family values, while intervening in vital debates about politics, history, and nation. Indiscreet F...

Though neither king nor priest, Spanish dictator Francisco Franco nevertheless conceptualized his right to sovereignty around a political theology in which national identity resembled a sacred cult. Using Franco’s Spain and la España sagrada as a counterpoint to European secularity’s own development, By the Grace of God is the first sustained analysis within Spanish cultural studies of the sacred as a political category and a tool for political organization.Willia...

Throughout the world modernization implied the abandonment of ancestral modes of life adapted to the land and their transformation through processes of social abstraction. During the 20th century entire cultures have vanished into the urban magma of the World's megalopolis. The classic city, perfectly defined against a rural background, has spilled over its boundaries and merged with the country in a vast sprawl. Vanishing references affect cultures in profound ways and force a reconsidera...