"In this original anthropological study, Miles Richardson uses forty years of empirical research to examine the way Christians address the uniquely human question of death. He explores the paradox that while humans must die like all evolving life forms, they have adapted a unique symbolic communication that makes them aware of their naturally occurring fate; and through word and artifact they dwell upon that discovery. The concepts of culture, as an emergent dialogic exchange, and place, as the experiential location of that exchange, illuminate how two groups, Catholics in Spanish America and Baptists in the American South, create "being-in-Christ" and thereby "put death in its place.""

"The book's thrust conjoins four-field anthropology (biological, cultural, archaeological, and linguistic) and a rigorous evolutionary framework to a postmodern dialogic, reflexive stance - that is, it views humanity as inescapably a product of nature without sacrificing the interpretive social constructions that "turn a primate into a poem."" "General readers, anthropologists, and students of Latin American and southern culture will be enthralled by Richardson's combination of ethnographic detail and religious insight that speaks to the question of what to do about death within the construct of human evolution."--Jacket.