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Anthropologist and mortician, Ruth E. Toulson, takes you behind the scenes in a Singaporean funeral parlor.

While multiple authors have probed the corpse's power as a potent political symbol, much of the existing literature on necropolitics has an exclusive focus on contexts of violent regime change, on the bodies of political leaders, or of "the dead" understood as an undifferentiated mass.

In Singapore, in contrast, Toulson argues that the manipulation of corpses is a quotidian strategy of political power, part of the everyday actions of a stable state. What's more, the corpses this state puts to its use are those of ordinary people, whose unremarkable deaths are marked in what seem initially to be unremarkable ways.

The embalmed body, she argues, is a particularly fraught sites of the politic. But how this comes to be is a puzzle, for the state has little interest in legislating ritual or grief. Toulson offers a new anthropology of death, one both more personal and politicized, a necropolitics of the ordinary.

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Ruth E. Toulson is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research focuses on the dead body, and death's material culture in Southeast and East Asia. Trained at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Toulson has a multi-sited collaborative international research agenda that combines long-term ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth work in museum collections.

Professor Toulson's scholarship explores the intersection of death and the state, particularly in moments of sociopolitical transition. She probes this intersection by focusing particularly on the dead body as a form of highly politicized material culture. Her research program has resulted in published work, including a book, "Necropolitics of the Ordinary: Death and Grieving in Contemporary Singapore" (2025, University of Washington Press), and numerous book chapters and peer-reviewed articles, including in "Journal of Material Culture." She is an associate editor of the journal "Anthropology and Humanism."