Preface: Toward a new history of death; Death and the origin of the state : loying down the law; Purgatory and ancestor worship in the early, apocalyptic state; Suffrages for the dead among Spaniards and Indians; death, counter-reformation, and the spirit of colonial capitalism. Death and the origin of popular culture: The domestication of mortuory ritual and the origins of popular culture, 1595-1790; Modern and macabre: the explosion of death imagery in the public sphere, 1790-1880; Elite cohabitation with the popular fiesta in the Nineteenth century. Death and the biography of the nation: Body politics and popular politics; Death and the Mexican revolution; The political travails of the Skeleton, 1923-85; Death in the contemporary ethnoscape.