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The unclaimed: Abandonment and hope in the city of angels. By P.Prickett and S.Timmermans, London: Penguin Random House. 2024

2024; Wiley; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/1468-4446.13159

1468-4446

Kate Woodthorpe,

Homelessness and Social Issues

How a society and state treat the most vulnerable and disenfranchised members of their population when they die can be an incredibly powerful indicator of values and beliefs, reflecting—amongst other things—conceptualisations and practices of citizenship, responsibility and compassion. 'The Unclaimed: abandonment and hope in the city of Los Angeles' is a new book that shows just this, detailing what happens to people who go 'unclaimed' after death and how their circumstances ultimately highlight the significance of social relationships today. Written by two sociologists, it is a compelling account of people who live and die within the city of Los Angeles, a place the authors note that is 'bathed in loneliness and hyperindividualism' (p. 151). Initially charting the cases of four real (and non-anonymised) individuals, Lena, Bobby, Midge and David, before moving onto veterans and unclaimed babies, the authors create a vivid and extremely readable narrative that details how bodily remains ended up being 'unclaimed', cremated and interred in a public burial plot along with thousands of others' ashes. The individual stories read like fiction but are in fact accounts of what really happened, re-told from public records, interviews and accounts by those who witnessed it firsthand. They show that, far from money being the primary driving factor for going unclaimed (as is often assumed when public health funerals—the UK equivalent—are debated), the more likely explanation for and cause of going 'unclaimed' is the weakening of social ties and the rigid way in which 'family' in conceptualised by the state after someone has died. This is an issue that is not confined to Los Angeles, and which I have written about in this very journal (see Woodthorpe & Rumble, 2016). I knew this book was coming following the publication of Prickett and Timmermans' paper in this journal (2022) and in the American Sociological Review (Timmermans & Prickett, 2022) and I had high hopes that a longer tome would describe in more detail the experience of dying with limited social networks, family and finances. From the outset the book did not disappoint; it is an absorbing and exceptionally easy read—and I mean that as the highest compliment. And while I expected the book to be about the decline of living conditions, poverty, isolation and the decline of family (and, in part, it is), it is not all doom and gloom. Amongst the desperation and sadness of the accounts told, the stories also speak to the resilience of humans, enduring love, the power of belonging, the significance of communities, and the importance of simple kindness. The audience for this book is not necessarily academic and it is written in a style that means it will be of interest and be very readable for a wider public audience. The book's key strength is the narratives of the cases, highlighting (to me at least) the very best traditions of good sociological writing and insight that is accessible to non-academics. This is not surprising as Timmermans' previous work Postmortem (2006) was a similarly vibrant and engaging book. If I had one gripe it would be that I would like to have seen a bit more inclusion of theorising at the end of the book for the academic audience. There is a growing body of literature in this area, such as Caswell's work on dying alone (2019) and Towers' (2023) work on the significance of familial norms at the end of life. However, that is not the goal of this book, I think, and I suspect that the authors have chosen to locate their theorising of the unclaimed within their academic papers, for an academic audience. As a book for a wider non-academic audience, this book instead foregrounds and privileges their rich (and throughout very moving) narrative to engage the reader with the broader issues that it raises; namely the consequences of weakening social ties and familial obligation throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. I loved this book, both for shining a light on this neglected area and for its style and tone. Making visible something that principally happens in secret, in positing the case for the need to pay attention to the unclaimed, the authors make a convincing argument: When we dispose of the unclaimed out of the public eye, locate their gravesites inaccessible areas, or either fail or refuse to mark a mass burial with a ceremony—the default in most cities in the United States—we erase these deaths and lives and the vital lessons they offer (p. 238). The lessons I take from this text are that the increasing atomisation of families, geographical mobility, and rampant individualism are leading to a future tidal wave of potential unclaimed people, which will be exacerbated if policymakers continue to privilege biological relationships. For the authors, as they show in their intimate reflections at the end of the book, they have clearly learned personal lessons from doing this study and their candidness in sharing lessons is admirable. I would like to see more sociologists being so open about the effect their work has on their personal lives, and for those of us who work in death and dying that intertwining can be profound. In sum, for me, this book joins my favourite book list, along with Timmermans aforementioned 'Postmortem' and Julia Lawton's 'The Dying Process' (2002). Common to these texts is rich description, and making good sociological/anthropological analysis and insight accessible and readable. This new book on Los Angeles' 'unclaimed' sets the standard for how to do so.