Ruth Toulson: Viewing Life Through the Anthropology of Death
Published August 29, 2025
In her mind’s eye, Ruth Toulson can readily and vividly see her father through her bedroom window – walking stick in hand, dressed smartly in his mourning coat and top hat – stepping solemnly and slowly before a hearse in a funeral procession. The procession winds through the gray, working-class, post-industrial town in Northern England where she grew up. From the same window, atop the funeral parlor where she lived, she can also see, to one side, a now-derelict coal mine, and to the other side, a Benson & Hedges cigarette factory.
“This is one of my earliest memories, that death deserves to be met with dignity, so much so that you would wear the costume of a more dignified time.” said Toulson, a sociocultural anthropologist and a third-year lecturer in Johns Hopkins University’s Master of Liberal Arts and MA in Museum Studies programs. Toulson is also a trained mortician and funeral director and a full-time undergraduate anthropology instructor at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. “The way we deal with death matters, and it often shows by what we value most in life. Rituals and grief are tied together, and those rituals are necessary to give those grieving space and time and the ability to say goodbye. Moments like this really stick with me. I come from generations and generations of funeral directors dating back to 1840. I saw death and bereaved families every day. But being born into a family of morticians was always more of a blessing than a curse for me. We were the family that had horses, because the horses would pull the funeral carriage. I lived in a big, old house with a casket lift that went up and down. Other children always wanted to come and play at our house, so I never saw it as a place of sadness or creepiness.”
Always ambitious as a child, Toulson was the first in her family to attend college, setting her sights on the University of Cambridge because “It was the best, and I always wanted to be the best that I could.” She has been living in the U.S. since 2005 and in Baltimore with her husband and son since 2015.
“I remember the first time I visited Cambridge and saw the beautiful gardens,” said Toulson, who initially enrolled as a political science major. “It was so different from where I grew up. To walk into the library, where the ceiling was like an upturned, beautiful blue-and-white Wedgwood bowl, I just could not believe that people got to live there. I wanted to live there.”
One introductory anthropology course as an undergraduate was all that Toulson needed to determine her life’s work. She went on to earn her master’s and PhD degrees in the subject at Cambridge and has devoted her research and professional pursuits to the discipline of anthropology – which she describes as “seeing the world through somebody else’s eyes” – but also with a broader connection to death studies.
“I thought when I went to university that I had left thinking about death behind,” she said. “But then when I would read the literature on the anthropology of death, yes some of the content was correct, but I was also aware, from my life and my father’s work, that some concepts were completely absent in the literature. I realized then, as I worked toward completing my PhD, that this wonderful, unusual childhood had given me a lens, a different perspective, which has shaped all my work from then on.”
Toulson embarked on field work in Singapore with an interest in big social science questions, including the link between capitalism and religion.
“I was interested in studying culture in Singapore because this tiny country has gone from being a shantytown with high levels of malaria and tuberculosis to a place with the highest levels of home ownership in the world, one of the highest levels of literacy and best educational systems in the world. It is paternalistic, at best, sometimes authoritarian, but the state has created this society that really works. It is assumed that as society changes it becomes more secular, but in Singapore that was not the case. You have a society there that has all sorts of religious expression – Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Hinduism, and multiple forms of Christianity – yet this society is tremendously wealthy and capitalistic to its core.”
During her time there, Toulson also found the subject of her newly released book, Necropolitics of the Ordinary: Death and Grieving in Contemporary Singapore, that draws on the question “Can a state make its people forget the dead?” and chronicles circumstances beginning in 2012 that caused families in Singapore to exhume their buried dead when the state destroyed all but one cemetery.
“I was interested in the impact on families who were forced to dig up their dead and the idea that this was also destroying concepts of the afterlife, of heavens and hells,” said Toulson whose work has taken her around the globe and will place her in Hong Kong in the fall for a conference with Asian death workers. “There are still things that I would like to write about Singapore, but this project has caused me to become more and more drawn to the world of death in other areas, for instance in Varanasi, the most sacred place for Hindus to die in India. I am also drawn to studying death in Baltimore because I see the dignity with which death is treated here. I am interested in the other people who work with death in the city – the homicide squad, the medical examiner – all the places that do the hidden work of death. One of the things I am most committed to, in my research, is that death never just becomes a data point, that I never forget that someone died, that people lost someone, and that this matters.”
Toulson brings an emphasis on the dead body as a piece of material culture to her JHU Museum Studies course “Material Culture in the Modern Museum.” “Everything that is selected in a funeral, and of course the dead body itself, is loaded with meaning – the color of the blanket, the shape of the coffin, the gravestone. I want my students to be interested in the stories that every object has to tell.” She will be teaching a new course in the Master of Liberal Arts program in Fall 2025 entitled “The Self in Question: Personhood and Its Puzzles,” that explores classic social theory and infuses the concept of cultural relativism and examples from other societies that show “maybe the way one imagines the world, isn’t the only way, isn’t natural, or inherent.”
She feels privileged to be teaching very focused, highly motivated Hopkins students in both programs. “Teaching at JHU gives me the perfect balance,” she said. “I have found that the online platform allows for rich discussion. It has completely opened a new world for me. Anthropology helps students to ask better questions. It is a method of unpacking, that you don’t just accept that this is just the way things are. It is a gift, and that depth of questioning stays with you forever.
“Anthropology is the greatest and most enduring love of my life,” continued Toulson. “To read and write anthropology is a joy. The ability to travel somewhere else to do fieldwork and be a part of the day-to-day of other people’s lives is incredible. It allows you to pay attention to what really matters and to the way that people are searching for meaning and giving things meaning and to honor other people’s lives with attention. In anthropology, you are not going for answers, you are going for better questions. That is a powerful way of using your brain. Just as I have no solution for death, I hope that my students take away from my courses the ability to improve their questioning and to be happy with not having an answer.”