In 2014–2015, Toulson will focus particularly on the role of color in funeral ritual. From the black of a widow’s weeds, to the sackcloth of a mourning gown, and the white of a shroud, death ritual is threaded with color. In the English language, sorrow is described as “the blues,” while in Chinese societies the events that surround death are referred to as “white through and through.” As much as the study of mortuary rites has been an enduring subject of humanistic inquiry, little consideration of color as a pivotal way death is codified. Moreover, the impact of color on mourning and memory is rarely discussed.

Drawing on perspectives from material culture studies—color understood as a property of things—Toulson interrogates how color structures grief, challenging current anthropological understandings of the connection between ritual, emotion, and materiality. Her examples come from her ethnographic fieldwork in the business of death among Chinese communities in Singapore—during which she worked as both an anthropologist and an embalmer. Her argument—that considering color is vital in order to understand the power of ritual—applies however to all human societies. To consider color, she argues, is to attend to the very matter of life and death.