The Unclaimed
Abandonment and Hope In The City of Angels
By Pamela Prickett & Stefan Timmermans
For centuries, people who died destitute or alone were buried in potters’ fields—a Dickensian end that even the most hard-pressed families tried to avoid. Today, more and more relatives are abandoning their dead, leaving it to local governments to dispose of the bodies. Up to 150,000 Americans now go unclaimed each year. Who are they? Why are they being forgotten? And what is the meaning of life if your death doesn’t matter to others?
Scholar. Writer. Producer.
Pamela Prickett is an associate professor of sociology and former broadcast journalist. She is the author of two books about Los Angeles, including The Unclaimed and Believing in South Central.
Praise for Believing In South Central
“… a stunning ethnography. It is attentive to many methodological concerns of positionality, access, and immersive fieldwork, but it is also a story of friendship, love, and loss.”
— Shobhana Xavier, host New Books in Islamic Studies and author of Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism