1st Edition

Postmortal Society Towards a Sociology of Immortality

Edited By Michael Hviid Jacobsen Copyright 2017
    256 Pages 2 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    256 Pages 2 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Throughout history mankind has struggled to reconcile itself with the inescapability of its own mortality. This book explores the themes of immortality and survivalism in contemporary culture, shedding light on the varied and ingenious ways in which humans and human societies aspire to confront and deal with death, or even seek to outlive it, as it were.

    Bringing together theoretical and empirical work from internationally acclaimed scholars across a range of disciplines, Postmortal Society offers studies of the strategies adopted and means available in modern society for trying to ‘cheat’ death or prolong life, the status of the dead in the modern Western world, the effects of beliefs that address the terror of death in other areas of life, the ‘immortalisation’ of celebrities, the veneration of the dead in virtual worlds, symbolic immortality through work, the implications of understanding ‘immortality’ in chemical-neuronal terms, and the apparent paradox of our greater reverence for the dead in increasingly secular, capitalist societies.

    A fascinating collection of studies that explore humanity’s attempts to deal with its own mortality in the modern age, this book will appeal to sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers and scholars of cultural studies with interests in death and dying.

    Introduction: Towards a Postmortal Society - Paving the Pathway for a Sociology of Immortality

    Michael Hviid Jacobsen

    1. How the Dead Survive - Ancestors, Immortality, Memory

    Tony Walter

    2. The Future of Death and the Four Pathways to Immortality

    Guy Brown

    3. Individualised Immortality in Liquid-Modern Times - Teasing Out the Topic of Symbolic Immortality in the Sociology of Zygmunt Bauman

    Michael Hviid Jacobsen

    4. Terror Management Theory - Surviving the Awareness of Death One Way or Another

    Uri Lifshin, Peter J. Helm and Jeff Greenberg

    5. The Immortalisation of Celebrities

    David Giles

    6. The Contemporary Imaginary of Work - Symbolic Immortality within the Postmodern Corporate Discourse

    Adriana Teodorescu

    7. The Neural Identity - Strategies of Immortality in Contemporary Western Culture

    Gianfranco Pecchinenda

    8. Toward Post-Human - The Dream of Never-Ending Life

    Nunzia Bonifati

    9. Digital Immortality or Digital Death? - Contemplating Digital End of Life Planning

    Carla J. Sofka, Allison Gibson and Danielle R. Silberman

    10. The Virtual Concept of Death

    William Sims Bainbridge

    11. The Proliferation of Postselves in American Civic and Popular Cultures

    Michael C. Kearl

    Biography

    Michael Hviid Jacobsen is Professor of Sociology at Aalborg University, Denmark. He is the editor of The Poetics of Crime and Beyond Bauman: Creative Excursions and Critical Engagements, and co-editor of The Sociology of Zygmunt Bauman; The Transformation of Modernity; Utopia: Social Theory and the Future; and Imaginative Methodologies: Creativity, Poetics and Rhetoric in Social Research (all available from Routledge).