Being with the Dead: Burial, Ancestral Politics, and the Roots of Historical Consciousness

by Hans Ruin

Philosophy, Socrates declared, is the art of dying. This book underscores that it is also the art of learning to live and share the earth with those who have come before us. Burial, with its surrounding rituals, is the most ancient documented cultural-symbolic all humans have developed techniques of caring for and communicating with the dead. The premise of Being with the Dead is that we can explore our lives with the dead as a cross-cultural existential a priori out of which the basic forms of historical consciousness emerge. Care for the dead is not just about the symbolic handling of mortal remains; it also points to a necropolitics, the social bond between the dead and living that holds societies together―a shared space or polis where the dead are maintained among the living. Moving from mortuary rituals to literary representations, from the problem of ancestrality to technologies of survival and intergenerational communication, Hans Ruin explores the epistemological, ethical, and ontological dimensions of what it means to be with the dead. His phenomenological approach to key sources in a range of fields gives us a new perspective on the human sciences as a whole.

Genres: Death, Philosophy, Nonfiction, History, Anthropology

272 pages, Hardcover

Published January 29, 2019

Reviews

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great Inquiry Into the Social Meaning of Death

This is a remarkably good phenomenological investigation into the sociality of death. It's not about ghosts or ESP or pseudoscience like that, as the title might make some think. It's about the way humans from ancient times through now have coped with the fact of there being people who are "having-been" rather than currently living and how we living humans try to wrestle with how that should affect our lives now. Particular examples would be the burial sites of indigenous peoples, the sociality with the dead of the historical academic enterprise itself, and grieving the death of a loved one.

In terms of precedent, the author is invoking Heidegger, yes, but thankfully he is rebuking Heidegger with the better thought of Emmanuel Levinas who instead of seeing death as a self-centered phenomenon of just about me, sees it as something that always links me to others and my concern for them, their survival, and their legacies.

Although not mentioned in the book (and I as a big fan of Levinas wish it would have been), one can see clearly the enormous practical difference their differing views played when comparing Heidegger being a Nazi who never even acknowledged the horrific nature of the Holocaust for decades after and Levinas who spent his life trying to lay out the philosophical wisdom ot prevent such tragedy from ever happening again. But for Heidegger, life AND death is all about me. For Levinas, life AND death is about caring for the Other.

The author follows along the thought of others as well like the almost forgotten but hugely important Alfred Schutz, who combined Edmund Husserl's phenomenology with Max Weber's sociology.

Most of all, I really wish this series from Stanford University Press - Cultural Memory in the Present - would put more of their publications on Audible. So far, I only count three. Some of my favorite philosophy books of all time are in this series, and it would be a huge boost to Audible's philosophy collection to have them all available here.

[Sophia · Rating 2 out of 5]

There were some good ideas here. I liked the chapter on archeology. Some parts of this just became too philosophy bro-y for me. Like this is the kind of philosophy that I hate. Why did we need to talk so much about hegel, I find it boring and unnecessary. I hate his writing style and his authorial voice. I could have done more research before going in to this but look, I didn't. So here is my hater review.

[Harrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful stuff. Really complements and provides a theoretical basis for The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains.

[Richard Ascough · Rating 4 out of 5]

Densly theoretical but inspiring of some good ideas on how we engage with the dead as a form of cultural memory making that is as much about preserving their legacy as it is about defining how we live in their continued presence.

[Patricia Powless · Rating 5 out of 5]

I liked it, but I would have seen more discussion about New World Indigenous peoples.