Postmortal Society: Towards a Sociology of Immortality

by Michael Hviid Jacobsen (Editor)

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.

258 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 31, 2017

Reviews

[Toki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful read. Postmortal Society is well organized and split into 11 chapters, each chapter short enough to be digestible but long enough to be informative. While the book is mostly Western centric, many of the authors do well in acknowledging the limited perspective. The book made sure to bring up many relevant topics when talking about death and immortality, such as the proliferation of death commodification, symbolic immortality, and the existence of death and immortality in a new, technology-based world.