Repository | Series | Book
Being with the dead
burial, ancestral Politics, and the roots of historical consciousness
Abstract
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 practice: 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.
Publication details
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Place: Stanford
Year: 2019
Pages: 272
Series: Cultural Memory in the Present
ISBN (hardback): 9780804791311
ISBN (paperback): 9781503607750
ISBN (digital): 9781503607767
Full citation:
Ruin Hans (2019) Being with the dead: burial, ancestral Politics, and the roots of historical consciousness. Stanford, Stanford University Press.