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.

About the Author

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).

Book Information
ISBN 9780367085384
Author Michael Hviid Jacobsen
Format Paperback
Page Count 242
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 453g