Being with the Dead

Burial, Ancestral Politics, and the Roots of Historical Consciousness

Hans Ruin

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781503607750
  9780804791311
• eBook ISBN:
  9781503607767
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Historiography

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. 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Thinking after Life: Historicity and Having-Been
• 2 Thanatologies: On the Social Meanings of Burial
• 3 Ancestrality: Ghosts, Forefathers, and Other Dead
• 4 Necropolitics: Contested Communities and Remains of the Dead
• 5 Ossuary Hermeneutics: The Necropolitical Sites of Archaeology
• 6 Visiting the Land of the Dead: History as Necromancy
• 7 The Tomb of Metaphysics: Writing, Memory, and the Arts of Survival
• Coda
• Notes
• Index