ANTHR 7448 - Death, Dying, and the Dead

(crosslisted) JWST 7448

Fall. 4 credits. Student option grading.

Co-meets with ANTHR 4448/JWST 4448.

J. Boyarin.

Death is both the opposite of life and an intimate part of life. Though it comes to us all, human understandings of the process of dying and of our relations to the dead have varied widely. For many, the dead remain engaged with the living for better and for worse. For others, the dead are just history. We will draw on anthropological, sociological, historical and literary texts to understand better this vast range of attitudes toward the dead and the process of dying—and we will come to understand better what we gain and lose by consigning the dead to oblivion. After considering a wide range of comparative studies, we will conclude with an intensive focus on death, dying, and the dead in Jewish cultures.