Why read Being with the Dead?

Book cover of Being with the Dead: Burial, Ancestral Politics, and the Roots of Historical Consciousness

Book description

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…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Being with the Dead as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Timothy Recuber

Author

I was blown away by this thought-provoking philosophical examination of the relationship between the living and the dead.

Burial, Hans Ruin points out, is the most ancient cultural-symbolic practice in all of human development. In burying the dead, and through the attendant rituals accompanying burial, we are caring for them and communicating about or with them. Ruin looks at a variety of ways that such care has been accomplished and debated over time, from prehistoric graves to ancient Egyptian pyramids to Sophoclean dramas from ancient Greece.

All of these examples are put to use as part of a larger meditation…

From Timothy's list on The best books to change your thinking about death and dying.