Towards a Methodology for the Ethnographic Study of the Afterlife

2001

In Western culture, approaches to the afterlife have mutated throughout history, from shamanism and mythology to philosophy, spiritualism, and psychical research. For conceptual reasons, however, survival research seems to many to be languishing, despite some remarkable recent advances. I urge a return to a more experience-based approach, modeled after features of the near-death experience, for its practical benefits; I intend that approach to complement other forms of research, not displace them. Finally, I underscore the unique status of survival research as a scientific pursuit.

These are exciting times for those with an interest in what might happen after death. One need not be a religious person to find some basis for believing that life can persist after the termination of our flesh-and-blood existence. Conversations about the possibilities of postmortem life are drawing atheists, agnostics, and scientists of all sorts to promising exchanges with religious people.

Modern Theology, 1997

Hardly any other moment in life besides death provides a subject for theological reflection that brings to such clear focus the precise force of a theologian's anthropological proposals. This essay addresses certain issues in theological anthropology, both material and formal issues. It focuses the issues by seeing what can be gleaned from comparing two mid-20th century theologies of death: Why select death as the lens through which the issues are brought to focus? It is because death focuses attention on the interconnections among three major ways in which Christianity has traditionally said human persons are related to God: the relation of creature to creator, the relation of redeemed to redeemer, and the relation of glorified to consummator. Each relation is constituted by God actively relating to us on God's own initiative. The dynamic character of these "relations", God's active relating, is crucial in Christian belief. For that reason, I shall generally write of "God creating", "redeeming" and "consummating" us rather than write more abstractly of God's "creation-relation" or "redemption-relation" or "consummationrelation" to us.

2015

In 2015 I was invited by my Anglican parish priest to give a series of three talks on my work on the afterlife to members of the congregation and anyone else who wished to attend. I have included the handouts and links to the talks, and some reflections on the process. It turned out to be an interesting lesson on the sensitivities and difficulties in bridging the gap between being a professional anthropologist and a member of a church congregation. The two worlds would not normally intersect and bringing the two together proved more of a challenge than I had initially anticipated. The handouts are available under the additional files tab and the actual presentations via the web link.

2022

A wide-ranging treatment on the meaning of death, and its juxtaposition with life, from biological, cultural, and spiritual perspectives. Dozens of case studies accompany the principal essays written by scholars, Indigenous community members, and curators of the exhibition Death: Life’s Greatest Mystery. This volume offers a richly illustrated companion to the exhibition, produced by Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, and contains full page photographs of the stunning objects in the exhibit, most from the Field Museum’s collections. This volume is intended to engage visitors to the exhibition and members of the general public who want to delve more fully into questions surrounding death and the multiple religious, historical, and cultural perspectives on it. Although not a comprehensive guide, the book touches on many world religions and case studies drawn from five continents.

The Review of Philosophy and Psychology

The author introduces and critically analyzes two recent, curious findings and their accompanying explanations regarding how the folk intuits the capabilities of the dead and those in a persistent vegetative state (PVS). The dead are intuited to survive death, whereas PVS patients are intuited as more dead than the dead. Current explanations of these curious findings rely on how the folk is said to conceive of death and the dead: either as the annihilation of the person (via the secular conception of death), or that person's continuation as a disembodied being (via folk dualism). The author argues that these two conceptions are incompatible and inconsistent with each other and the evidence. Contrariwise, the author argues that the folk intuition about dead-survivors and the living dead are more easily explained by appealing to cross-culturally established concepts: the folk biological concept of death, the existential (metaphorical) concept of death, and the concept of social death. KEYWORDS: Afterlife beliefs, persistent vegetative state; folk biological concept of death; religious conception of death; secular conception of death; folk dualism; existential (metaphorical) concept of death; social death.

This study is a metaphysical inquiry into the phenomenon of death in Esan culture. It begins by expositing the Esan understanding of death and how it constitutes mystery. It argues that in Esan, the question of 'the why of death'just like 'the why of life' and 'the why of birth', philosophically speaking, does not admit any satisfactorily answer. Thereafter, the study discussed the Esanconception of the causes of death. It examined the epistemological and logical status of some of these causal beliefs among the Esan people and with reference to some other cultures. It argues that although some claims to afterlife seem rational and convincing; any claim to knowledge of absolute certainty of the hereafter is epistemologically suspicious since there is no valid epistemic intersection of this world and the assumed world after. Although the Esan do not conceive any contradiction in their beliefs in afterlife and reincarnation, but logically speaking, such belief suffers logical infelicity since it defies the logical laws of thought. However, the study also argues that just like any affirmation, any denial of certain knowledge of afterlife experience conversely rests on logical fallacy of 'argumentum ad ignorantiam'. It concludes that death and the belief in life after death have practical moral implications on the living. In the course of inquiry, the engagement attempts simultaneously, an

The author argues that, contrary to received wisdom, neurotypical humans (a.k.a., the folk) do not conceive of death as the annihilation of the individual. If that received wisdom were true, then afterlife beliefs, which have proven to be intuitive to the folk and ubiquitous across the vast time and space of human religious cultures, are a straightforward, blatant contradiction in the minds of the folk. To alleviate and ameliorate that contradiction, those who accept the received wisdom have argued for one of two theories regarding how and why the folk create, accept, and enforce their cultural afterlife beliefs: through cognitive dissonance or explanatory coexistence. The author argues, however, that these cognitive explanations fail to explain the intuitive and ubiquitous nature of afterlife beliefs. Contrariwise, the author argues that the folk has three different concepts of death—the folk biological concept of death, the existential concept of death, and the concept of social death—which apply to different experiential domains: the fate of the body, the fate of the individual, and the social fate of the individual, respectively. Finally, the author argues that these integrated concepts allow afterlife beliefs to be held coherently and consistently in the folk's mind and accounts for their intuitiveness and ubiquity.

Studies in Nepali History and Society (SINHAS), 2016