Death and Religion: Theories and Practices Across Time
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Death and Religion: Theories and Practices Across Time
Prof. Maya Balakirsky
Тuesday, 16.00—17.30 (Semester A)
Course Abstract
Death is definitive. In practical terms, death defines life. Yet, no matter how natural death seems, it is also mythic, fueling a whole culture around it. No matter how inevitable death is, it remains, for the living, an imaginary experience. Ideas of immortality influence our understanding of mortality. While death happens constantly, it is reimagined anew in each generation. And, even though death is universal, different cultures and subgroups within cultures create unique customs and images related to the passage of life. Religious views on death offer an underexplored perspective for understanding identity, selfhood, and collective memory across different eras. Artistic themes and visual practices related to death—such as necropolitics, celebrity funerals, and modes of death (e.g., execution, suicide, and martyrdom) reflect and leave a lasting impact on human history.
The course is thematic and does not follow a continuous historical timeline, but it is arranged in loosely chronological order. Each class examines a different theoretical approach to death and dying alongside a wide variety of artistic and functional objects, rituals, and customs related to dying and death. Whether warding off the Angel of Death, preparing the body and the grave, funerals, mourning rituals, or artistic depictions of the dead's return through Buddhist reincarnation, dybbuk, the Undead, the Afterlife, Christian resurrection, or the Messianic Rising of the Dead, the attempt to deal with death is a fundamental human endeavor across the ages.
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Sample topics
Death as Epistemology: Knowing through the End // Immortality and the Conquest of Death in Ancient Literature and Art // The Myth of Death and the Ontology of Absence // Jewish Afterlives: Memory and Messianism // Sacrifice and Spectacle: Martyrdom as Theological Theater // Jonah in the Belly of the Fish: Liminal Bodies in Christian Art // Death as Instruction: Texts of Legacy and Transmission // The Afterlife of the Body: Samsara, Karma, and Image // Temporal Geographies of the Afterlife // Early Modern Reformulations: Death and the Self // The Modernization of Death: Secular Rituals/Sacred Absence // Mortality: Existential and Psychological Approaches // The Judenmord: Beyond the Limitations of Representation // Pilgrimage to the Dead: Memory Sites and Sacred Tourism
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