On Not Dying: Secular Immortality in the Age of Technoscience

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An ethnographic exploration of technoscientific immortality Immortality has long been considered the domain of religion. But immortality projects have gained increasing legitimacy and power in the world of science and technology. With recent rapid advances in biology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence, secular immortalists hope for an

Reviews

"If Bruno Latour once argued that we have never been modern, then Abou Farman shows convincingly that we have also never, really, been secular. On Not Dying challenges we secularists to recognize that distinctions between mind and matter, ghost and machine, religion and science have only ever been provisional grounds for a secular world that is increasingly in question."David Valentine, University of Minnesota

"For atheists, death is the end of the human being, but for religious believers, there is an afterlife in another world. Abou Farman describes the ambition of secular immortalists as abolitioning death (assumed to be an intrinsic fact of life) through means of technoscience. In this brilliant study of the cryonics movement, Farman has taken the anthropology of science in a highly original and mind-widening direction."Talal Asad, Graduate Center, City University of New York

"Unmissable and vital reading."Neural

"This is no celebration of cryonic immortalism but rather a fascinating appraisal of certain existential binds into which we secularists have gotten ourselves and of immortalists exploitation of those binds to advance a technoutopian vision of a very particular posthuman future."American Anthropologist

"On Not Dying is a wonderfully crafted ethnography which will appeal to a wide array of audiences including, but not restricted to, those interested in STS, anthropology and the history of science."Somatosphere

"The absence of characterological complexity opens a space for both an intensive history of secularist perspectives on mortality, and a cornucopia of philosophical provocations on humanism, temporality, cosmos, and more."Medical Anthropology Quarterly

Author Bio

Abou Farman is assistant professor of anthropology at the New School for Social Research.