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DESCRIPTION
An Empirical Science of the Spirit: (Near-) Death and Postmaterialist Science in Japan, Switzerland and North-America
Mainstream bioscientific and biomedical models of human conscious experience are dominated by materialist explanations of its production (through the physical processes of the brain) and its limits (at biological death). Contrarily, the emergent discipline of near-death studies (NDS), concerned with explaining the experiences of those who have died and come back to life, offers an openness to the possibility of non-material characteristics or functions of conscious experience, and the potential for it to continue after biological death. NDS researchers often frame their work as an act of resistance against a stagnating scientific materialism, and express a moral impetus for their research by linking alienating and objectifying medical practices to the persistence of a materialist dogma in science and medicine. Building on literature that reveals death as a sociotechnical phenomenon, as well as a site of moral and technical intervention, this research will undertake a multi-sited anthropological analysis of the practices and narratives of postmaterialist NDS, in Japan, Switzerland and North America, to explore how ongoing struggles to understand and define the boundary between life and death are acting as a catalyst for a scientific and moral movement from the margins of institutional bioscience.
Join our Research Café to learn more about this topic from our GHC Affiliate Researcher Sam Nelson.
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Sam Nelson is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, and Affiliate Researcher at the Global Health Centre. Read his biography.
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The Global Health Centre (GHC)
