Why do we die? What happens after death? These questions are fundamental to the human experience, but the answers are always contingent on our cultural, political, and religious milieu. Each week we’ll explore a broad range of topics within the field of death and dying from a social scientific perspective using an interdisciplinary and comparative approach.

In SCAR 2M03 Death and Dying: Comparative Views, you’ll be introduced to a wide range of religious and cultural responses to death, dying, and bereavement from around the world through various practices, funerary rituals, conceptions of the afterlife and the ‘soul’, ancestor veneration, social justice, ecological grief, and globalization.