Somatosphere: "A wonderfully crafted ethnography."

Immortality, a concern more readily identified with religion is explored here as a growing interest in secular scientific circles[3]. Inspired by Talal Asad’s formulation of the secular as a “social formation” and approaching secular immortality as a historical and a distinctly American project Farman inquires “what […this project] can tell us about secular assumptions and how…death and not dying [are] related to secular notions and ways of being human and of moving beyond the human” (p.6). By locating this project within a larger historical formation of secularism Farman gestures at the tensions in its folds which makes the project—its impulse, the unease it generates and its shaky status as science—better appraisable.

An ethnographic exploration of technoscientific immortalityImmortality, a concern more readily identified with religion is explored here as a growing interest in secular scientific circles. Inspired by Talal Asad’s formulation of the secular as a “social formation” and approaching secular immortality as a historical and a distinctly American project Farman inquires “what […this project] can tell us about secular assumptions and how…death and not dying [are] related to secular notions and ways of being human and of moving beyond the human” (p.6). By locating this project within a larger historical formation of secularism Farman gestures at the tensions in its folds which makes the project—its impulse, the unease it generates and its shaky status as science—better appraisable. 

Article at Somatosphere.