Somatosphere: "A wonderfully crafted ethnography."
Immortality, 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.