berghahn New York · Oxford

Contents

Introduction: Introducing Life
Martin Eggen Mogseth & Fartein Hauan Nilsen

Part I: Conceiving Life

Chapter 1. Limits of Life, Limits of the Body
Davide Tarizzo

Chapter 2. Virtual DNA: Traversing Limits through Reconception
Martin Eggen Mogseth

Chapter 3. Neither Sacred nor Profane: Reflections on Life in Islam
Arpan Roy

Part II: Considering Transcendence

Chapter 4. After Human Futures: Transhuman and Posthuman Politics of the Sacred
Annelin Eriksen

Chapter 5. Digital Afterlife and the Spiritual Realm: Transcendence
Maggi Savin-Baden

Chapter 6. Virtual Ancestralization: A Glimpse into the Field of Digital Afterlives and Virtual Humans in the US
Fartein Hauan Nilsen

Part III: Confronting the Body

Chapter 7. The Limits of Love in the Technoscientific future
Jeffrey Bennett

Chapter 8. Bypassing the Body? Immortality and Vulnerability in Digital Spaces
Cristiana Anca Voinov

Chapter 9. Triangulating Transhumanism: How Risk, Race, and Religion in US Culture Produce Futures (and Afro-Futures)
William Dawley

Part IV: Composing Enhancement

Chapter 10. Commodification of Implant Technologies: How Businesses Believe Their Products Extend the Limits of Life
Martijn Clarysse, Lieven De Marez & Koen Ponnet

Chapter 11. Beyond the Limits of the Species? The Transpecies Society and the Art of Exploration
Jennifer Huberman

Afterword
Bruce Kapferer

References
Index

Limits of Life

Reflections on Life, Death, and the Body in the Age of Technoscience

Edited by Martin Eggen Mogseth & Fartein Hauan Nilsen

Afterword by Bruce Kapferer

156 pages, bibliog., index

ISBN 978-1-80539-568-3 Hb Published (June 2024)

eISBN 978-1-80539-519-5 eBook

Details

New technologies and scientific imagination rearrange the boundary that we identify as the beginning and end of life. New techno-social constellations, such as the ever-increasing presence of digital avatars and genetic screenings, implore us to reconsider and transcend the existing definitions of life and death. Through a multidisciplinary approach, this volume explores how the limitations and perceived finality of life and death are reconstituted through engagements with modern technology.

Martin Eggen Mogseth is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, Norway. His current research aims to explore some of the different ways we make sense of our world and the limits and transcendence of such sense-making.

Fartein Hauan Nilsen is a PhD Candidate of social anthropology at the University of Bergen, Norway. His current research explores the social and cultural dimensions of generative and conversational Artificial Intelligence.

Subject: Anthropology (General) Sociology

Area:

LC: BD435 .L56 2024

BISAC: SOC002010 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Anthropology/Cultural & Social; SOC036000 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Death & Dying; TEC000000 TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING/General