Neither completely gone, nor completely here. Living with the dead

Study day in the Cernuschi Museum auditorium from 12:15 to 18:00.

Six interventions bringing together researchers around the multiple ways of living with the deceased, between presence, absence and memory.

In Plato's Phaedo, Socrates argues that life arises from death and death from life, in an endless cycle that gives meaning to existence. What Plato formulates as a philosophical argument, some human societies experience as self-evident: dying is not enough to disappear. This study day proposes to examine, from a multidisciplinary perspective, the ways in which societies care for their deceased. It will not only reflect on death as an event, but on everything the living do for their dead, to ensure that the path to rest is indeed found, so that, at peace, they become ancestors rather than ghosts. Some Buddhist populations in Nepal distinguish two ritual sequences, one devoted to the body and the other to the soul, sometimes separated by twenty-one days. At a time when Western societies tend to keep death at a distance, out of sight and out of social life, what is lost when the funeral rite – from the funeral home to the ceremony – is accomplished in just a few days? In this world of immediacy, where the silence of the dead often weighs like a void rather than a presence, this meeting proposes to bring together the perspectives of anthropology, sociology, history, literature, and thanatology to reflect on the place of our deceased, not as mere absentees, but as beings with whom the living compose and maintain lasting relationships.

This day will be an opportunity to rediscover what these local practices, originating from elsewhere or from bygone eras, tell us about ourselves, transient humans, whose bodies return to the earth, and whose souls, where societies have agreed to make room for them, continue to inhabit other worlds. It invites us to shift our perspective and, through the lens of the social sciences, to ask the question that perhaps underlies all others: why do the living expend so much energy on their dead, if there is nothing after?

Coordination: Adrien VIEL, filmmaker and anthropologist, research associate at the laboratory
anthropology, archaeology and biology (LAAB, Paris-Saclay) and at the center for studies in
social sciences of religion (CéSor EHESS-CNRS) and Juliette CAZES, thanatologist and
independent researcher