The Long Way Back to Ourselves

4.7

Death: Burial, Mourning, the Afterlife

This episode opens with an Egyptian clay figure inscribed to answer for its owner's forced labor in the afterlife, showing descriptions of death are almost always descriptions of the society that produced them. It covers the difficulty of proving deliberate burial, dated back at least a hundred thousand years, and examines the grave at Sungir, where two children buried under thousands of ivory beads reveal ascribed rank, not earned status. The episode tests anthropologist Ernest Becker's theory that culture cushions the fear of death, reporting that terror management theory, built on his idea, has largely failed large-scale replications recently. You see the shift, following Philippe Ariès, from death as a familiar event at home to a process concealed inside hospitals.