Tasteless

Towards a Food-Based Approach to Death

Bibliographic Data

ID8067744
AuthorsVal Plumwood (Former Visiting Fellow Fenner School of Environment and Society Australian National University, Canberra, corresponding author)
Year2008
Volume17
Issue3
Pages323-330
Publication date2008-07-27
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironmental Values (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0963-2719 • E-ISSN: 1752-7015
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.3197/096327108x343103
OpenAlexW2046661118
LanguageEN
Citations received22
References cited2

In this posthumously published paper Val Plumwood reflects on two personal encounters with death, being seized as prey by a crocodile and burying her son in a country cemetery with a flourishing botanic community. She challenges the exceptionalism which sets the human self apart from nature and which is reflected in the choice between two conceptions of death, one of continuity in the realm of spirit, the other a reductive materialist conception in which death marks the end of the story of the self. Both perspectives structure out the basis of animal existence – that we are all food, and through death nourish others. She commends an animistic materialist approach, where life is seen as in circulation and where mortuary practices might affirm death as an opportunity of life for others in the ecological community

Aesthetics · Afterlife · Archaeology · Biology · Crocodile · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Flourishing · Materialism · Realm · Sociology · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Psychology · Ecology · History · Philosophy · Social Psychology

Tools

Open DOISci-HubOpen Access