Ceremonies of Life, Rituals of Death – Daniel Vidart (English Version)

Life and death, heads and tails of the existential coin, a subject disputed by metaphysics, religion, science, and folklore, is analyzed in this book from the double point of view of popular traditions and the academic community. Culture and nature, myth and logos, peasants and citizens, pre-literate and civilized, euthanasia and artificial survival: these are some of the dialectical couples intensely questioned by the author. The answers thus form an attractive set of visions about the profane and the sacred – sometimes not even suspected, as is the case with the carnival – that underlie the Ceremonies of Life and the Rituals of Death.
The summary, more eloquent than any introductory synthesis, summarizes the spirit of a book that at times oscillates between the magical and the scary: biologists and life. For an ethnology of death, Life, and immortality. The masquerade of the living and the dead. The living Earth, the snail of life..

listen to readings of the book (excerpts)