ABSTRACT

This chapter examines the status of self-identity, death, and community, in highly technological, spiritually hybrid, post-traditional societies. Although the term 'spirituality' is used throughout this chapter, it is not used uncritically; this is partly because it inscribes a dualism and, by omission, a hierarchy between the material and the spiritual. If the spiritual signifies a notion of the sacred or a transcendent otherness beyond the sensible and intelligible, then one has to ask what relation this has to material existence. There will always be religious and/or spiritual cultures and practices while death continues to be part of the human condition. Priests and other religious persons do not have a monopoly on existential interpretations in contemporary society - they compete with other spiritual experts and often with secular experts such as counsellors and psychologists. Death is the great equalizer because it is 'general equivalence'.