ABSTRACT

Dwelling is a human being's or Dasein's manner of being: it is another term for Dasein's constitutive state, being-in-the-world, unified by the care structure. Dwelling constitutes human existence and precedes and provides for the possibility of our 'cognitive powers'. Heidegger argues that only modern human beings dwell because it is only modern humans that die in his specific sense of the term. Heidegger's primitive Dasein is modern Homo sapiens and the ontological knowledge afforded by the process of investigating primitive Dasein is ontological knowledge of the structure of dwelling. Crucially, mourning has an archaeological signature in mortuary practice and linking mourning to intimations of mortality and to other aspects of this 'practice' brought out by a Heideggerian reading would ground such phenomena in the record. Disinhibition is an intimation of mortality and, Krell notes, 'the ability to die also implies the capacity to share a particular kind of pain – the capacity to mourn'.