Our project facilitates an online book club on the book Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death by Susana Monsó. We hope that this fascinating book provides a starting point for interesting discussions between a broad range of people interested in the topics of the Death Care project. This book club is open to all. Whether you are a researcher, societal stakeholder, or just interested in the topic, you are very welcome to join us!
Practical information
- Where: online through Teams
- When: we will meet three times. The first meeting will take place on 24 April, 12-13h30 CET. Subsequent meetings will be planned during the first one.
- Reading material: the book Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death by Susana Monsó. If you have trouble obtaining a (digital) copy of the book, please contact us. During the first meeting, we will discuss Chapter 1 – Introduction: The Silence of the Chimps and Chapter 2 – The Ant Who Attended Her Own Funeral.
- Language: English
- For more information, questions and to obtain a meeting link, please contact Kristien Hens (kristien.hens@uantwerpen.be).
About the book
When the opossum feels threatened, she becomes paralyzed. Her body temperature plummets, her breathing and heart rates drop to a minimum, and her glands simulate the smell of a putrefying corpse. Playing Possum explores what the opossum and other creatures can teach us about how we and other species understand mortality, and demonstrates that the concept of death, far from being a uniquely human attribute, is widespread in the animal kingdom. With humor and empathy, Susana Monsó tells the stories of ants who attend their own funerals, chimpanzees who clean the teeth of their dead, dogs who snack on their caregivers, crows who avoid the places where they saw a carcass, elephants obsessed with collecting ivory, and whales who carry their dead for weeks. Monsó, one of today’s leading experts on animal cognition and ethics, shows how there are more ways to conceive of mortality than the human way, and challenges the notion that the only emotional reactions to death worthy of our attention are ones that resemble our own.
More information about the author is available on her website: https://susanamonso.com/.