Department seminar: Anya Bernstein

Through practices such as cryonics and plans to build robotic bodies for future “consciousness transfer,” the Russian transhumanist movement has engendered competing practices of immortality as well as ontological debates over the immortal body and person. Drawing on an ethnography of these practices and plans, I explore controversies around religion and secularism within the movement as well as the growing disagreements between transhumanists and the Russian Orthodox Church. I argue that the core issues in debates over the role of religion vis-à-vis immortality derive from diverse assumptions being made about “the human,” which—from prerevolutionary esoteric futurist movements through the Soviet secularist project and into the present day—has been and remains a profoundly plastic project.

BIO: Anya Bernstein is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences and
Assistant Director of Graduate Studies in the Anthropology Department and the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies at Harvard University. Her research focuses on religion and secularism, death and immortality, science and technology, futurism, body, materiality, time and temporality, visual ethnography; Russia, Eurasia, Inner Asia, Siberia. 

Light refreshments will be served in the Corner Room after the talk. All interested are welcome!