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"Any sentence that begins ´All societies have´ is either baseless or banal." In his book, Oliver Nahm sets out to disprove this statement, made by the renowned anthropologist Clifford Geertz. Analyzing the beliefs, myths and legends of different religious groups surrounding death and dying he shows that behind the fa‡ade of diversity there lie the same needs which are in turn met by similar solutions. With an interdisciplinary approach Nahm uncovers important commonalities between diverse societies and demonstrates that such findings need to be neither baseless nor banal.

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Oliver Nahm was born 1984 in Bonn, Germany. After completing his Magister degree in history, he started to work on this doctoral thesis in the area of cultural studies.

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