DEATH SALON LA: Join us for a conversation about the taboo

Los Angeles October 18-19, 2013 Death Salon is a gathering of intellectuals, artists and independent thinkers engaged in the exploration of our shared mortality, coming together for the first time in Los Angeles in October. Cultural death practices – from Dia de los Muertos to Tibetan sky burial to the veneration of remains and reliquaries –show a long-standing fascination with (and attempts to understand) the end of life. In our modern age, where death and disease are hidden away or sanitized, discussion of mortality and mourning have become strangely taboo.

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Death Salon aims for open dialogue about death and its anthropological, historical, and artistic contributions to culture. In the spirit of informal 18th-century salon gatherings of intellectuals, Death Salon performers and organizers include academic historians, funeral industry professionals, musicians, filmmakers, and widely-published authors coming from a variety of perspectives. Many of the performers are local to the Los Angeles area.

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Part conference and part public spectacle, Death Salon LA is Death Salon’s inaugural annual event; future Death Salons are already in the works for the UK (2014) and Cleveland (2015). Full descriptions of Death Salon LA’s public events are attached and can be also be found here: http://deathsalon.org/meetings/death-salon-la-2013-events-open-to-the-public/

“There are conferences for the funeral industry, conferences for the hospice and palliative care industry, conferences on specific academic topics relating to mortality,” says mortician Caitlin Doughty, Death Salon co-founder  and host of the popular Youtube series Ask A Mortician,  “But Death Salon is attempting, for the first time, to bring together experts in a wide range of fields to approach the problem of death denial in an interdisciplinary way.”

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