Coping with death is a vital foundation of every culture and the key demand of every society is to legitimize death in the symbolic universe of its members through socially objectivized knowledge. In this manner, society manages and organizes its own social continuity, reproduction, cohesion and integration, which represent the central issue of most sociological discussions regarding death. By focusing on the wider mechanisms and structures of maintaining social continuity and the disruptive or integrating potential of death, it seems as if sociology is forgetting the individual scope of coping with the awareness of death with regard to those individuals who reproduce the social structure and cultural frameworks of meaning. In sociology the problem of death is focus upon the potential consequences for social integration or disintegration, ensuring the continuity of social life, affirming or dissolving solidarity, the dynamics and institutionalisation of managing the elderly, the dying and tackling questions of potential obstructions to individual motivation and participation in daily social life. Death is thus tackled from the perspective of society and not from the perspective of individual people that produce and reproduce it. As a given of human existence death has an important place in daily social praxis. Therefore this thesis will primarily argue fort he hypothesis that awareness and coping with death constitutes an important mainspring of individual social action as well as social structuration. Through sociological interpretations of the findings stemming from cultural anthropology and social psychology, I will situate death in the social present of even those people not in direct relations with it. I will introduce and establish the concept of immortality projects that stem from the awareness and coping with death that bridge individual motivations of social action with social structures that enable ontological security, survival strategies, death legitimations, and opportunities of the symbolic colonisation of the future (afterlife) and the endless continuity of meaning. Death is one of the rare omnipresent general parameters through which individual and social life are constructed. This is why sociology must consider an awareness of one's own death and why the implications of this are to be taken deadly seriously.
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