It is often said that those who object to death have made the mistake of trying to imagine what it is like to be dead. It is alleged that the failure to realize that this task is logically impossible (For the banal reason that there is nothing to imagine) leads to the conviction that death is mysterious and therefore terrifying prospective state. But this diagnosis is evidently false, for it is just as impossible to imagine being totally unconscious as to imagine being dead (though it is easy enough to imagine oneself, from the outside, in either those conditions). Yet people who are averse to death are not usually averse to unconsciousness (so long as it does not entail a substantial cut in the total duration of waking life).
If we are to make sense of the view that to die is bad, it must be on the ground that life is a good and death is the corresponding deprivation or loss, bad not because of any positive features but because of the desirability of what it removes.
—- Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions, Cpt 1
I’ve got your shock & awe right here — from my “Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology” class :
Final Essay #3 – Approaches to Socio-cultural and Sociolinguistic Diversity & Difference
Compare and contrast two approaches in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics that concern the study of socio-cultural and sociolinguistic “difference” and “diversity” with regard to either ethnicity, race and/or gender as manifest in any of the following units of analysis: phonetics & phonology, morpho-syntax, discourse level phenomena or suprasegmental features [i.e. prosody, paralanguage, and kinesthetic phenomena – Gumperz’ approach to contextualization].You may reference any of the 26 articles or two books read during this semester.