Online Talk · Death Rituals Around The World: From Burying People Twice, To Eating Your In-Laws, with Author and Death Anthropologist Naomi Westerman

$8.00

11am ET (NYC time)
Sunday, September 21st, 2025

PLEASE NOTE: A link to a recording of this talk will be sent out to ticket holders after its conclusion. It will also be archived for our Patreon members. Become a Member HERE.

Ticketholders: A Zoom invite is sent out two hours before the event to the email used at checkout. Please check your spam folder and if not received, email hello@morbidanayomy.org. A temporary streaming link will be emailed after the event concludes.

DEATH: we all do it, but most of us don't like to talk about it. How do we use ritual to help cope with the pain of loss, and the inevitability of death? And what can we learn from studying how people in other cultures ritualise death and dying?

Naomi Westerman was an anthropologist who travelled the world studying how people in other cultures use ritual to come to terms with death, when her entire family died suddenly. Now, Naomi is a death acceptance activist and author of the UK best-seller Happy Death Club, a collection of personal and anthropological essays exploring various facets of death and grief across cultures.

This talk will cover her years working as a death anthropologist, covering diverse death rituals past and present, from the double burial practice in rural China, and mortuary endo-cannibalism in the Amazon jungle, to Mexico's Day of the Dead, Irish wakes and Jewish shiva ceremonies. Naomi will also briefly read from Happy Death Club, before discussing her work as a death acceptance activist, and why it's so crucial that we talk openly about death, and why we need to create more secular communal grieving rituals.

Naomi Westerman is a playwright, screenwriter and author, a former anthropologist, and a death acceptance activist. As a playwright, her work has been widely staged in theatres across her native UK, as well as in the USA, Africa, South America, and numerous countries across Europe. Her first TV series The Faulty Elephants (about a group of disabled people who form a criminal heist gang) is in development, and her play Batman is under contract to be adapted for TV. Prior to becoming a writer, she worked at the Natural History Museum in London for more than ten years. Happy Death Club is her first non-fiction book.

11am ET (NYC time)
Sunday, September 21st, 2025

PLEASE NOTE: A link to a recording of this talk will be sent out to ticket holders after its conclusion. It will also be archived for our Patreon members. Become a Member HERE.

Ticketholders: A Zoom invite is sent out two hours before the event to the email used at checkout. Please check your spam folder and if not received, email hello@morbidanayomy.org. A temporary streaming link will be emailed after the event concludes.

DEATH: we all do it, but most of us don't like to talk about it. How do we use ritual to help cope with the pain of loss, and the inevitability of death? And what can we learn from studying how people in other cultures ritualise death and dying?

Naomi Westerman was an anthropologist who travelled the world studying how people in other cultures use ritual to come to terms with death, when her entire family died suddenly. Now, Naomi is a death acceptance activist and author of the UK best-seller Happy Death Club, a collection of personal and anthropological essays exploring various facets of death and grief across cultures.

This talk will cover her years working as a death anthropologist, covering diverse death rituals past and present, from the double burial practice in rural China, and mortuary endo-cannibalism in the Amazon jungle, to Mexico's Day of the Dead, Irish wakes and Jewish shiva ceremonies. Naomi will also briefly read from Happy Death Club, before discussing her work as a death acceptance activist, and why it's so crucial that we talk openly about death, and why we need to create more secular communal grieving rituals.

Naomi Westerman is a playwright, screenwriter and author, a former anthropologist, and a death acceptance activist. As a playwright, her work has been widely staged in theatres across her native UK, as well as in the USA, Africa, South America, and numerous countries across Europe. Her first TV series The Faulty Elephants (about a group of disabled people who form a criminal heist gang) is in development, and her play Batman is under contract to be adapted for TV. Prior to becoming a writer, she worked at the Natural History Museum in London for more than ten years. Happy Death Club is her first non-fiction book.