Article: Becker, Ernest

Becker, Ernest

The anthropologist Ernest Becker is well-known for his thesis that individuals are terrorized by the knowledge of their own mortality and thus seek to deny it in various ways. Correspondingly, according to Becker, a main function of a culture is to provide ways to engage successfully in death denial.

Becker was born on September 27, 1924, in Springfield, Massachusetts, to Jewish immigrants. His first publication, Zen: A Rational Critique (1961), was a version of his doctoral dissertation at Syracuse University, where he pursued graduate studies in cultural anthropology before becoming a writer and professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, ...

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