Sergey Mokhov

Sergey Viktorovich Mokhov is a Russian social anthropologist and Candidate of Sociological Sciences at the National Research University Higher School of Economics.

He graduated from the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences (2015, MA in Public History) and completed postgraduate studies at the Higher School of Economics, earning a Candidate of Sociological Sciences degree from NRU HSE (2019). His dissertation was devoted to the formation of the funeral industry in modern Russia. The research was based on ethnographic fieldwork: for several years Mokhov worked in a funeral brigade in the Kaluga Region.

He was an Oxford Russia Fellowship recipient (2018–2019) with a project on the study of the palliative care system for dying and seriously ill people in contemporary Russia. He is currently studying care practices in the late Soviet period and in modern Russia, conducting ethnographic fieldwork in hospices in the Siberian region, and researching the history of Soviet oncology and alternative treatments for serious diseases.

He is the author of the book The Birth and Death of the Funeral Industry: From Medieval Churchyards to Digital Immortality (Moscow: Common Place, 2018), which was awarded the Alexander Piatigorsky Literary Prize for the best philosophical work of the 6th season. According to jury chair Kseniya Golubovich, “Mokhov brought to the Russian-speaking audience an entire field of study that had previously remained outside our cultural field.” The book was also shortlisted for the Andrei Bely Prize in the “humanities research” category.

In 2020, Mokhov’s second book, The History of Death. How We Fought and Accepted, was published by Individuum. The book is devoted to the growing public interest in death, as well as to an analysis of key debates on death and dying in the 20th and 21st centuries: euthanasia, palliative medicine, immortality, grief and mourning, popular culture, and necropolitics.

He has published repeatedly in the journals Ethnographic Review, Anthropological Forum, Sociological Journal, Economic Sociology, and others, as well as in the English-language journal Mortality Show full Collapse