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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The definitive reference on the anthropology of death and dying, expanded with new contributions covering everything from animal mourning to mortuary cannibalism
Few subjects stir the imagination more than the study of how people across cultures deal with death and dying. This expanded second edition of the internationally bestselling Death, Mourning, and Burial offers cross-cultural readings that span the period from dying to afterlife, considering approaches to this transition as a social process and exploring the great variations of cultural responses to death. Exploring new content including organ transplantation, institutionalized care for the dying, HIV-AIDs, animal mourning, and biotechnology, this text retains classic readings from the first edition, and is enhanced by sixteen new articles and two new sections which provide increased breadth and depth for readers.
Death, Mourning, and Burial, Second Edition is divided into eight parts reflecting the social trajectory of death: conceptualizations of death; death, dying, and care; grief and mourning; mortuary rituals; and remembrance and regeneration. Sections are introduced through foundational texts which provide the ideal introduction to this diverse field. It is essential reading for anyone concerned with issues of death and dying, as well as violence, terrorism, war, state terror, organ theft, and mortuary rituals.
- A thoroughly revised edition of this classic anthology featuring twenty-three new articles, two new sections, and three reformulated sections
- Updated to include current topics, including organ transplantation, institutionalized care for the dying, HIV-AIDs, animal mourning, and biotechnology
- Must reading for anyone concerned with issues of death and dying, as well as violence, terrorism, war, state terror, organ theft, and mortuary rituals
- Serves as a text for anthropology classes and provides a genuinely cross-cultural perspective to all those studying death and dying
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Acknowledgments
Death and Anthropology: An Introduction
Conceptualizations of Death
Death, Dying, and Care
Grief and Mourning
Mortuary Rituals and Epidemics
Remembrance and Regeneration
Future of the Anthropology of Death
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Part I: Conceptualizations of Death
1 A Contribution to the Study of the Collective Representation of Death
1. The Intermediary Period
2. The Final Ceremony
3. Conclusion
2 The Rites of Passage
Funerals
3 Symbolic Immortality
4 Remembering as Cultural Process
Memory Making
Materialities and Social Practices
Memory Materials in Cultural and Historical Perspectives
Bodies in Time/Materials in Memory
Material Memories: Contemporary Concerns
BIBLIOGRAPHY
5 Massive Violent Death and Contested National Mourning in Post‐Authoritarian Chile and Argentina
National Mourning after Massive Violent Death
Retribution and Remembrance in Argentina
Reparation and the Pursuit of Reconciliation in Chile
Conclusion
REFERENCES
Part II: Death, Dying, and Care
6 Magic, Science and Religion
Death and the Reintegration of the Group
7 Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande
8 Living Cadavers and the Calculation of Death
Preamble
Inventing a New Death
When Bodies Outlive Persons
Doubts among the Certainty
The Brain Death ‘Problem’
Public Commentary on Brain Death
Summary
REFERENCES
9 All Eyes on Egypt
‘Right’ and ‘Wrong’ Ideas about Eye Donation
Medicine’s Cadavers
Can the Dead Feel the Knife?
A New Way Forward: The 2011–12 Cornea Donation Campaign
Conclusions
REFERENCES
10 The Optimal Sacrifice
Problems with the study of voluntary death
The ownership and possession of souls
The soul as helper of and traitor to its possessor
Suicide – “a woman’s death”
Sacrifice as substitution
Voluntary death as sacrifice
REFERENCES CITED
11 Love’s Labor Paid for: Gift and Commodity at the Threshold of Death
Reconciling Life and Death: The Spirit of Care
Gift and Commodity: A Phenomenology of Exchange
The Limits of Caring: Living the Contradictions of Intimate Exchange
Negotiating the Unnegotiable: Commodification and Regeneration
The Abundance of Loss: Problems of Terminality and Retention
Death Given and Received
REFERENCES CITED
Part III: Grief and Mourning
12 The Andaman Islanders
REFERENCE
13 Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage
The Rage in Ilongot Grief
How I Found the Rage in Grief
Death in Anthropology
Grief, Rage, and Ilongot Headhunting
Summary
14 Death Without Weeping
Mortal Ills, Fated Deaths
Angel‐Babies: The Velório de Anjinhos
Grief Work: A Political Economy of the Emotions
Death Without Weeping
REFERENCES
15 Three Days for Weeping
Matsigenka: “The People”
A Message from Afar
Emotion and Grief: Cross‐Cultural Perspectives
Sex, Death, and Demons
Three Days for Weeping
Defensive Mourning
Emotional Pathology
Farewells, Cheerful Pessimism, and the Matsigenka Ethos
Conclusion
Epilogue
Postscript
REFERENCES CITED
16 The Expression of Grief in Monkeys, Apes, and Other Animals
Defining grief
What
isn’t
grief?
Grief and great ape welfare
Beyond speciesism
The future of grief research
REFERENCES
Part IV: Mortuary Rituals and Epidemics
17 Hunting the Ancestors
“Pigs” from the Ancestors
Cannibalism and Images of the Afterlife
Ecology and Eschatology
Death and Alliance
Cannibalism and Human/Animal Reciprocity
Consuming Grief: Cannibalism and Mourning
REFERENCES
18 State Terror in the Netherworld
Disappearance as Terror
Reburial at Recoleta National Cemetery
Repatriation and Reburial in the Twentieth Century
Contested Exhumations and Revolutionary Protest
Reburial and Reconciliation
19 Mourning Becomes Eclectic
Disinterment and deposition of bones
The shape of mourning
Representing community
Representing family ties
Mourning, grief, and identity
Belief, practice, and meaning
Final words
REFERENCES CITED
20 ‘We Are Tired of Mourning!’ The Economy of Death and Bereavement in a Time of AIDS
The Meru and the Lutheran Church
Funeral Practices and Mourning
Negotiating Time and Money
Conclusion: Negotiating Death and the Regeneration of Life
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Part V: Remembrance and Regeneration
21 Ancestors as Elders in Africa
BIBLIOGRAPHY
22 The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Mapuche Shaman
Kinship, Personhood, and the Individuality of Spirits
Rosa: The German‐Mapuche Lightning Shaman Who Saved the World
Francisca Colipi: The Mestiza Lightning Shaman in the Time of Conflict
Planned Death and Ritual Finishing
Remembering Francisca
Conclusion
REFERENCES CITED
23 The Ghosts of War and the Spirit of Cosmopolitanism
Ancestors and Ghosts
Political Ghosts
The Diversity of Ghosts
The Spirit of Cosmopolitanism
24 The Intimacy of Defeat
A Massacre at Valdediós
The Reemergence of Traumatic Memories
The Intimacy of Defeat
Commemorating the Victims
WORKS CITED
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 05
Table 5.1 Key Political Developments
Table 5.2 Key Loss‐Oriented (LO) and Restoration‐Oriented (RO) Occurrences
Chapter 14
Table 14.1 Causes of infant/child deaths (Alto mothers’ explanations)
Chapter 21
Table 21.1 The use of common radicals in forming terms for ‘elders’ and ‘ancestors’ in selected Bantu languages
List of Illustrations
Chapter 22
Figure 22.1 Location of research (shading on left) in southern Mapuche regions of Chile (hachure on right); after Bacigalupo 2007: figures 1.1 and 1.2.
Guide
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Table of Contents
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Death, Mourning, and Burial
A Cross‐Cultural Reader
Second Edition
Edited by
Antonius C. G. M. Robben
This edition first published 2018Editorial material and organization © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Edition HistoryBlackwell Publishing Ltd (1e, 2004)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: Robben, Antonius C. G. M., editor.Title: Death, mourning, and burial : a cross‐cultural reader / edited by Antonius C.G.M. Robben.Description: Second Edition. | Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2016058001 (print) | LCCN 2016058951 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119151746 (Paper) | ISBN 9781119151753 (Adobe PDF) | ISBN 9781119151760 (ePub)Subjects: LCSH: Funeral rites and ceremonies–Cross‐cultural studies.Classification: LCC GN486 .D43 2017 (ebook) | LCC GN486 (print) | DDC 393–dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016058951
Cover image: © BERKO85/iStockphotoCover design by Wiley
Acknowledgments
This volume is the long overdue second edition of Death, Mourning, and Burial: A Cross‐Cultural Reader (2004). Groundbreaking conceptual approaches and new research fields were developed in the anthropology of death during the last decade that have produced many original publications. The selection of the most important texts was greatly helped by the review reports of the manuscript prospectus. The constructive comments and generous suggestions made by half a dozen anonymous colleagues resulted in important adjustments of the proposed table of contents. This book owes its publication to the warm encouragement of the Anthropology and Archaeology assistant editor Mark Graney. Mark is no longer with the press but he passed this project into the capable hands of Justin Vaughan and Tanya McMullin. Liz Wingett deserves much credit for the manuscript preparation and her persistence in surmounting several obstacles in the permissions clearance process. Finally, I want to thank Tom Bates for the manuscript production.
The editor and publishers gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book:
Extracts from Robert Hertz, “A Contribution to the Study of the Collective Representation of Death” (1905–6), from
Death and the Right Hand
, translated by Rodney and Claudia Needham, published by Cohen & West in 1960. Reproduced with permission from Taylor & Francis.
Extract from Arnold van Gennep,
The Rites of Passage
(1909), translated by Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee, published by University of Chicago Press in 1960. Reproduced with permission from University of Chicago Press.
Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Olson, “Symbolic Immortality,” from
Living and Dying
, published by Wildwood House and Praeger Publishing, Inc. in 1974. Reproduced with permission from South‐Western College Publishing, a division of Cengage Learning.
Elizabeth Hallam and Jenny Hockey, “Remembering as Cultural Process,” from
Death, Memory and Material Culture
, published by Berg in 2001. Reproduced with permission from Berg Publishers, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing.
Antonius C. G. M. Robben, “Massive Violent Death and Contested National Mourning in Post‐Authoritarian Chile and Argentina: A Sociocultural Application of the Dual Process Model,”
Death Studies
, 38.5 (2014): 335–45. Reproduced with permission from Taylor & Francis and A. Robben.
Extract from Bronislaw Malinowski, “Magic, Science and Religion” (1925), in
Magic, Science and Religion
, edited by James Needham, published by Doubleday in 1954. Reproduced with permission from SPCK.
Extract from E. E. Evans‐Pritchard,
Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande
, published by Oxford University Press in 1937 and 1968. Reproduced with permission from Oxford University Press.
Margaret Lock, “Living Cadavers and the Calculation of Death,”
Body and Society
, 10.2–3 (2004): 135–52. Reproduced with permission from Sage and M. Lock.
Sherine Hamdy, “All Eyes on Egypt: Islam and the Medical Use of Dead Bodies amidst Cairo’s Political Unrest,”
Medical Anthropology
, 35.3 (2016): 220–35. Reproduced with permission from Taylor & Francis and S. Hamdy.
Rane Willerslev, “The Optimal Sacrifice: A Study of Voluntary Death among the Siberian Chukchi,”
American Ethnologist
, 36.4 (2009): 693–704. Reproduced with permission from American Anthropological Association and R. Willerslev.
Ann Julienne Russ, “Love’s Labor Paid For: Gift and Commodity at the Threshold of Death,”
Cultural Anthropology
, 20.1 (2005): 128–55. Reproduced with permission from American Anthropological Association and A. Russ.
Extract from A. R. Radcliffe‐Brown,
The Andaman Islanders
(1922), published, with additions, by Cambridge University Press in 1933. © Cambridge University Press, 1933. Reproduced with permission from Cambridge University Press.
Renato Rosaldo, “Introduction: Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage,” in
Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis
, published by Beacon Press in 1989. Reproduced with permission from Beacon Press.
Extracts from Nancy Scheper‐Hughes,
Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil
, published by University of California Press in 1992. Reproduced with permission from University of California Press.
Glenn H. Shepard Jr., “Three Days for Weeping: Dreams, Emotions, and Death in the Peruvian Amazon,”
Medical Anthropology Quarterly
, 16.2 (2002): 200–29. Reproduced with permission from American Anthropological Association and G. Shephard.
Barbara J. King, “The Expression of Grief in Monkeys, Apes, and Other Animals,” in Raymond Corbey and Annette Lanjouw (eds.),
The Politics of Species: Reshaping Our Relationships with Other Animals
, published by Cambridge University Press in 2013. Reproduced with permission from Cambridge University Press and B. J. King.
Beth A. Conklin, “Hunting the Ancestors: Death and Alliance in Wari’ Cannibalism,”
Latin American Anthropology Review
, 5.2 (1993): 65–70. Reproduced with permission from American Anthropological Association and B. A. Conklin.
Antonius C. G. M. Robben, “State Terror in the Netherworld: Disappearance and Reburial in Argentina,” in Jeffrey A. Sluka (ed.),
Death Squad: The Anthropology of State Terror
, published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2000. Reproduced with permission from University of Pennsylvania Press.
Diane O’Rourke, “Mourning Becomes Eclectic: Death of Communal Practice in a Greek Cemetery,”
American Ethnologist
, 34.2 (2007): 387–402. Reproduced with permission from American Anthropological Association and D. O’Rourke.
Liv Haram, “‘We Are Tired of Mourning!’ The Economy of Death and Bereavement in a Time of AIDS,” in Hansjörg Dilger and Ute Luig (eds.),
Morality, Hope and Grief: Anthropologies of AIDS in Africa
, published by Berghahn Books in 2010. Reproduced with permission from Berghahn Books.
Igor Kopytoff, “Ancestors as Elders in Africa,”
Africa: Journal of the International African Institute
, 41.2 (1971): 129–42. Reproduced with permission from Cambridge University Press.
Ana Mariella Bacigalupo, “The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Mapuche Shaman: Remembering, Disremembering, and the Willful Transformation of Memory,”
Journal of Anthropological Research
, 66.1 (2010): 97–119. Reproduced with permission from the Regents of the University of New Mexico/Journal of Anthropological Research.
Heonik Kwon, “The Ghosts of War and the Spirit of Cosmopolitanism,”
History of Religions
, 48.1 (2008): 22–42. Reproduced with permission from University of Chicago Press and H. Kwon.
Francisco Ferrándiz, “The Intimacy of Defeat: Exhumations in Contemporary Spain,” in Carlos Jerez‐Farrán and Samuel Amago (eds.),
Unearthing Franco’s Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain
, published by Notre Dame Press in 2010. Reproduced with permission from F. Ferrándiz.
Death and Anthropology: An Introduction
Antonius C. G. M. Robben
Every autumn, men and women in the United Kingdom wear red paper poppies to commemorate the British troops who died in World War I and later armed conflicts. Adopted in 1921, the modest symbol was inspired by the first two lines of a poem written in 1915 by John McCrea, a medical officer of the Canadian Expeditionary Force: “In Flanders fields the poppies blow/Between the crosses, row on row” (McCrae 1919). The poppy was only one of many reminders in the decade after the carnage of the Great War. More than nine hundred British military cemeteries dotted the landscapes of Belgium and France in 1918 (Hurst 1929). A Tomb of the Unknown Warrior was placed in Westminster Abbey in 1920 to honor unidentified soldiers. There were hundreds of thousands of psychiatric casualties, and many families continued to mourn their dead loved ones. Spirit photographs were taken on Remembrance Day in 1922 that showed the ghosts of fallen soldiers, and artists grappled in the interwar years with the sense of it all (Eksteins 1989; Mosse 1990; Winter 1995).
In 2014, a remarkable bed of red poppies sprouted at the foot of the Tower of London. Two artists had created the installation Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red to mark the one‐hundredth anniversary of the British entry into World War I. The field of 888,246 hand‐made ceramic poppies represented the number of British fatalities.1 I visited the display on a Saturday afternoon in October 2014, and saw thousands of people lining the ramparts that surround the grounds. I struck up a conversation with a middle‐aged couple from Cheshire. They had made the journey to London to see the open‐air installation, and pay tribute to the relatives who had sacrificed their lives in the Great War. The woman’s grandfather had served as a young paramedic. He survived the war but never recovered from the mental shocks received across the Channel. Even though there was no one left in 2014 with a living memory of fighting the war, still nearly 4 million people came from all over Great Britain to see the display.2 The annual commemorations, the works of art, and the personal mementos gave the century‐old dead a presence in people’s consciousness which meant deceased relatives and compatriots continued to be remembered.
One of the casualties of World War I was the French anthropologist Robert Hertz. He was stationed near Verdun and died on April 13, 1915, after volunteering for an offensive mission towards Marchéville‐en‐Woëvre across open terrain defended by German machine guns (Parkin 1996: 13). Hertz (1905–6) had written what has become the single most influential text in the anthropology of death, of which large portions are reproduced in this anthology. The elaborate death rituals of the Dayak in Kalimantan, Indonesia, may seem far removed from the hasty burial of massive numbers of dead in World War I and the collective prayers said for their souls at public war funerals (Capdevila and Voldman 2006). Yet, the two mortuary practices share a general concern for carrying out society’s social and moral obligations to the dead, and show analogies in the representation and destiny of the lamented souls. Hertz writes that the soul’s departure for the land of the dead after reburial is not necessarily permanent: “In certain Indonesian societies the appeased souls are actually worshipped, and they then settle near the domestic hearth in some consecrated object or in a statuette of the deceased which they animate: their presence, duly honoured, guarantees the prosperity of the living” (see Chapter 1). Are the paper and ceramic poppies not also imbued with the souls and memories of the dead, and does the playing of the “Last Post” in the Belgian town of Ypres – every day since 1928 – not only pay homage to the dead but remind us also of the tolls of war and the value of peace?
The anthropology of death has been struggling with the cultural diversity and structural similarity of mortuary rituals since the discipline’s early days. Anthropologists and sociologists around the turn of the nineteenth century, such as Tylor (1930), Durkheim (1995), Hertz (1960), and Van Gennep (1960), compared funerary rituals and death cultures through their overarching evolutionary, functionalist, and structuralist approaches. This period ended when anthropologists like Malinowski (1954), Radcliffe‐Brown (1933), Goody (1962), and Evans‐Pritchard (1968) began to conduct long‐term fieldwork. They revealed the varying collective responses to death, and showed that the Western understandings and scholarly interpretations of death and ritual differed significantly from those of other cultures. The analytical pendulum swung back towards more comparative approaches during the 1970s and 1980s in such works as Rosenblatt, Walsh, and Jackson (1976), Huntington and Metcalf (1979), Bloch and Parry (1982), and Palgi and Abramovitch (1984). At the same time, anthropologists continued to conduct ethnographic fieldwork but their studies differed from the earlier ethnographies because of the influence of postmodern, reflexive and deconstructive approaches in American anthropology. Without trying to be exhaustive, the most important monographs are Badone (1989), Cátedra (1992), Clark‐Decès (2005), Conklin (2001), Danforth (1982), Desjarlais (2003), Green (2008), Hinton (2005), Hockey (1990), Kan (1989), Klima (2002), Kwon (2006), Lock (2002), Nelson (2008), Parry (1994), Robben (2005), Rosaldo (1980), Sanford (2003), Scheper‐Hughes (1992), Seremetakis (1991), Suzuki (2000), Verdery (1999), Vitebsky (1993), and Whitehead (2002). This rich ethnographic harvest from the 1990s and 2000s has been spurring renewed efforts to formulate more general models and comparative approaches to the study of death, as will be shown in Part I of this volume.
This cross‐cultural reader combines foundational texts in the anthropology of death with enduring texts from the 1970s to the 1990s and recent works from the 2000s and 2010s. The latter texts have been selected because of their innovative contribution to the field by benefiting from insights developed in medical anthropology, the anthropology of violence and trauma, and memory studies. The Reader’s first edition was organized along a trajectory from dying to afterlife (Robben 2004). This new edition pays closer attention to fields of interest in the anthropology of death that have the promise of opening future lines of research.
Conceptualizations of Death
At the turn of the nineteenth century, anthropologists were looking for universal features in the diverse cultural responses to death, particularly in funerary rituals and expressions of mourning. Later generations became absorbed in the mortuary practices themselves through meticulous ethnographies and sophisticated interpretations without trying to formulate the type of generalizing statements of their predecessors. Conceptualizing death, grief, and mourning was so daunting in the face of the tremendous variation of funerary rituals that anthropologists shied away from general models and frameworks, with only few exceptions in the 1970s and 1980s as was mentioned above. In the early 1970s, Johannes Fabian (2004) bemoaned anthropology’s parochialization, folklorization, and exoticization of death. An obsessive concern for cultural variation, the folkloric isolation of death as a self‐contained experience, and a fascination with exotic mortuary practices inhibited the formulation of generalizations that transcended local peculiarities. This situation did not change in the following decades, but the need for general concepts and models was nevertheless felt as the ethnographies of death multiplied. In search of theoretical inspiration, anthropologists harked back to the work of Hertz and Van Gennep, often refreshing their models but only seldom engaging them critically. Some anthropologists, however, attempted to develop new concepts, models, and comparative frameworks. This section includes five comparative studies in the anthropology of death, namely two key articles by Hertz and Van Gennep from the 1900s, a text by Lifton and Olson from the 1970s, and two recent examples of comparative approaches by Hallam and Hockey, and Robben from the 2000s and 2010s.
The chapter by Robert Hertz, “A Contribution to the Study of the Collective Representation of Death,” was published originally in 1905–6, and endures as a key text in the anthropology of death because of its comparative appeal. Hertz argued forcefully that the death of a human being is not exclusively a biological reality or confined to the individual sorrow of the bereaved relatives, but that death evokes moral and social obligations expressed in culturally determined funeral practices. Although Hertz restricts his analysis largely to the mortuary practices of South Asian tribal societies, he reveals a structure of great cross‐cultural significance. In the excerpts included in this Reader, Hertz isolates the key elements in the secondary burials among the Dayak of Kalimantan, Indonesia. He points out that the inert body, the deceased’s soul, and the surviving relatives play changing roles during the time between death and secondary burial; a time that he subdivides into two periods. First, there is the intermediary period during which (a) the inert body is temporarily stored or buried, (b) the soul of the deceased remains near the corpse, and (c) the bereaved relatives are separated from society and enter into mourning. Clearly, death does not occur at one moment in time but is a drawn‐out process. The dead person is still considered part of society, and his or her continued residence among the living obliges them to provide food, engage in conversation, and show respect as if he or she were still alive. In a similar way, the deceased’s soul does not depart for the land of the dead but wanders in the vicinity of the corpse and frequents the places where the deceased used to dwell. The bereaved relatives fear the soul’s wrath for past wrongdoing, and are prone to appease the soul through sacrifices, taboos, and mourning. Furthermore, their sadness and weakness experienced at the loss might contaminate others. These circumstances make the mourners stand apart from society. They cannot participate in its daily routines, and wear distinctive clothing and ornaments.
The second and final period begins when the body has disintegrated sufficiently, the soul has detached from the deceased, and the mourners have properly expressed their grief and carried out their social obligations. Hertz sums up this second period as follows: “The final ceremony has three objects: to give burial to the remains of the deceased, to ensure the soul peace and access to the land of the dead, and finally to free the living from the obligations of mourning” (see Chapter 1). In contrast to the temporary burial of the first period, the final burial is a collective affair through which the deceased joins the ancestors and the community bids him or her farewell. The surviving relatives can now end their mourning. They cleanse themselves ritually from the impurities of their extended proximity to death, change into new clothing, and reunite with the community.
Arnold van Gennep made an equally important contribution to the cross‐cultural study of death by interpreting mortuary rituals as one among similar rites of passage: “The life of an individual in any society is a series of passages from one age to another and from one occupation to another” (Van Gennep 1960: 2–3). These transitions, such as birth, puberty, marriage, and death, are life crises that become the subject of elaborate elevation rituals as a person rises from one status to the next. These rituals take place in what Durkheim (1995) has called sacred time, and what Turner (1967) has named liminal time. Van Gennep’s book The Rites of Passage (1960) was originally published in 1909. The chapter included in this collection discusses funerals.
Mortuary transition or elevation rituals have three distinct phases. First, there is a relatively short preliminary phase characterized by a rite of separation that isolates the corpse and the mourners from society, and makes them wear special clothing and observe certain taboos. The rite of transition takes place during the second or liminal phase that marks the passage from the land of the living to the afterworld. This phase has the most elaborate rituals because the journey is considered long and the deceased may have to be equipped with food, clothing, weapons, protective amulets, means of transportation, and a guide to lead the way. Finally, there is the postliminal rite of incorporation to indicate both the passage of the soul to the world of the dead and the return of the mourners to the bosom of society. The human remains are buried in a cemetery, placed in a tree, cremated, or separated in any other way from their temporary stay. The bereaved relatives join for a meal, sing songs or celebrate the final passage of the deceased. The mourning has come to an end, the social order has been restored, and the flow of everyday life is picked up again.
Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Olson postulate the universal fear of death in the chapter “Symbolic Immortality” from their book Living and Dying (1974), and like Malinowski (Chapter 6), they consider the belief in immortality as its universal response. Lifton and Olson reconcile Freud’s emphasis on the finality of biological death – and the human need to believe otherwise – with Jung’s attention to people’s search for meaning and immortality through religious symbolization. Lifton and Olson find this symbolic immortality in five modes of expression. Biological immortality consists of extending life through one’s offspring, family name, tribe or nation. The creation of literature, art works, and knowledge leads to the author’s creative immortality. Theological immortality refers to beliefs in resurrection, reincarnation, rebirth, and a spiritual life after death. Natural immortality makes people part of an eternal universe and the interminable cycles of nature. Finally, experiential immortality concerns altered states of consciousness such as ecstasy, enlightenment, drug‐induced highs, and collective effervescence. The fear of death impels people to procure these modes of symbolic immortality to overcome their innate death anxiety, and live meaningful lives in the promise of continuity with others. Society reaps the good works of these personal quests but may also suffer its consequences when leaders pursue self‐aggrandizing and megalomaniac projects through war, political repression, and economic exploitation. In the vein of Lifton and Olson, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has argued that people try to transcend the fear of death through culture and social organization. Culture is a defiant denial of death in the desire for meaning and immortality: “Without mortality, no history, no culture – no humanity” (Bauman 1992: 7).
Anthropology’s long‐term interest in mortuary rituals and spirituality has its counterpart in archaeology’s study of material culture and funerary artifacts. Anthropology’s relative neglect of the material dimension of death cultures has been remedied by Elizabeth Hallam and Jenny Hockey, who developed a conceptual framework for the anthropological study of the materiality of death and mourning. In the chapter “Remembering as Cultural Process,” from their book Death, Memory and Material Culture (2001), they emphasize that material objects mediate people’s memory of the dead, and give cultural meaning to death through multi‐varied, polysemous materializations. Artifacts as diverse as monuments, clothes, photographs, bodily gestures, inscriptions, and texts influence memory because they are relational constructs produced through a mutual constitution of material objects and human beings (see Gell 1998; Ingold 2011; Knappett 2016). The multiple contemporary and historical meanings of artifacts, and the memories they evoke, are dependent on place, time, power, gender, and the body. Meanings vary whether the spatial setting is sacred or communal, public or collective, and domestic or intimate. Time also influences the relation of material culture and memory, and not just because of the passage of time. Annual commemorations with dignitaries, national flags, and memorial wreaths shape the memory of the dead in other temporal ways than periodic family visits to the cemetery or the daily recollection of a deceased loved one by glancing at his or her photo in the living room. Power and gender relations among the mourners, and between the dead and the bereaved, influence the meaning of material objects and the representations of the dead. Finally, the mediation of the relation between the dead and the living exists as much in material objects as in the body. Embodied and sensorial memories can take the shape of corporeal practices, such as forms of dress and bodily movements that are reminiscent of the deceased.
In my contribution to this section (Robben 2014), entitled “Massive Violent Death and Contested National Mourning in Post‐Authoritarian Chile and Argentina,” I adapt a constructivist model of social psychology about personal mourning to an anthropological analysis of national mourning. The significance of the dual process model of coping with bereavement over other psychological models of mourning exists in its equal attention to the primary loss of a loved one experienced by the bereaved, and the secondary loss of restoring a shattered life. The model interprets personal mourning as a process of oscillation between the reality of confronting the death and grieving over the painful loss (loss orientation), and facing the reality of a life without the deceased (restoration orientation) by for instance being forced to sell a home that has become too expensive to maintain. The first loss is more directed towards the past, while the second loss is more future‐oriented. I have applied this psychological model to the multiple oscillations in the national mourning of mass assassinations and disappearances in Chile and Argentina, but this framework can just as well be used to understand the dual mourning of families, social groups, and communities.
Chile and Argentina were suffering from dictatorial regimes in the 1970s and 1980s that disappeared and assassinated tens of thousands of citizens suspected of revolutionary ideas and armed actions. The national mourning of these losses differed in the two countries because of a distinct politics of oscillation that was propelled by national governments in competition with conflicting social groups. Chile was more oriented towards rebuilding the postconflict society through reparative justice, the memorialization of the repressive past, and concerted attempts to achieve national reconciliation. It confined the primary loss orientation to documenting the truth about state terrorism, and providing psychological and social assistance to the bereaved. Argentina’s oscillation weighed more heavily on the side of loss orientation by prosecuting perpetrators, exhuming mass graves, and actively remembering the disappeared with street protests, while the country’s restoration orientation remained limited to the failed amnesty of convicted perpetrators and halfhearted reparation measures. This dual process approach demonstrates that the conceptualization of death should always take the conceptualization of life after death into account because of their mutual influence.
Death, Dying, and Care
The inevitability of biological death made the German physician and psychologist Wilhelm Wundt assume that people are dominated by a universal fear of death. Bronislaw Malinowski (1954) challenged this idea in his 1925 essay “Magic, Science and Religion.” He indicates that this universal fear is complemented by an equally universal denial of death through a belief in immortality. These two attitudes translate into an ambivalent attachment of the living and the dead. Surviving relatives want to break and at the same time prolong their association with the deceased. Close relatives accompany the loved one during the dying process, care for the corpse, assume the social status of mourners, and display their grief in public. Mortuary rituals separate the living from the dead. The corpse is removed from the place of death and undergoes some sort of transformation through burial, mummification, cremation or consumption, thus betraying the ambivalent relation between the living and the dead. The mourners are concerned about the dangers of the corpse and the contamination by death, but there reigns also a sublime sense of spirituality, hope, and otherworldliness. Malinowski considers such religious imagination as a functional response to death because people loathe the idea of a final ending. They cling to a belief in a spiritual life after death by imagining the salvation of an eternal spirit from the visibly decaying corpse. Thus, religion gives people a comforting sense of immortality, while the mortuary practices restore the group that has been temporarily disturbed by the death of one of its members.
Evans‐Pritchard’s study Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1968) provides a classic analysis of the cultural scenarios set in motion to deal with the disruptive consequences of a death caused by witchcraft. He notices that the Azande of southern Sudan distinguished between natural and magical causes of death. Snake bites, a collapsing granary or the wound of a spear were recognized as natural causes of death. However, these natural causes did not stand on their own but were related to secondary causes, usually witchcraft. Witchcraft made the victim cross the snake’s path, so both the witch and the snake killed the person. What happened when a person’s death was attributed to witchcraft? First, the bereaved relatives consulted a poison oracle (benge) to establish the cause of death. A noble administered poison to a chicken, asked the oracle whether a particular person was a witch, and waited for the poison to take effect. If the chicken died, then poison was given to a second chicken to validate the first outcome. If the second chicken was spared, then the oracle had confirmed the suspicion of witchcraft and the surviving family would take revenge by magically killing the guilty witch or by demanding material compensation.
Organ transplants have placed a tremendous moral pressure on people to accept the assumption that death can be established unequivocally and at a precise moment in time. Margaret Lock, in her article “Living Cadavers and the Calculation of Death” (2004), compares American and Japanese understandings of death, and reveals how distinct notions of personhood can account for differences in the procurement of organs. North American clinicians and the general public alike have always considered people to be dead when the heart stopped beating and the lungs stopped breathing. The first successful heart transplant in 1967 required a new medical definition of death to protect the legal rights of donors and physicians, and allow for the procurement of organs. The US 1981 Uniform Determination of Death Act stated that someone was considered dead when an irreversible coma had set in because the unconscious person was effectively brain dead, even though the body continued to function with the aid of a respirator. This meant that the person was considered dead, but not his or her body or organs. As Lock writes: “The patient has, therefore, assumed a hybrid status – that of a dead‐person‐in‐a‐living‐body” (see Chapter 8). Death as the final stage in a process of dying with elaborate social and cultural significance was medicalized and turned into a biological certainty that became measurable in terms of time and neurological activity. Culture retreated from the brain‐dead body, and organ donation was couched in a moral discourse that turned consent into a social obligation, praised the gift of life, and promised biological immortality.
The general acceptance by North American society of the brain‐death definition contrasts sharply with the situation in Japan. The Japanese government defined brain death in 1985, and instituted in 1989 a special committee to present an authoritative opinion. Even though the committee agreed on the principle of organ transplants and that a biological death is not the same as the death of a person, a committee minority emphasized that brain death should not be equated with human death, which has been understood by the Japanese people as the absence of pulse, breathing, and pupil dilation. Many Japanese mistrusted the transplant surgeons who were believed to be eager to pronounce people brain dead to harvest their organs (Lock 2002: 167–71). A compromise was reached in 1997 when a law pronounced brain death as a particular form of death, and stipulated that organ donation required the written consent of the donor and the family. Contrary to the North American belief that the brain is the seat of personhood, the Japanese people believe that personhood exists in their social relations, relations that do not cease when the dying enter into an irreversible coma. Death is therefore not a precise event in time but an extended process that resists clinical definitions of brain death and makes people reluctant to donate their organs. Nevertheless, definitions of death are subject to change, and Lock expects that brain death will become more acceptable in Japan once the media begin to pay attention to the plight of potential organ recipients.
Egypt is another country where people’s beliefs about organ procurement can change. Sherine Hamdy explains in the chapter “All Eyes on Egypt” (2016) that Islamic scholars and religious leaders have been arguing since 1959 that the human soul and spirit are infinitely superior to the quickly decaying body, and that God will reward those who donate their remains for the benefit of others. Most Egyptians have nevertheless been against organ donation because they believe that the dead are capable of feeling, and deserve to be washed, shrouded, and treated with care before burial. This respect for the dead reflects also on the bereaved relatives, and opposes them to the invasive organ procurements. Furthermore, poor Egyptians have been highly suspicious of the corrupt public teaching hospitals where organs and corneas were repeatedly taken from their dead relatives without prior consent (Hamdy 2012). The misgivings about organ donation changed in 2011 when the brutal police repression of antigovernment street protests caused many eye injuries through the use of tear gas and rubber bullets. A cornea campaign was successful, according to Hamdy, because many protesters registered themselves as potential donors, and because the participation of doctors in the protests took away people’s suspicion of a medical establishment that used to sell organs on the black market. The donation of organs to blinded martyrs, who would then be able to continue the political struggle, and the belief in a reward from God motivated protesters to pledge their organs when killed. In the end, a public eye bank was not created, and the donation campaign fell apart for lack of state support.
The chapter “The Optimal Sacrifice” by Rane Willerslev (2009) analyzes voluntary death among the Chukchi, who are reindeer herders on the Kamchatka peninsula in northeastern Siberia. The non‐Christian Chukchi have a perspectivist worldview in which the world of the living mirrors the world of the dead (Viveiros de Castro 1998). Both the dead and the living keep reindeer herds, and live with their families in tents and villages, but aspects such as night and day, winter and summer, and bodily skin and soft tissue, exist in reverse order. The world and the otherworld are communicating vessels in which a fixed number of souls circulates between the living and the dead in an endless cycle of renewal because body and soul are not different entities but each other’s flip side. This renewal is conditioned, however, by the superiority of the deceased over the living, and by the control and ownership of the life‐giving souls by the dead. Reindeer and other surrogates for human beings are sacrificed to dissuade the deceased from demanding the return of the life‐giving souls, and thus cause death or suicide in the world to welcome a deceased relative back in the otherworld. Willerslev distinguishes three forms of voluntary death: euthanasia, suicide, and sacrifice. Euthanasia refers to the abandonment of the sick and the aged in the inhospitable circumpolar North in order not to burden healthy relatives. Suicide among the Chukchi implies an identification of the victim with his or her deceased other, while the ritual blood sacrifice of a human being separates the victim from the deceased ancestor and differentiates the realms of life and death to make human existence possible. Sacrificial voluntary deaths occur most often at times of crisis, such as the bubonic plague or mass animal death, when the living need the help and protection of their more powerful dead ancestors. Care for the living and the common good will then persuade elderly Chukchi to sacrifice their lives to their ancestors.
Sacrifice and care are also central to hospices. Ann Julienne Russ (2005) shows in her article “Love’s Labor Paid for: Gift and Commodity at the Threshold of Death” that hospice workers in San Francisco were torn between the emotional need to provide compassionate care and the institutional demand of efficiency and profit. The hospice movement began in Great Britain in the 1960s with volunteers who provided human dignity to a dying process that had become increasingly institutionalized and commodified. The individualized treatment of terminally ill cancer patients in hospitals had displaced family care in the home of dying loved ones. The hospice provided palliative care and a dignified death in a welcoming environment. The movement soon spread to the United States, but its humanistic holism came under pressure in the 1990s when neoliberalism transformed hospices into commercial institutions. Hospice workers in San Francisco were looking after rising numbers of young gay men with HIV/AIDS, and they had difficulty reconciling the gift of unconditional love with the commodification of care through strict work schedules and protocols. Russ emphasizes that the hospice caregivers were not balancing opposed demands, as if these were measurable services, but that they themselves comprised the services that were dispensed as gifts and commodities. Instead of volunteers providing collective care, as was originally intended by the hospice movement, now each employee had to solve these contradictory demands individually and within themselves. The decision about how much care to give and how much care to withhold became a formation of self through which the gift of care and sacrifice was reciprocated with the patient’s gift of dying in their arms.
Grief and Mourning
Émile Durkheim has had a lasting influence on the anthropology of death by emphasizing that the individual grief experienced at the death of another human being is expressed collectively in culturally prescribed ways of mourning. Crying relates in the same way to grief as weeping and wailing relate to mourning. Mourning is not a spontaneous emotion but a collective obligation manifested in appeasement rituals. In his classic work The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Émile Durkheim (1995) draws upon ethnographic accounts of Australian Aborigines to argue that the spontaneity of their wailing is deceptive, because all these expressions are clearly prescribed, controlled, and monitored by the community. Durkheim’s explanation of such rituals is that the death of an individual diminishes the group numerically and socially. Durkheim was fascinated by questions of social order and disintegration. This Hobbesian puzzle becomes particularly pressing in the case of death. Indifference to a death expresses a lack of moral and cultural unity, and an absence of social cohesion and solidarity. Instead, collective mourning helps to draw people closer together and invigorates the weakened social group. This social function of mourning rituals is not limited to the death of individuals. Mourning is a general expression of loss for a social collectivity under threat, as is demonstrated by Aboriginal rites for illness, famine, drought, and the desecration of religious symbols. Grief and mourning should therefore always be understood in relation to other losses that provoke personal and collective crises (Freud 1968).
Radcliffe‐Brown (1964) demonstrates in the excerpt from his ethnography The Andaman Islanders how weeping and embracing are collective performances rather than spontaneous personal expressions of sorrow or happiness. The Andamanese can cry on demand when required by society. Radcliffe‐Brown even suggests that these cultural practices produce the emotions which they are obliged to express, and affirm the social attachments that hold society together. He delineates seven occasions of ceremonial weeping related to initiations, marriages, deaths, friendships, and peace‐making. These rites are subdivided into two varieties: reciprocal or symmetrical rites (meeting of friends or relatives, peace‐making ceremonies, communal mourning) and one‐sided or asymmetrical rites (wailing over a corpse, weeping over initiated novices and newly weds). The practice of embracing at reciprocal rites expresses the emotional attachment of two persons, while weeping provides relief from built‐up tensions. This dual function becomes clear at the end of a mourning period when secluded mourners renew their social ties with the community. Weeping is a general response to loss, as shown not only in mortuary rituals but also in weddings and initiation ceremonies. Asymmetrical rites signify affective and collective attachments, and are expressed by embracing and weeping over the inert body, the novice or the newly wed. In the case of death, weeping and embracing manifest the social attachment of the living and the dead, enhance the social solidarity of the survivors, and mend the weakened social collectivity.
Renato Rosaldo reveals in “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage,” his introduction to Culture and Truth (1989), how the accidental death of his wife Michelle in 1981 deepened his understanding of bereavement among the Ilongot of the Philippines. Bereaved Ilongot men used to engage in headhunting to dispel the rage embedded in their grief by severing and casting away the head of an unsuspecting victim. For the Ilongot, “grief, rage, and headhunting go together in a self‐evident manner” (see Chapter 13). His wife’s unfortunate fall to death during fieldwork provoked an unsuspected anger and rage in Rosaldo resembling that of bereaved Ilongot men. This personal reaction made him eventually shift his analysis from headhunting as a ritual manifestation of bereavement to headhunting as an expression of grief, rage, and emotional loss. A reinterpretation of the ethnographic record showed that headhunting was a common Ilongot response to severe loss. Not only the death of a close relative, but also dramatic life transitions made young Ilongot men boil over with anger and make them eager to take a head. Decades after his wife’s tragic fall, Rosaldo (2014) published an anthropoetic exploration of his grief and the sorrow of the Ilongot at her death.
Nancy Scheper‐Hughes has taken the cultural construction of bereavement one step further by arguing that not only mourning but grief itself is a product of culture. In the excerpts from her ethnography Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (1992), she points out that mothers in a northeast Brazilian shantytown are aware of the structural causes of high infant mortality (poverty, malnutrition, poor health care) as well as the immediate causes (diarrhea, communicable diseases). Still, they endow babies with a life force, a will to live, whose strength will ultimately determine whether or not an infant survives. This belief makes mothers withhold food from weak, passive babies and give more food to strong, active babies. These Brazilian mothers accept the death of their weak infants stoically. Crying is even considered detrimental to the babies because the heavy tears on the thin angel wings burden their flight to heaven. Scheper‐Hughes emphasizes that the maternal aloofness does not cover a deep sorrow, and the absence of a display of grief is not the repression of an inconsolable loss. The mother feels pity rather than grief for the baby.
Grief is commonly understood as people’s struggle with the emotions surrounding a close death. Glenn Shepard demonstrates that grief may also include the sense of loss experienced by the dead on their departure from the living. In the chapter “Three Days for Weeping,” Shepard (2002) explains how the Matsigenka of southeast Peru attribute illness and death to sexual assaults by ghosts, demons, and sorcerers that occur when people are dreaming or walking alone in the rainforest. Illness makes the soul (suretsi) leave the body temporarily, and only a shaman and herbal medicine can bring the soul back to the withering body. Death implies the slow but permanent detachment of the soul from the violated body. The lonely soul remains near the corpse as a rotten‐smelling ghost that has such longing for the bereaved relatives that it wants to carry their souls to the afterworld, while in the meantime gathering all material possessions to imitate an earthly existence in the land of the dead. The mourners therefore fear and dehumanize the dead, and protect themselves from contamination by shaving their heads and painting their faces with a red dye to disguise themselves as red‐spotted jaguars. Shepard argues that the bereaved have strong personal feelings of grief but do not express them in public mourning. The Matsigenka control their emotions over death, and have only a modest tearless burial, because any display of negative emotions may cause illness, social disruption, and eventual death.
The classification of animals and humans into different categories has been debated since Darwin developed the theory of evolution. Neuroscientists and anthropologists have described the unique cognitive abilities of human beings (Edelman 1992; Shore 1996), whereas primatologists have emphasized the similarities of humans and primates, and shown that both have the capacity for empathy (de Waal 2002; 2009). In “The Expression of Grief in Monkeys, Apes, and Other Animals,” Barbara King (2013a; see also 2013b) defines animal grief as the visual emotional manifestation of loss at the death of a loved group member. This emotional reaction is preceded by demonstrable signs of attachment between the two individuals by spending more time together than needed to survive. Animal grief exceeds therefore the distress shown at deaths that threaten survival, such as a weakened group defense or a lower reproduction rate. Visible signs of grief among monkeys and great apes include particular vocal or facial expressions, and the loss of appetite, weight, and social interaction. King takes great care in weighing the indirect evidence of nonhuman animal grief, and proposes a combination of field observations and physiological data, especially the stress hormone profiles. King concludes that a better understanding of animal grief will benefit the welfare of monkeys, apes, elephants, and dolphins in captivity. The same conclusion can be extended to human beings, as the importance of mortuary rituals and the emotional cost of the inability to bury one’s dead will show in Part IV.
Mortuary Rituals and Epidemics
Mortuary rituals are a true cultural universal that show people’s resistance to accepting biological death as a self‐contained event, and express the desire to prolong the separation of the living and the dead through a process of phased transitions. The structuralist approaches developed by Hertz and Van Gennep continue to be important for the anthropology of death because they offer analytical frameworks that can be applied to every mortuary ritual. Still, the mortuary rituals on which Hertz and Van Gennep based their models existed in relative isolation. Mortuary rituals in this day and age are influenced by processes of globalization, and can no longer be taken for granted because of state authorities that prohibit indigenous funerary practices, disappear the dead, and control the disposal of the victims of ebola and HIV/AIDS, as is shown in Part IV.
The Brazilian authorities were shocked to learn in the 1960s that the Wari’ of western Amazonia consumed their deceased relatives. The integrity of the body, the sacredness of the corpse, and the burial of human remains are so deep‐seated in Western culture that such endocannibalism could only provoke horror. Government officials and missionaries therefore forced the Wari’ to bury their dead. From the Wari’s perspective, however, not the eating of the dead but the Western practice of abandoning them to rot away in cold, uncaring soil was callous and heartless. Beth Conklin explains in her chapter “Hunting the Ancestors: Death and Alliance in Wari’ Cannibalism” that the mortuary cannibalism was a consequence of the reciprocal relation between humans and animals (Conklin 1993). Social ties continue to embody the corpse upon biological death as the deceased’s spirit materializes into a white‐lipped peccary. Rather than merciless, endocannibalism was an expression of compassion for the bereaved relatives, helped severing the ties of the living and the dead, and contributed to the community’s subsistence by effectuating the transformation of humans into animals. The physical separation of the blood relatives from the corpse, and its subsequent dismemberment by the affines, were the most emotional moments of the funeral. After all, the cutting implied the severing of the embodied social ties, resembled the butchering of game, and marked the spirit’s departure for the ancestral underwater world. Not the blood relatives, but the affines ate the roasted flesh and organs. This rite of transition dissipated grief by the consumption of the sociophysical body and its embodied identity and social ties. Most important, the practice resuscitated the Wari’ spirit under water, and foreshadowed its incarnation into a peccary. This transformation from human into animal showed that the deceased cared for the surviving relatives by providing them with game for their subsistence. Grief ended after shamans had talked to the spirits embodied in hunted peccaries, and could provide comfort to the bereaved relatives by communicating the deceased’s well‐being (see Conklin 1995; 2001).
