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+~~DECKJS~~
+# What does death end?
+## What does death end?
+Ryan Schram
+ANTH 1002: Anthropology in the world
+Module 4, Week 2, Lecture 1
+Social Sciences Building (A02), Room 410
+ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au
+October 28, 2019
+Available at http://anthro.rschram.org/1002/4.2.1
+## Death is not individual
+When people die, the relationships that they mediate are interrupted and must be restored. Death is an injury to the social body.
+## But death is individual
+Death is individual in the sense that it is end of an individual biological organism.
+## Cultures contain contradictions
+Cultures are not dogmas; they are not uniform or unequivocal or absolute. Cultures contain [[:identity_and_contradiction|contradictions]].
+### Heraclitus' contradictions
+* Everything gives way and nothing stands fast. You cannot step into the same river twice (quoted in Plato, *Cratylus* 402a).
+* The road up and the road down are one and the same (quoted in Vamvacas 2009, 104).
+* Mortals are immortals and immortals are mortals, the one living the others' death and dying the others' life (Fitt and Freeman 1983, 29).
+A culture A is both A and not-A
+Societies are made of up mortal individuals, but the structures and institutions of society are immortal.
+## Secondary burial
+Robert Hertz is a student of Durkheim who observed a common pattern in burial which he argued was evidence of Durkheim's main theory of society. Many societies bury people twice.
+* First when they die
+* Later, with some modification of the corpse, to create a memorial
+### Examples
+* Auhelawa skull shrines
+* Malakula *rambaramp* effigies (Deacon 1934, 518-587)
+## Merina tombs and ancestral villages
+According to Bloch (1968), people of Merina society in Madagascar
+* reside in one of many small villages throughout the territory
+* have an identity linked to a single ancestral village
+When a person dies, they are buried locally. Later the family will hold a famadihana ritual, meaning turning over the bones.
+* Corpse is wrapped again in fine silk sheets
+* People dance with the wrapped corpse
+* The body is reburied in a tomb of the ancestral village when the flesh has completely decomposed
+In the ancestral villages and tombs, Merina society looks the way people imagine it *should* but doesn't.
+## Quiz: Ancestors are people too
+Go to Canvas and take //Quiz no. 20: Ancestors are people too//.
+We have previously discussed an idea that is very relevant for understanding the status of ancestors in society. What is it?
+The code will be announced in class.
+## The good death reconsidered
+Good deaths and bad deaths are determined by what happens to dead people after they die, for instance, when and how people are buried.
+Good deaths and bad deaths in the US and in Japan are defined by what happens to people when they are alive, up to and at the point of death.
+* Medical script: Death is the end of life, and a good death is a death deferred for as long as possible.
+* Revivalist script: Death is "natural" and people should understand their own death and determine what it means
+* Religious script: Death is a stage in an eternal life; there is an afterlife
+These are all versions of the same thing.
+## One's own death
+There seem to be two major themes in these scripts:
+* The physical individual whose life defined by health, illness, infirmity, and death.
+  - Diagnosis, treatment, and the prognosis of death
+  - Pain and pain alleviation
+* The sovereign individual whose life is defined by being an autonomous subject who "wants" to die a good death
+  - End-of-life decisions, e.g. living wills
+  - Cognitive capacity
+  - The right to die
+## References
+Bloch, Maurice. 1968. “Tombs and Conservatism Among the Merina of Madagascar.” Man 3 (1): 94–104. https://doi.org/10.2307/2799414.
+Deacon, A. B. 1934. Malekula: A Vanishing People in the New Hebrides. London: George Routledge and Sons, Ltd.
+Fitt, Mary, and Kathleen Freeman. 1983. Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers: A Complete Translation of the Fragments in Diels, Fragmente Der Vorsokratiker. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
+Hertz, Robert. 1960. Death and the Right Hand. Translated by Rodney Needham. London: Routledge.
+Plato. 1998. Cratylus. Translated by C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
+Vamvacas, Constantine J. 2009. The Founders of Western Thought – The Presocratics: A Diachronic Parallelism between Presocratic Thought and Philosophy and the Natural Sciences. Berlin: Springer Science & Business Media.