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1002:4.2.1 [2019/10/27 01:31] – [What does death end?] Ryan Schram (admin) | 1002:4.2.1 [Unknown date] (current) – removed - external edit (Unknown date) 127.0.0.1 | ||
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- | ~~DECKJS~~ | ||
- | # What does death end? | ||
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- | ## What does death end? | ||
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- | 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:// | ||
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- | ## Death is not individual | ||
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- | When people die, the relationships that they mediate are interrupted and must be restored. Death is an injury to the social body. | ||
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- | ## But death is individual | ||
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- | Death is individual in the sense that it is end of an individual biological organism. | ||
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- | ## Cultures contain contradictions | ||
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- | Cultures are not dogmas; they are not uniform or unequivocal or absolute. Cultures contain contradictions. | ||
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- | ### Heraclitus' | ||
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- | * 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' | ||
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- | A culture A is both A and not-A | ||
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- | Societies are made of up mortal individuals, | ||
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- | ## Secondary burial | ||
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- | Robert Hertz is a student of Durkheim who observed a common pattern in burial which he argued was evidence of Durkheim' | ||
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- | * First when they die | ||
- | * Later, with some modification of the corpse, to create a memorial | ||
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- | ### Examples | ||
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- | * Auhelawa skull shrines | ||
- | * Malakula *rambaramp* effigies (Deacon 1934, 518-587) | ||
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- | ## Merina tombs and ancestral villages | ||
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- | According to Bloch (1968), people of Merina society in Madagascar | ||
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- | * reside in one of many small villages throughout the territory | ||
- | * have an identity linked to a single ancestral village | ||
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- | When a person dies, they are buried locally. Later the family will hold a famadihana ritual, meaning turning over the bones. | ||
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- | * 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 | ||
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- | In the ancestral villages and tombs, Merina society looks the way people imagine it *should* but doesn' | ||
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- | ## Quiz: Ancestors are people too | ||
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- | Go to Canvas and take Quiz no. 20: Ancestors are people too. | ||
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- | We have previously discussed an idea that is very relevant for understanding the status of ancestors in society. What is it? | ||
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- | The code will be announced in class. | ||
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- | ## The good death reconsidered | ||
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- | Good deaths and bad deaths are determined by what happens to dead people after they die, for instance, when and how people are buried. | ||
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- | 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. | ||
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- | * 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 " | ||
- | * Religious script: Death is a stage in an eternal life; there is an afterlife | ||
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- | These are all versions of the same thing. | ||
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- | ## One's own death | ||
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- | There seem to be two major themes in these scripts: | ||
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- | * The physical individual whose life defined by health, illness, infirmity, and death. | ||
- | - Diagnosis, treatment, and the prognosis of death | ||
- | - Pain and pain alleviation | ||
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- | * The sovereign individual whose life is defined by being an autonomous subject who " | ||
- | - End-of-life decisions, e.g. living wills | ||
- | - Cognitive capacity | ||
- | - The right to die | ||
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- | ## References | ||
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- | Bloch, Maurice. 1968. “Tombs and Conservatism Among the Merina of Madagascar.” Man 3 (1): 94–104. https:// | ||
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- | Deacon, A. B. 1934. Malekula: A Vanishing People in the New Hebrides. London: George Routledge and Sons, Ltd. | ||
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- | Fitt, Mary, and Kathleen Freeman. 1983. Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers: | ||
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- | Hertz, Robert. 1960. Death and the Right Hand. Translated by Rodney Needham. London: Routledge. | ||
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- | Plato. 1998. Cratylus. Translated by C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: | ||
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- | Vamvacas, Constantine J. 2009. The Founders of Western Thought – The Presocratics: | ||
1002/4.2.1.1572165096.txt.gz · Last modified: 2019/10/27 01:31 by Ryan Schram (admin)