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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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-# 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://anthro.rschram.org/1002/4.2.1 
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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' contradictions  
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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' death and dying the others' life (Fitt and Freeman 1983, 29).  
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-A culture A is both A and not-A 
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-Societies are made of up mortal individuals, but the structures and institutions of society are immortal.  
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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's main theory of society. Many societies bury people twice. 
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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't.  
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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 "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 
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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 "wants" to die a good death  
-  - 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://doi.org/10.2307/2799414. 
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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: A Complete Translation of the Fragments in Diels, Fragmente Der Vorsokratiker. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 
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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: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. 
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-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. 
  
1002/4.2.1.1572165096.txt.gz · Last modified: 2019/10/27 01:31 by Ryan Schram (admin)