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/1002/2019/4.2.1

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 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.

  1. Diagnosis, treatment, and the prognosis of death
  2. Pain and pain alleviation
• The sovereign individual whose life is defined by being an autonomous subject who “wants” to die a good death

  1. End-of-life decisions, e.g. living wills
  2. Cognitive capacity
  3. 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.