The politics of the corpse

The politics of the corpse

Ryan Schram
ANTH 1002: Anthropology in the world
Module 4, Week 2, Lecture 2
Social Sciences Building (A02), Room 410
ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au
October 30, 2019
Available at http://anthro.rschram.org/1002/2019/4.2.2

Two contradictions

On Monday we discussed a basic paradox that all societies face: People are mortal, but societies are immortal. When a person dies, society as a whole has to act in order to go on.

• There is a fundamental contradiction in all societies between the social totality and the material world.
• In Merina society, this is also an ideological contradiction. Burial in ancestral tombs creates a picture of a perfect society, but one also that only exists when people are dead and become ancestors. This perfect picture masks reality.

Like looking in a mirror

In Portland, Oregon, an anthropology professor goes to the coffee shop, and conducts some impromptu ethnographic fieldwork. She hears:

I wonder what it is like to have a culture.

Today, Auhelawa has two cultural scripts for death

When I carried out fieldwork in Auhelawa, many people told me that their mortuary practices were kastam (custom, tradition), and a lot of people wished they would just go away.

• Masele (light, as opposed to darkness, guguyou) is the way people talk about the present in contrast to the past, a framework learned from Christianity.
• Bwabwale and feasts are kastam, so they are guguyou; Many people wanted there to be a masele way to mourn.

Two other contradictions

• Contradictions between values, or dilemmas between two equally important ideas.
  • Individual health versus individual choice
• Contradictions that emerge in history, when societies interact and influence each other.
  • Societies are total systems, yet no society exists in isolation, and at any moment people occupy an intersection of multiple systems.

Nostalgia

Long's informants in the US and Japan are “forced to be free” (Rousseau 1978 [1762], 55).

• There is no right way to die.
• As members of their society, their function is to make a choice about how they want to die.

The medical script

• One option is to trust doctors as scientific experts to make decisions
• Yet to do this is to define death as bad in opposition to life.

The revivalist script

• Another way people resolve this is to look to an idealized version of other cultures, whom they imagine find authentic meaning in death.
• For them, other people's present is their past. In the past, society told people what to do.
• Yet, as a “revived” model, it is a choice for patients.

Modernism

In their own way, Auhelawa people were also “forced to be free” — by colonialism.

The masele script

• As Christians, they are equal to every other Christian, no matter who they are or where they come from.
• Yet to do Christianity, they must not do bwabwale, which is based on reciprocity.

The kastam script

• Kastam is valuable because it is unique to Auhelawa, and a source of pride and identity
• Yet in order to be this kind of value, it can never change. And it has changed because cultures are always changing.

Cultural scripts are never one-person shows

If social life is like the script of a play, and people play the roles in the script, then any cultural script needs to be shared.

As Long also argues, no single script is complete. People need to recruit other people to play the other parts in their script.

Yet other people have their own scripts, and will be looking for you to play a role in their script.

Quiz: You can go home again

A few weeks ago, we discussed migration. At the time I said that many people operate with an assumption that their migration is circular (and contrary to the standard narrative of migration in the US, e.g. An American tail and An American tail II: Fievel goes west).

When migrants die away from home, they may be repatriated to their homelands to be buried. So in a sense their migration is circular. In spite of their untimely death, their migratory journey still functions within an overall social system. When people's bodies are sent home to be buried, there is an unexpected parallel to another case of secondary burial we discussed on Monday. What is it?

Go to Canvas and take Quiz 21: You can go home again.

The code will be announced in class.

Reference

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1978 (1762). On the Social Contract, with Geneva Manuscript and Political Economy. Edited by Roger D. Masters. Translated by Judith R. Masters. New York: St. Martin’s Press. http://archive.org/details/onsocialcontract00rous.