Do the dead have rights?

Why aren't you...?

In Week 11, I discussed wailing as an example of cultural differences in the meaning of death in difference societies.

If you are not familiar with ritual mourning, then it is legitimate to be curious about wailing and ask “Why do other people do this?”
The better question, however, is to ask “Why don't I? Why doesn't my culture tell me that I am implicated in other people's deaths?”

Seeing the symmetry of difference is important to anthropology, which always starts from a position of relativism. We must abandon the Portland coffee shop fantasy that some people are acultural and live in a world without any cultural programming (see Gershon 2012, 5).

Kwaio ancestors

People of Kwaio society live in the inland mountains of the island of Malaita in Solomon Islands (Keesing 1982a, 1982b). They have always defended what they call their kastam from Australian missionaries and colonial government. Kwaio kastam centers on

Strict separation of women from men to protect men from pollution
Maintenance of proper relationships to ancestors of one's kin group through sacrifice of pigs, facilitated by male priests of a kin group

Kwaio society is another example in which the meaning of one person's death is determined by what happens to everyone else after that person dies and is buried and their skull is enshrined.

Pause

What is your response to this information?

Have you ever heard of anything like this?

What do you want to know about this situation?

When Kwaio activists become ancestors

The late twentieth century, at the end of the colonial period in Solomon Islands, was also a time for much more vigorous political demands by Kwaio men and women for their autonomy, including a recognition of their kastam as law for Kwaio.

The leading figures of this movement are now dead, and have become ancestors. As advocates for maintaining kastam, they now insist on strict adherence to the taboos

Minor, accidental offenses that could be ignored in the past are now penalized.
Women, as the main violators of taboos, are increasingly indebted to men.
New practices have emerged to take the pressure off, like magical charms which “cool down” spirits' anger (Akin 2003, 397).

Kwaio society in the twenty-first century reveals another paradox:

The symbol of their traditional continuity—ancestor worship—has also become a record of their society's history and change.

The symmetrical question, take two

In Kwaio society, ancestors possess great authority. Their choices and decisions as individual spirits have a great deal of influence on living descendants. Ancestors are also political actors, and continue to push for the same kinds of political decisions as they did when they were alive.

Many societies define death as the end of a life. In these societies, the dead do not have a say in what the living do. Why not? Why don't the dead have rights the way Kwaio ancestors do in Kwaio society?

When there are no words

In his study of people's emotional experiences and social behavior in Tahiti, Robert Levy (1973) introduces a useful conceptual distinction:

Hypocognized states are experiences for which there is no cultural script (per Long 2004), or no clear, shared social construct which interprets and classifies what one is experiencing.
Hypercognized states are experiences which are widely recognized within a community because they are valuable, and thus are highly elaborated: people have explicit and well-developed theories about their causes and meanings.

Examples of hypercognition and hypocognition

Shame in the presence of others is familiar to most people across cultures but is highly elaborated as hinimaya in Auhelawa in stories, tropes, and explicit discourse on its relationship to people's behavior, feelings, and moral thinking (see also Epstein 1984).
Witchcraft explanations of misfortune of the type described by Evans-Pritchard (1976 [1937]) are an example of hypercognition of a sense that people are interdependent and mutually responsible. People do feel this way in other societies, but we can say it is hypocognized because they lack this system of explanations for it.
The collective consciousness of society is a hypocognized experience for people in individualist cultures. They can see it if they think about it, but they believe that they have had a unique insight into reality (see Dumont 1980, 4)

In a society that practices hospital death and death choice, people hypocognize the rights of the dead

Why is there a train platform that looks like a church at the end of Regent Street (Brook 2015)?
Why is the big park in Newtown called Camperdown Memorial Rest Park (Sydney Morning Herald 1948)?

Death choice means that some people will have bad deaths

The Queensland Pacific Islanders’ Fund, ca. 1880s (Moore 2015)
The morgue at Port Moresby General Hospital (Awikiak 2019)
A funeral for an asylum-seeker in Ireland (Thomas 2019)

Quiz: Nothing left to lose

In last week's lecture, I argued that the value of choice in all things is an example of how people can be “forced to be free,” that is, compelled to play the role of the individual without social ties and obligations (Rousseau 1978 [1762], 55). In this perspective, what is another area where people are forced to be free?

Go to Canvas and take Quiz no. 22: Nothing left to lose. The code will be announced in lecture.

References

Akin, David. 2003. “Concealment, Confession, and Innovation in Kwaio Women’s Taboos.” American Ethnologist 30 (3): 381–400. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.2003.30.3.381.

Awikiak, Glenda. 2019. “Hospital Wants People to Collect Bodies of Relatives.” The Papua New Guinea National, January 7, 2019. https://www.thenational.com.pg/hospital-wants-people-to-collect-bodies-of-relatives/.

Brook, Benedict. 2015. “The Station Where Only the Dead Depart.” News.Com.Au, October 16, 2015. https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-ideas/adventure/the-sydney-railway-station-designed-for-the-dead-is-to-be-opened-to-the-living/news-story/17c480c9d5c5c4cc992391117b8d119e#.wt7vi.

Dumont, Louis. 1980. Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Epstein, A. L. 1984. The Experience of Shame in Melanesia: An Essay in the Anthropology of Affect. London: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/002560429.

Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1976 (1937). Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Edited by Eva Gillies. Abridged edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gershon, Ilana. 2012. No Family Is an Island: Cultural Expertise among Samoans in Diaspora. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Keesing, Roger M. 1982a. Kwaio Religion: The Living and the Dead in a Solomon Island Society. New York: Columbia University Press.

———. 1982b. “Kastom and Anticolonialism on Malaita: ‘Culture’ as Political Symbol.” Mankind 13 (4): 357–73. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1835-9310.1982.tb01000.x.

Levy, Robert I. 1973. Tahitians: Mind and Experience in the Society Islands. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Long, Susan Orpett. 2004. “Cultural Scripts for a Good Death in Japan and the United States: Similarities and Differences.” Social Science & Medicine, Good and Bad Death, 58 (5): 913–28. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2003.10.037.

Moore, Clive. 2015. “The Pacific Islanders’ Fund and the Misappropriation of the Wages of Deceased Pacific Islanders by the Queensland Government.” Australian Journal of Politics & History 61 (1): 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajph.12083.

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.

Sydney Morning Herald. 1948. “New Park Planned,” April 9, 1948. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article18067188.

Thomas, Cónal. 2019. “Woman Who Died in Direct Provision Buried without Ceremony before Friends Were Told.” TheJournal.Ie, June 5, 2019. https://www.thejournal.ie/sylva-direct-provision-death-burial-funeral-4668250-Jun2019/.