13.Life and Death

Question 1

What are the models of the nature of death?

Answer 1

1. Just a biological event. Death is medicalised.
2. Social + biological event
   a) Death = social rupture (Durkheim)
   b) Death = central to regeneration of life

Question 2

What does the biological view of death state?

Answer 2

1. Death is just a biological event.
2. Human remains = waste.
3. Death is medicalised.

Question 3

What is the Durkheimian view on death?

Answer 3

1. Death is a social event which implicates society as a whole.
2. Social rupture which threatens foundation of society.
3. Necessitates collective acts of grieving in the form of mortuary rites.

Question 4

How did Hertz develop Durkheim’s argument about mortuary rites?

Answer 4

1. General theory about double burials.
2. First burial is provisional, imbued with negative symbolism and represents the threat that society has suffered (DIS-INTEGRATION).
3. Second burial is final, imbued with positive symbolism and represents society’s victory over death (RE-INTEGRATION).

Question 5

How have anthropologist’s utilised the idea of ‘double burials’ in ethnographies focusing upon death?

Answer 5

1. Suzuki (2004) argues that in Japan the first burial corresponds to the elaborate rituals immediately enacted after death but contests Hertz’s idea of the transitional period being marked by pollution and danger for body is seen as lonely instead.
2. Walter (2004) argues that the plastinated bodies in the ‘Body Worlds’ exhibition are an example of a second burial since the corpse is no longer the subject of mourning. Unlike in Hertz’s case where the secondary burial admitted the dead person into the world of the ancestors, in this case the burial turns the dead person into an scientific and educational object.

Question 6

How have Durkheimian views on death been contested?

Answer 6

Too restrictive view of death since death can be central to the regeneration of life itself.

a) Bloch (1983) argues that the second burial of the Merina people is an occasion where they receive blessings from their ancestors.
b) Conklin (1995) argues that Wari mortuary rites are necessary for the continuation of social life since relations are formed between humans and ancestors at the moment of death.