Chapter 1 Death and Culture

• Understanding of death and our beliefs and practices related to it are embedded in human culture

• Culture: A set of rules or standards shared by members of a society, which, when acted upon by the members, produce behavior that falls within a range of variation the members deem proper and acceptable

• Fear of death (thanatophobia) and the belief in life after death seem to be a universal phenomenon

• How we “see” the world (worldview) determines our actions within it

• Understanding of it are found within belief systems or religions of people

• Beliefs establish what the living must do for the dead in order for the deceased to transition to wherever the dead go and to ensure their successful journey there

Rites of Passage

• With humans, death is a rite of passage

• One of the rites which accompany the important changes in someone’s life

• Changes are more or less permanent and progressive

• One cannot return to the original state from which one has moved on

• Every rite of passage has 3 stages:

  1) separation of the individual designated to go through the change

  2) liminal or transitional phase in which the individual is no longer in the former state but have not yet entered the new

  3) final entry of the individual into the new status

• With respect to death, the rite of passage consists of:

  1) an individual dying

  2) rituals being performed to bless the deceased and assist their passage to the hereafter

  3) the burial/cremation of the body to indicate the final separation from the living world and the arrival into the next

Death, Cognition, Anxiety

• Humans are the only living things that have a concept of the fact that they will die one day

• They can witness the processes and results of death in others but cannot know what it’s like

• human consciousness cannot access one’s own death as an inner experience

• Death is an inescapable personal experience, which remains outside of an individual’s self-reflection throughout their entire life

• Whenever we imagine ourselves as dead, we are imagining death from the perspective of an “other” or external observer

  • only frame of reference for death

  • experience death through our observation of other dead people

  • can only envision it from what we imagine is what others will see about our death

• When speaking about the cognition of death, we must consider:

  • the feeling of uncertainty about what our own death will be like (even though we’ve seen it in others)

  • the knowledge that death is inescapable

• This intersection of thoughts normally constitutes a powerful source of anxiety for humans

• Concerns over one’s own death and the uncertainty of what comes after life is a powerful combination of ideas that has become incorporated into a faith-based systems of humans cross-culturally

Death as a Social Product

• Every culture attributes some meaning to death (partly to alleviate anxiety)

• This meaning involves constructing a unique concept of death and afterlife

• The construction of a death concept somewhat alleviates the empirical taboo of death, and makes it meaningful

• this piece of knowledge serves as an ideology or “symbolic structure” upon which beliefs about death and its meaning can be hung

Anthropomorphism and Death

• Anthropomorphism: giving human-like aspects and qualities

• Why? We perceive death and afterlife based on the pattern of life in the world of the living

• Most widespread idea is a world analogous to that of the living, but more pleasant, and of a society organized in the same or a similar way as it is in the living world

  • Ex: grave goods or other gifts given to the dead

• Souls or spirits need to “eat” and be “clothed” are clearly the result of anthropomorphizing the dead

• Placement of objects in a grave of the deceased is frequent because these objects will be needed for a successful existence in the afterlife

Rationalization of Death

• Images concerning the other world take an institutionalized form determined by religion

• Creates the reality (and possibly some control) of idea of death by religion

• Creates a feeling of both probability and validity of a particular concept of the afterlife

• Legitimacy of the church/scholar/texts to determine the concept of death

• Ideas about death must fit into the cultural world that already people know and understand

• This '“rationalization” is about controlling the ideas about where we go when we fie and what it’s like there

  • this includes rejecting other explanations for the afterlife that other faith-based systems have

Death and Culture

• The concept of death is so pervasive in cultural systems that it can affect many areas of daily life that aren’t directly connected to actual death itself

Numbers

• Tetraphobia: fear of the number 4

• Most common in East Asian and Southeast Asian cultures for linguistic reasons

• Pronunciation of the word for the number 4 is very similar or identical to the word for death

  • Ex: Cantonese: 4 is “sei”, die is “sei”, Korean: 4 is “sa”, die is “sa“, Japanese: 4 is “shi”, die is “shi”

  • In Mandarin saying the number 74 can sound like “will die in anger” and, in Japanese, saying the number 49 sounds like “to suffer and die”

Tarot - Death Card

• Means transformation or rebirth

• Figuratively the death of the person you are and the emergence of you as a new person

  • end of one stage of life and beginning of another

• Inverted death card represents a resistance to change or transformation

Personification of Death

• Western culture has death as a skeletal figure carrying a large scythe with versions having a black hooded cloak or robe

• Scythe is connected to early farming societies

  • Farmer cuts down (i.e., reaps) stalks of wheat at the end of its life during harvest time

  • Ex: Death cuts down humans at the end of their lives (harvest time)

• Cloaked Reaper grew in popularity during Middle Ages in Europe due to the large-scale fatalities in epidemics, war, etc.

• Grim Reaper is sometimes depicted as riding a white/pale horse and is most likely linked to the four horsemen of the apocalypse referenced in the New Testament/Bible

Other Personifications of Death

• In Mexican beliefs, Death is conceived of as a goddess or folk saint called “Nuestra Senora de la Santa Muerte”

  • She appears as a skeletonized woman wearing colored robes and carrying a scythe and a globe

• Product of colonization and represents the result of syncretic religion (mix of catholic and indigenous beliefs)

• Alternative identities, such as the White Girl (“la Niña Blanca”), the White Sister (“la Hermana Blanca”), Señora de las Sombras ("Lady of Shadows"), Señora Negra ("Black Lady"), the Skinny Lady (“La Flaquita”), and the Bony Lady (“la Huesuda”), among others

Colors

• Black has been the customary colors of mourning for men and women in Europe since the 14th century AD

  • Traditional color for mourners going to funerals among Christian and Jewish people

• Within Hindu traditions, women generally wear white or black

  • colors and clothes in which the deceased are dressed are often indicative of age, marital status, and caste

  • Ex: if elderly male, clothing is usually simple and white, married women are dressed in new saris in shades of red and pink with some items of jewelry and red Kumkum powder in the parting of the hair

Folklore and Popular Culture

• Vampires

  • Possibly based on Vlad the Impaler (Vlad Draculea) - an aristocrat in Transylvania, Romania in the 15th century AD

  • Stories about vampires - John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)

• Zombies

  • originates in Haiti among West African Slaves

  • thought to be creatures created through magic and exist as mindless laborers forever belonging to their master

  • drastically changed from this to brain-eating monsters